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I’m not a very good soccer player. I love the game so much, but it’s not my gifting. I had the privilege of playing soccer for Ouachita Baptist University my senior year of uni. Coach Alex Denning and his wife Lauren, as well as my awesome teammates, taught me more about the game than I ever thought possible. I’m still very challenged in taking what I know and making my feet follow-through with action, but my gracious after a season with Coachie and Lauren, I know my soccer. And then I got to Cambodia. In our village we played barefoot soccer in a rice field. Everything that I had been taught was pretty much thrown out the window. I mean the basics were the same- two goals, throw-ins, no handballs,.. you know, the things you learn when you were four. The terrain makes every skill added to that impossible to perform. The entire earth of the field is covered with deep holes and small hills. You not only have to make sure you aren’t going to break an ankle in a hole, but you have to avoid the random mounds of cow manure. Dribbling the ball anywhere or expecting accuracy in passing if the ball was on the ground was a complete joke. The game had to be simplified. Everything that I had learned in my D-2 school soccer education had to be put aside in this game. It was soccer in it’s simplest form- barefoot in a rice field.

My experience with playing soccer there actually was my same experience in bringing the Gospel to the people of the village. Twice a day we would split into two groups and do evangelism. We went door to door sitting with each family and shared the Gospel with them through translation. Two of Vuthy’s students joined one of the groups as translators and Vuthey goes with the other. The girls were very limited in their English, so we quickly recognized that we had to come up with a way to share the Gospel in its simplest form. No one in the village really knew anything about Jesus. It was a very difficult, but very powerful exercise to bring the Gospel message to the basics. We could not even use words that we Thought were necessary because the girls didn’t know the English. It was just like soccer. “Creation”- hole in the field. “Eternity”- whoops! Cow manure. We sat in our small wooden house for hours finally bringing the Good News down to a one page presentation beginning with “God made the world”. It was definitely a tough thing for me because every ounce of my Theology-schooled brain was crying out words like “salvation”, “redemption”, etc. This is where simplicity and Amanda Glenn collide in a ferocious battle. I can shower with tadpoles all day long, just don’t make me give up “justification”! As painful a process as it was, in the end it was quite liberating. I will never discount the significance of delving deeper, because I think it is extremely important to press into the Lord and His truths. Let’s be honest, Jesus Himself was Teacher. I could not have played one minute in D2 soccer if I was playing like I was in the rice field. But I also found so much value in bringing it back to the basics. Why do I love Jesus? It truly gets you down to the core!!!