Why Would You Put Me Through This?

I've asked God that question more times than I can count over the past three years. And a week ago, lying on a training field with a crack still ringing in my ears, I asked it again.

This time, though, I think I finally got an answer:

It's so you know how to get out of it when you go back in for someone else.

If you're just finding me, here's where things stand: I'm Trinity, I'm a center back for the San Diego Wave, and as of this week, I'm about to have my third knee surgery in three years. This one's the biggest yet — a fully ruptured ACL and a torn lateral meniscus, on my right knee this time, the one that's never given me a single problem in my whole career. Nine to twelve months of recovery. Longer than anything I've been through before.

I'm not writing this because I have it all figured out. I'm writing it because I don't, and I think that's actually the point.

This isn't the first time my body has stopped me in my tracks. When I was in eighth grade, I ended up in the hospital with a hemoglobin level of six — half of what it's supposed to be — after months of bleeding that doctors kept calling "common." Common isn't the same thing as normal, and I've never forgotten that. A few years later, right after I'd verbally committed to UNC, it happened again, worse. I spent eleven weeks bedridden, unable to lift a foot off the ground, unable to do much of anything except open my Bible because it was the only thing I had the strength for. That season taught me something I didn't want to learn but needed to: rest isn't weakness. It's not optional. It's where I met God the clearest.

Then came two meniscus tears on my left knee, surgeries that felt almost small compared to what anemia had already put me through. I came back from both. I played in a World Cup. I won a national championship. I signed my first pro contract. I got my first pro goal. And I thought, honestly, that I'd already learned the lesson this body had for me.

Then my right knee gave out in the last few minutes of a normal Tuesday training session, and I was on the ground before I understood what had happened.

I'm not going to pretend I've been angry at God through this. I haven't, not really. Mostly I've just been confused. Why now? Why again? I thought this year was supposed to look different.

But here's what I keep coming back to. Jeremiah 33:3 says, "Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known." I've called out. And what keeps surfacing isn't an explanation for why this happened — it's a reason for what it's for.

I don't think God is done using pain and suffering in my life to grow me. But I'm starting to believe He's also using it to prepare me — to give me a language for this, a credibility I couldn't have any other way, so that someday I can turn around and hand it to somebody else who's exactly where I am right now. Somebody staring at their own MRI results. Somebody who just heard the word "surgery" for the first time, or the third. Somebody who feels like their body betrayed them at the worst possible moment.

I don't have this all resolved. I'm writing this a few days before surgery, still working through what it means to trust a plan I can't see the shape of yet. But I know I'm not doing this recovery quietly this time. I'm going to document it — the hard parts and the sacred parts — every two weeks, right here, because I think that's part of what I'm being asked to do with this.

If you're in your own version of this right now — hurt, confused, tired of asking why — I see you. I don't have your answer. But I believe there's one coming, even if it doesn't look like what either of us expects.

More soon.