Written by Abby Adkison
It’s one of those tight games. Emotions are high; the tension is in the air and any other cliché you can think up. It’s just a high school soccer game, but it’s become something like the world cup for my small town. If I looked hard enough at the sideline I probably would have seen Denzel Washington, in his Titans coaching outfit, about to give some kind of beautiful speech. And my team was in need of a Denzel speech. I was shoulder-to-shoulder with this girl when the ball came flying through the air toward us. We both jumped to head it to one of our own players. We took off from the ground, still attached at the shoulder, floating in the air for a split second of eternity. The ball came, we reached and … we both missed. The ball fell to the ground and the play resumed. No big deal, slightly embarrassing, but no big deal. Well, I guess I was wrong to assume.Within minutes my coach had me off the field and sitting on the frigid bench. Then at least 10 minutes tick by and my coach still hadn’t looked at me, which was like a slow death considering how big the game was, the crowd, me being a senior and how the bench had completely given my entire lower body frost bite.”Adkison!” my head popped to attention as my coach turned to face me. My coach walked over to me and, despite being small, was quite intimidating, mainly because of her excellent screaming voice. I was sort of hoping for a Denzel speech in all truth. Instead she grabbed the front of my jersey, yanked me to her eye level and yelled in my face, “You have to swear to make every single air ball or I’m taking you out of the game for good!” I just gawked at her. I sat down hard, not saying anything, knowing that if I went onto that field and didn’t play to perfection I’d be even more humiliated. Not a Denzel speech at all.Have you ever felt like God can be that way sometimes? Like he grabs you by the jersey and demands perfection out on the field of life? It’s a pretty warped idea of God, really. But I feel like there are people who believe that God has put the weight of our eternity on our own shoulders, when really it is God carrying our cross for us. The beauty about God is that he doesn’t demand perfection; he simply loves us. Like Romans 9:16 says,”It does not therefore depend on man’s desire or effort, but on God’s mercy.”
