A Broken Hallelujah

I write this mostly for me. I have the tendency to forget and forgetting the past 3 months would be a tragedy. Why? I don’t know, you tell me.

After a 6-month recovery from my season-ending injury last Fall, I came back and joined the team in countless 5:30 am lifting sessions, sprint workouts, and 11pm “voluntary” pre-bedtime scrimmages (it really calms you down for a restful 2 hours of sleep). We call this wonderful time of the year, “Spring Season.”  Amidst the futile battles against midday class naps and developing strategic blueprints to avoid anything resembling stairs, I couldn’t suppress the nagging feeling that God was setting our team up for something big. This feeling turned into a belief, which developed a passion in me that I shared with a few people before the summer. Inspired by a few teammates on the importance of prayer, I decided to send out an email to a small group of us to partner with me in praying for our team in the summer and throughout the upcoming season. To sum it up I wanted one thing: for our team to look like Jesus so that when people looked at us, we could point their eyes and hearts to Him.

In an athletic world it’s hard to gain respect and attention if you don’t win, so naturally it was a part of my prayers. Nevertheless, I decided that even if we lost every single game that season, even if no one rewarded us with recognition, I would have full confidence that God had used us. Based on this, I came to God throughout the season confident He would hear my prayer, but humble because He knew how our team could glorify Him better than I did.

Personally, the season turned out to be more of a fight than I had expected. I missed more than 2/3rds of it due to various injuries, a consequence of the hardware put in my leg the year before. I’d like to say I remained focused on my prayers for the team and went through the season as holy as a slice of Swiss cheese, but boy did I fail. When you’re injured, it’s all about getting back on the pitch. Yet week after week my injury prolonged and every Monday I fell apart after having my hope of playing that week crushed yet again.

“Soccer is just soccer” I told myself as I wiped my tears, hiding in a bathroom stall; as I lay on my bedroom floor begging God to help me; as I sat on a bench under a dark sky, sobbing into a friend’s shoulder; as I drifted back and forth on a swingset in a quiet and lonely park, realizing how utterly helpless I was. I knew that I should be joyful, that soccer really was just soccer and that my hope, value, and purpose were in the relentless love of Jesus. Yet there’s a difference between knowing and doing. Not enough mind power in the world could have changed my despair. It was at that point, sitting alone in a park, that I realized it didn’t matter how many times I told myself what I knew, the only way I was going to face my situation well was by the grace of God alone. I finally surrendered it all, the joy I sought returned, and a week later I was back on the pitch. That is until four games later when I once again fell to injury. But I was okay with it. I understood my role was on the sideline, praying for and encouraging my team. It was still hard (my ego hadn’t completely died) but God gave me the grace for it.

So I prayed. As did my teammates, and our families, our church families, our friends from home, our classmates, our professors, other teams… the list goes on. We prayed:

• To win GMAC (for the 1st time & in the last year of our coach’s career).
• To make it to the NCAA & witness to new teams.
• For good weather. (One of our beloved teammates developed a bad reaction to cold rain last year.)
• For an easy transition for the Freshmen.
• For no injuries. (We had 17 last year.)
• For service opportunities.
• For safe travels.
• To represent Christ on and off the field.
• To live out our team pillars: Christ-centered, team-focused, work-ethic, humility, & legacy.
• To glorify God through it all.

And now it is my pleasure to brag on what my God did.

