I, like everyone, have spent much of the last couple of weeks talking about Alysa Liu. Alysa Liu is an American figure skater who recently won gold at the Winter Olympics in Milan. But it wasn’t her win that made her the only thing we all could talk about, it was how she won it.

If you haven’t watched her free skate, give yourself a 8-minute gift, I’ll wait. 

Even if you are not a person who watches a lot of ice skating, it’s impossible not to notice her joy, her breeziness, her clear groundedness in being a person who is doing exactly what she wants to be doing, and is doing a great job at it. She makes it look effortless, and she makes it look fun. She has an edgy dye-job on her hair, and instead of the slicked-back, glossy perfection we’ve become used to in skaters, she has simple barrettes, and her bangs out. She even rocks a visible frenulum piercing, and when she finishes her jaw-dropping, perfectly executed skate, her celebration is loud and unrestrained, and includes her saying some words to the camera that they weren’t allowed to air on tv (much to the commentators’ giggles). 

People have fallen in love not just with her skating, but her freedom, her joy, her playfulness on a stage that is famous for its overwhelming pressure. The gravity of the world watching seems weightless to her. 

I was talking to a friend about it last night, who has always loved skating, who watched generation after generation of perfectly polished young skaters. She, like me, was a small child in the Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan days of skating, and had always considered it a beautiful sport that was plagued by strict beauty standards and rigid control.

“Skating has changed so much since we were kids – thank God, right?” I knew she was right, it really had changed, and with Liu’s dominant win, it probably wasn’t going back. Thank God, indeed. 

The conversation was still rattling in my head when I attended a listening session with one of our partners, a mainline protestant regional judicatory. We asked a question to one of their Native American ministry partners about how we might be able to better engage historically marginalized communities, and the Native American partner said that the kind of change we would need to be talking about would be systemic, we’d have to dismantle the whole system itself. 

Our partner reflected back, “Yes. It is probably generations of work. But we have to start somewhere.” 

And I thought of Alysa. And of Simone Biles in 2020, and of the brave women and girls of the U.S.A. Gymnastics team that testified to their abuse and the conditions that made it possible. I thought of Shawn Johnson vaulting on a broken ankle, and Nancy Kerrigan, and how the landscape for young female athletes really was different now. And how it did take a whole generation, but it happened.

I thought about how the generations are going to pass anyway, and that we might as well try to do something with them. 

It made me wonder – what project, generations in the making, can we be part of today? What broken, insurmountable problem do we face in our contexts that we can begin to shift? Where can we begin to just blow on the sails of a massive ship, because when enough people join in and the wind is just right, it will eventually make a difference?

For this partner in the listening session, we may very well be spending some frustrating, fruitful, slow years trying to learn what it looks like to rebuild an institution from the inside out, to bring it into more alignment with the margins we are called to serve. For your community it may look like trying to set better norms for how people treat one another, it may look like trying to break “always done that way”s with quiet new ways, it may look like a single relationship, a single family that you can help have a different experience of faith. 

What did Eugene Peterson call faith but a “long obedience in the same direction?” 

We know that work to transform lives, congregations, community, culture is long and slow, we all live in that every day. What I am thinking about, and what I want to leave you with, is the reality that, eventually, change does come. 

Eventually, a young athlete grows up and when she watches the Olympics, it’s not Shawn Johnson crawling across the mat, but Simone Biles backing out of competition when she knows can’t safely compete – and still going on to win a whole lot more medals the next time. 

And she takes to the ice on her own terms, on no diet, with funky hair, and piercing I’m sure our Sunday school teachers wouldn’t have stood for, and blows everyone’s socks off, not just with her talent, but with her unrestrained joy. Eventually, things can change, and they can be more beautiful and life-giving than we ever imagined. 

As Alysa Liu would say (and NBC couldn’t air), “That’s what I’m *&#%@*#$ talking about!”