Each year as fall approaches, I can feel my adrenaline rise and my competitive personality seep into every corner of my life. College football is back in action, my kids’ sports teams are in full swing, and just the changing of the season brings back the nostalgia of my collegiate soccer career.
I’m a competitor, wired to make everything into some sort of game or competition. This was instilled in me in childhood when I discovered the thrill of competing through sports. I played soccer my whole life and earned a scholarship to play at a Division I school. While soccer was a huge part of my life, once I began walking with the Lord, I subconsciously viewed soccer as more of a sidebar to what the Lord was doing in and through my heart.
The years of training and teamwork, victory and defeat, met and unmet expectations all built my mental, physical, and emotional tenacity. But what I didn’t realize throughout my adolescence and early adult years was God’s larger story working through my naïve concept of soccer as a hobby.
Ten years after graduating college, my husband received a brain tumor diagnosis in 2019. It was a whirlwind of a season with confusion, sleeplessness, and a survival mode mindset.
Over the next few months we experienced two brain surgeries (neither went well), chemotherapy, radiation, losing hope, and regaining hope. We felt the supporting presence of our community through church and our children’s school. And then, a global pandemic put our journey on the backburner while we all tried to figure out how to survive.
That recap cannot capture my reality, which was heavier, darker and more intense than words can convey. Where was God? This chapter of my story seemed to have spiraled out of hand, and all I could ask was, “Why?” I was driven to persevere, but the lament and grief I felt in losing my safe, normal life was completely defeating.
God often uses time to heal trauma, and the waves of grief have lessened over the last five years. My husband is alive and doing well, and on top of that we welcomed our fourth child into the world two years ago. Our story is truly a miraculous testimony of God’s healing power this side of heaven.
I can see a thread of God’s grace and pursuit in every season and circumstance of my life leading up to that brain tumor battle and continuing today. The many years of soccer training, developing endurance and learning perseverance, were never just a sidebar.
During that time, the Lord was strengthening within me a muscle that He knew I would need for a future time. That muscle would be able to persevere when everything in me wanted to quit. This spiritual muscle is one He built so that I would learn to ultimately lean on Him in every season.
Through this spiritual training, I can recognize that there is no sidebar to my story but that God is threading all things together in my life to draw me closer to Him. Nothing is wasted.
The song “The Goodness of God” leads me in worship to express the hope I have in my God who orchestrates every detail of my life for my good and for His glory. The second verse says:
I love your voice
You have led me through the fire
In darkest night You are close like no other
I’ve known you as a Father
I’ve known you as a Friend
And I have lived in the goodness of God.
He was there on the darkest nights, through the loneliest days, and at the most traumatic moments. He never left my side, and His strength and presence were most evident when I felt the weakest. And as I reflect on that dark season of my life, I can see how he has woven my story together to continue to point me to him.
Each one of us has a story with a thread like this. We’re each being trained and conditioned by the Spirit to see his thread of goodness working in our lives. And we can see a thread of enduring hope amidst trials in God’s larger story throughout Scripture as well. This thread runs throughout stories of defeat and victory, through unlikely people and seemingly simple events to bring about God’s good plan of redemption for his people and his coming kingdom.
Our temporary trials are exercising spiritual muscles that achieve for us an eternal prize of glory. They are muscles that strengthen us to fix our eyes on Jesus. In all circumstances of our lives, we are given the opportunity to train our physical bodies and our spiritual minds to lean upon and submit to Him.
In this battle of life, we fight the good fight of faith knowing that victory is ours, and it is now our joy and our prize to compete in every season of life for the goal of knowing and living for him because we have nothing to lose. He is always working, always moving and always using our passions and our drive to accomplish his work in us and for his kingdom’s sake.
Val Peterson serves as communications director at Oak Mountain Presbyterian Church