The Grace of Returning: What Simone Biles Teaches Us About Rest and Renewal

Simone Biles walked away from the Olympic stage in Tokyo 2021, mid-competition, citing mental health concerns and a dangerous disconnect between mind and body known as "the twisties." The world watched, some with empathy, others with judgment. Then she returned to competition, won more medals, and continued to redefine what greatness looks like in athletics.

Her story isn't primarily about gymnastics. It's about something deeper—the spiritual practice of knowing when to stop, when to rest, and when the time has come to begin again.

We live in a culture of relentless productivity. The algorithms that shape our digital lives reward constant output: post daily, stay relevant, never disappear from the feed. The professional world operates similarly—always on, always available, always producing. To rest is to risk irrelevance. To step back is to lose ground.

This is spiritually corrosive.

The biblical rhythm of Sabbath—one day in seven set aside for rest—wasn't a suggestion for the lackadaisical. It was a commandment, carved in stone alongside prohibitions against murder and theft. God Himself modeled it in the creation narrative, resting on the seventh day not from exhaustion but from completion. The rest was part of the work, not separate from it.

What Biles demonstrated in Tokyo was a kind of Sabbath courage: the ability to say "I am not a machine, and I will not pretend to be one." She recognized that her body and mind had limits, that pushing past them wouldn't produce excellence but disaster. In an arena where the expectation was performance at all costs, she chose wholeness instead.

This required profound self-knowledge. The twisties aren't merely physical—they represent a disconnection, a moment when the body refuses to execute what the mind commands. Athletes describe it as terrifying. Your muscle memory betrays you mid-air. You lose your sense of space and orientation. Continuing under those conditions doesn't demonstrate courage; it demonstrates a dangerous inability to listen to what your own being is telling you.

The spiritual practice here is discernment—the ability to distinguish between the voice that calls us to grow through difficulty and the voice that warns us we're about to break. Not all resistance should be pushed through. Some resistance is wisdom.

We need technology that supports this kind of discernment, not undermines it. Imagine if our devices helped us notice patterns of exhaustion, prompted us to reflect on whether we're operating from health or depletion, created space for genuine rest rather than filling every spare moment with content consumption. Some apps attempt this—mindfulness timers, digital wellbeing dashboards—but they're swimming upstream against platforms designed to maximize engagement.

The better path is simpler and requires no app: build actual Sabbath into your life. Not as a productivity hack to make you more efficient the other six days, but as a practice of trust. Trust that the world will continue without your constant input. Trust that your worth isn't measured by your output. Trust that rest is holy.

Biles' return to competition matters because it demonstrated that stepping back isn't the same as giving up. Rest isn't failure. Sometimes rest is the necessary precondition for sustainable excellence. She came back stronger not despite her break, but because of it.

The Christian tradition speaks of fallow fields—land deliberately left unplanted for a season so it can recover its fertility. Ancient farmers understood what modern productivity culture has forgotten: that rest isn't wasted time but regenerative time. The field that's never allowed to lie fallow eventually becomes depleted, yielding less and less until it yields nothing at all.

We are not fields, but we are finite. We have limits, and those limits aren't defects to be engineered away but features of being human. The spiritual life involves learning to live within our creatureliness with gratitude rather than resentment.

This is countercultural in the extreme. Our devices never rest. Servers run 24/7. The feed never sleeps. We've surrounded ourselves with technology that models the opposite of Sabbath—perpetual availability, infinite scrolling, always-on existence. We absorb this pattern until we believe it's the only way to be.

But it isn't. Biles proved it. She showed that you can be the greatest in the world at something and still have the wisdom to stop. You can step away from the spotlight and the pressure and the expectations, tend to your own soul, and then—if and when you're ready—return.

The grace of returning only comes to those who've had the courage to rest. You cannot return from somewhere you never left.

So the question isn't whether you're performing at peak capacity right now. The question is whether you're listening to what your body, mind, and spirit are actually telling you. Are you operating from a place of health and wholeness, or are you pushing through warning signs that something needs to change?

The Sabbath commandment ends with a reason: "for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy."

Rest isn't an interruption of the holy work. Rest is part of the holy work. Technology can serve this or subvert it, but it cannot replace the fundamental human need to stop, to breathe, to let the soil of our lives lie fallow for a season.

Simone Biles knew when to step back. She knew when to return. Both required the same thing: the courage to listen to the truth of her own embodied existence rather than the demands of the crowd.

That's a spiritual practice worth learning, whether you're a world-class athlete or someone simply trying to make it through another week without depleting yourself entirely. The world will always demand more. Wisdom knows when to say enough.