By Kurt Rietema
There are certain habits and patterns we’ve come to expect moments before Olympic figure skaters step onto the ice for the most consequential performance of their lives. Cameras pan to athletes stretching in dark corridors. Headphones drown out the noise – both the scores of other competitors and the voices in their heads whispering that everything they’ve done up to this point hinges on the next four minutes.
They step onto the ice, shake off the jitters, hands raised, waiting for the music. One last deep breath. What stands between them and the medal stand are jumps and spins they’ve practiced thousands of times – but now they must execute them flawlessly. Practiced smiles betray the fear and trembling that high-definition cameras can’t quite hide.
And then there’s Alysa Liu. She steps out as bubbly and effervescent as a warm 7-Up poured over ice. I’ve seen that kind of energy before in fifth grade girls on the first day back after summer break. Top-of-the-school swagger. An eagerness to perform. Grades don’t yet matter. I own this place. That’s the energy Liu brought to the Olympic stage. Everyone noticed. So did the judges. Liu took home gold.
What set her apart was this: she didn’t skate for the outcome. “I don’t need this,” she said, pointing to the medal. “What I needed was the stage.” She had walked away from the sport at 16, burned out by a version of success controlled down to the smallest detail. When she returned, it was different. It was on her terms. She was no longer chasing a result. She reclaimed something she loved. In doing so, she quietly overturned the logic of the Olympics and a culture obsessed with achievement. Joy didn’t follow the reward of a gold medal. Joy was the reason for doing it in the first place.
In Mark 10, James and John approach Jesus with a request: “Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.” They saw Jesus as their ticket to greatness. And why wouldn’t they? Jesus was a rising figure in first-century Palestine. Everyone was talking about him – the religious authorities, the political insiders, the crowds drawn by his teaching and healing. In a Roman world where strength, honor, and status defined greatness, hitching their wagons to Jesus looked like the surest path forward.
Jesus’ response is blunt: “You don’t know what you’re asking.” When the goal is greatness, we’ve already lost the plot. He gathers the disciples and reframes everything. You know how rulers operate – the ones in charge, the ones who call the shots, who throw the banquets you’re not invited to, who own the estates you labor on? They think greatness looks like dominating others. Humiliating them. Excluding them. They define greatness by power.
“Not so with you.” Whoever wants to be great must become a servant. Whoever wants to be first must become last. In a culture obsessed with status and achievement, Jesus inverted the entire hierarchy and made care for the poor, the widows and orphans, slaves, the foreigners, and the sick a sign of moral greatness.
I worry we’re making the same mistake James and John did believing that Christianity becomes another way to “win.”
If we’re not careful, the very virtues Jesus rejected – strength, dominance, status—get quietly rebranded as “Christian.” If we don’t keep ourselves grounded by keeping company with those who Jesus spent the majority of his time with, we start to admire power. We grow suspicious of empathy. We retain the vocabulary of Christ and hollow out his virtues.
Jesus saw this coming. People loudly claimed to act in God’s name, but their hearts were far from him (Isaiah 29:13). Others pointed to everything they had done “in his name” only to hear that they had missed him entirely (Matthew 7:21–23). In short, our public talk about Jesus can be full of his name but empty of his character.
This past week, I returned to our old home in Croc, Mexico with a group of college students on a Missional Journey. One evening, we sat down for tacos at a market in a neighboring colonia. There were no artisan crafts, no tourist souvenirs. This was a nondescript, industrial boomtown with row after row of houses with the same floor plan and buses belching out exhaust just a few yards from where we’d shoved tables together.
Across from me sat Anna. Grease from the tacos ran down her elbows as a smile spread across her face. “This is soooo good!!!” But she wasn’t just talking about the tacos.
Earlier, she told me she’d visited resort towns across Mexico. At 20 years old, she had seen more of the country than many locals ever will. And yet, nothing she’d experienced there compared to this. Playing with the kids at the afterschool program. Making tortillas in the pozo with Doña Marta. Line dancing and playing bingo at the elderly care center. Eating picadillo with a migrant family who spoke longingly of the home they left behind.
It’s moments like this where the Spirit cracks us open, pulling us out of the stories we’ve been living in so we can see clearly again. Like Alysa Liu stepping away from a version of skating that drained her joy, these students began to see how empty a life organized around status and achievement can be. And here, in a dusty industrial town that will never be on TripAdvisor, they encountered something deeper. Joy. The kind Jesus spoke of. The kind found in proximity to the overlooked and the forgotten. They’re inverting the logic. Recovering the virtues of Jesus. They’re finding life by letting it go.
If you’d like to learn more about Missional Journeys in Croc, Mexico or Kansas City, Kansas, visit youthfront.com/yf-neighborhood-experiences/missional-journeys.
About Kurt Rietema: Kurt is the Senior Director of Youthfront Neighborhood. He holds a Master’s in Global Development and Social Justice from St. John’s University. Kurt is also an adjunct at MidAmerica Nazarene University and at William Jewell College. Kurt and his wife Emily live with their sons, Luke, Perkins and Leo in an under-resourced neighborhood of Kansas City, Kansas called Argentine.
