Now I'd like to share a little bit of what has been probably the most transformational time in my life. It happened during college and it involves my dreams to play tennis and a back injury which stopped these dreams from becoming a full reality.
I started college at the University of Colorado and played on the tennis team. It was a dream come true. Everything about it was incredibly exciting and fun. It might be hard to imagine, but I loved waking up at 5 a.m. and running up and down the stadium steps with snow-covered mountains in the background. Yes, I was one of those people! It was an amazing feeling to be part of a college team: wearing Nike gear, wearing the prestigious college logo, and representing a school which I had grown up seeing on TV.
During that year I struggled with a back injury. After that season, my coach got fired, which led me to transfer to the University of Miami in Florida. During that sophomore year, my back problems continued. I never got better and I was forced to stop playing. I was rocked by this reality. This was easily the hardest and most difficult time in my young life. I wanted to say that my identity was strong outside of being an athlete, but that was not true. I had put so much stake in myself as an athlete. I was standing behind that identity more than being loved by God. So when the reality hit me that I would not be playing tennis anymore, I began a long, difficult, two-year journey that became an identity crisis.
As this reality hit, I felt scared and embarrassed about being “just a student” at Miami. These feelings led me to transfer again my junior year. I chose to go to Vanderbilt University, a strong academic school that could be a good place to finish college. It was also closer to home and I knew people who went there. This is where I truly struggled to be a normal person and a normal student.
I remember the early struggles of my identity crisis. I would try to guide conversations with new friends back to the past where I could explain that I used to be an athlete. I even wore some of my old Nike tennis gear on my way to class! It was terrifying to me to be just a person, just a student, normal. I had grown up my whole life thinking that I was either unique or different because of my kidney cancer, my academic ability, or athletic ability. Now I found myself in a place having to be just a person, with nothing to stand behind. This is where my faith truly grew.
There are many people that say that we only really grow spiritually through pain and suffering. I don't think that's necessarily true for all spiritual growth, , but it was the way that I grew in this time of life. I was certainly struggling physically with my back, mentally with my shattered dreams, and spiritually with trying to make sense of why I worked so hard just to have God not seem to honor that hard work. I grew up my whole life believing the “American (Athletic) Dream” that “hard work pays off.” It did not in my case. I was frustrated and sad that my athletic career was over and I had nothing to show for it.
All of this contemplating and crying out led me to a breaking point. I was truly broken and felt weak in most all areas of my life. At the hardest point, I broke up with my girlfriend, who was one of my deepest sources of comfort, because she had kissed another guy. My trust was broken with her, too.
As all of this was happening, I started to read some books that my brother had recommended to me. They were around the topic of God’s love for us and what it means to be a man. At my brother’s suggestion, I also started attending a church where admitting your brokenness and weaknesses were essential to living an authentic Christian life. These people were different from those at other churches I had attended. Most people wore casual clothes; they were okay talking about their problems; and they put deep trust in God’s grace to bring them comfort, strength, and real life. I did not know the extent of this kind of living, but I knew I wanted more than what I had. I wanted to be alive. I wanted to be healed. I wanted to know who I really was. I wanted to know if God and others could love me if I wasn’t a star tennis player.
At this church there was great emphasis on the grace and mercy of Jesus. At this church, the pastors helped me understand Christianity and our relationship with God as an ongoing story. I had never heard this before. God didn’t just want to save us so we could go to heaven. He wanted us to experience his love and to share that joy by going into the world and loving others. Church was not a building. It was a community of people.
This church painted a story of the Christian life that I desperately wanted. It gave me a much larger picture of the story that we are in. The pastors talked about four great chapters in the story of God’s world:1) Creation; 2) Fall; 3) Redemption; and 4) Consummation. I learned that we were in the redemption part of the story. Some people call this time the “already but not yet.” In “the already but not yet,” Jesus has done the work for us in order to be saved, but we are not yet where we will be. In the fourth part of the story, there will be no more tears or crying or pain. Predator and prey animals will be friends. (Isaiah 11:6: The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them). People from all the nations will gather and praise God. Heaven is coming down to Earth and Jesus will make all things new.
In this kind of church, which also emphasized beauty (through paintings, storytelling, and incredible music), I came to tears many times despite not being someone who is able to cry easily, especially in front of others. As I read more books, listened to sermons, and formed friendships with some older mentors, I remember my heart pounding as I learned about the hope that we have in being part of God's story. Our weaknesses and brokenness are not something to hold us back, but something for us to hold up to God as he invites us into his larger story. As God reveals to Paul in the New Testament: “My strength is made perfect in your weakness.”
In fact, the more I read the Bible and read books about the Bible, the main characters were quite broken and weak people themselves. My pastor, who became a mentor during this time and spent time with me each week, helped me to understand this. God rarely used the best and brightest. He walked with people who had great flaws because they would be his handiwork. By doing great things with them, people would see that God is real. If someone so normal could be capable of great things, there must be some larger story going on.
I started to feel such strength and life from the truth of the biblical story. What was amazing to hear from my pastor was that these kinds of stories keep happening today. Just as the men and women in the Bible were real human beings with families and jobs, we are here living in God’s world and He is present to us today. God’s presence and strength accompanied by our courage can allow the biblical story to play out for us today. The Old Testament and New Testament “characters” were real people living in real times and God spoke despite their brokenness and their faults. That gave me immense help and reason to believe God can do the same with me, as I felt like a complete failure having never realized my tennis dreams. Despite my circumstances being the exact same — broken back, no more tennis, loneliness from my breakup — I began feeling so hopeful about the future. I had no idea what kind of joy was right around the corner.