• We won the G-MAC tournament.
• We were the 1st Cedarville Women’s Soccer team to make it to the NCAA tournament.
• Our 7 Freshmen fit in flawlessly.
• Only one teammate suffered a season-ending injury but allowed God to use her as a lightening bolt to strike our team into action time & time again & constantly encourage us & point us to Christ.
  • God healed a different teammate of a broken arm. I am one of few who believe this but I stand firm. All I know is that everyone who looked at her arm, including our athletic trainers, said it appeared broken. That night I called a friend & we prayed for her healing, that it would only be bruised not broken. The next day the doctor claimed it was just that, “bruised, not broken.” You be the judge.
• We partnered with a Cedarville custodian to make sleeping mats for the homeless.
• We managed to travel 9 times (4 to WVA…) without any accidents. (You don’t understand how amazing this is unless you know about our trip to Ursuline.)
• A team in our conference invited us to join them for lunch, which we did, bonding over the way Christ had been working in both our teams. They shared that they saw Christ in the way we played & acted as a team & it had helped inspire them to do the same. This included praying with their opponents & starting a Bible study, which has now been spreading to other teams on their campus! (P.S. eating with your competitors isn’t normal, not even in our conference…yet.)
• We talked to & prayed with Jo, a McDonald’s janitor, on the way back home from a game as well as befriended & prayed with Tom, a homeless man we met on our trip to the NCAA.
• One of our mottos, “We Are One,” finally rang true. Each player, on the field or not, played a positive role in every game.
  • We had the greatest sideline in the league…seriously.
• Three humbled & perfectly selected captains.
• We re-focused each other throughout the season by uplifting pre-game, mid-game, & post-game speeches from various players; pre-game day worship sessions; & pre-practice/game day devotionals.
• Fostered vulnerability through shared struggles & honest prayer requests as a team & in variously formed small groups.
• Each game we wrote encouraging notes to our opponents. Players from a handful of different teams responded to these notes, asking for prayer & seeking encouragement.
• One of our bus drivers told us he wanted to send his child to Cedarville based off the interactions he had with our team.
• We played in only 2-3 games with bad weather AND the teammate who had developed a cold reaction is now healed!

Now, if you’re not jumping out of your seat dancing around and praising Jesus, or at least smiling, you may want to check your pulse and call an ambulance because there’s a possibility you may be dead. Prayer is powerful. That’s why I wrote this – to remind myself that I am the daughter of a God who listens to my words and my desires. A God who cares about what I care about. A God who wants to hear what causes my heart joy, laughter, tears, anger, restlessness, desolation, peace. I don’t fully understand prayer but I know it’s worthwhile, because God listens.

But the season ended on a loss. Isn’t that upsetting?

Maybe you weren’t expecting us to win the NCAA, but I was. Not a soul on our team thought we were going to lose the 1st round. Think about all the teams we could have witnessed to if we had continued! Think about all the people who would have looked at us and wondered what made us different had we won the whole thing! That was the moment I was looking for – the moment when all eyes would be on us and we could point them up, to Him.

Well, at the end of our 1-0 loss we circled up with the opposing team and one of our captains summed it all up in a single prayer. She thanked God for the joy this season had brought including all the opportunities and answered prayers, especially this one. We had prayed that we would make it to the NCAA in order to witness to teams, and this team, Truman State, was the one God had set up for us to meet. She thanked God for His Son, Jesus, whose death and resurrection gave us the hope we so desperately wanted to share, and she prayed a blessing over Truman. We said, “Amen,” gave the other team our notes, and a few of us stayed and prayed with them individually. We then circled up with just our team and rather than endure a long speech from Coach, he had the team gather around the seniors and pray.

Afterwards, each of us lifted up a hand to the center of the circle and shouted the same phrase we always did before and after every game, win or loss. We had shouted it with smiles on our faces when we won GMAC, and now, with runny noses and teary eyes, after losing the last game of our season. “For Him.” I’ll never forget that moment, or the following few seconds of silence as I tried to breathe. I couldn’t take it. My heart had burst with a painful joy because that, that was the moment. No, the world’s eyes were not upon us, but God’s were. I firmly believe that we gave Him more glory in that moment than we ever could have with an NCAA trophy in our hands. The point of glorifying God is not necessarily for other people to see; it’s simply to glorify God.

Although I played in a grand total of 5 games, this year was by far the greatest season of soccer I have ever been a part of. Before our last game, I sat in our locker room, looking around at roughly 30 of the goofiest, most Godly women I know, when I realized my heart’s prayer had been answered. People looked at us and saw Jesus. I looked at us and saw Jesus. Though I had prayed for it the whole season, I told God I would let Him figure out how it would all work because it was beyond me. Well, it finally hit me in the form of John 13:34-35, which says, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” My team loves each other with a fierce kind of love that comes only from the Lord, and we share that love with all whom we encounter. Oh how blessed I am to be a part of such a community of Jesus-loving weirdos. May I never forget who God is and what He has done in and through a small, division-two soccer team from the cornfields of Ohio.

“In Christ alone my hope is found.

He is my light, my strength, my song.

This cornerstone, this solid ground.

Firm through the fiercest drought and storm.

What heights of love, what depths of peace,

When fears are stilled, when strivings cease.

My comforter, my All in All,

Here in the love of Christ I stand.”