The following article by David Zahl appears in the the newly released book, The Jesus I Wish I Knew in High School, edited by Mbird contributors Charlotte Getz and Cameron Cole. CLICK HERE to purchase!

It was a lock, they told me.

The team would meet for its annual post-season banquet. We’d eat some pizza, our coach would hand out a few awards, and then we’d elect next year’s captains. I say captains, plural. My sophomore year there had been three. My junior year, two.

Water polo is what you call a niche sport — in New England at least. Sunny places like California and Florida boast robust high school programs, both public and private school leagues. These states tend to feed the US Olympic roster. Up in Connecticut, though, the sport is mainly something for swim­mers to do during the off-season. No one takes it that seriously.

When I showed up at boarding school as a new sophomore, I had never played water polo in earnest before. I couldn’t tell you the positions, certainly not the rules. I just knew there was a lot of treading water involved. The admissions office must have informed the coach of my facility in the pool, as he wasted no time urging me to go out for the team, assuring me that I’d have a leg up when swim season started that winter. It was a no-brainer, he said.

So out I went, kicking off three seasons of intense play. Turns out that being a good swimmer was more than half the battle. I wasn’t going to make any all-American lists, but I more than held my own. By the end of that first year I was starting on varsity, which felt like a big deal. The next fall, I was one of only two juniors who started in every game. The other junior was my good friend Myles.

When captain elections came up, this means there were really only two guys in the running. Fortunately, there had never been less than two captains, so all that remained was to plan my acceptance speech.

You can guess what happened next. The coach tallied the anonymous vote and announced that … there would be only one captain next season, and Myles had been chosen.

WHAT?

I was dumbfounded. But it was no prank. Myles looked almost as shocked as I. As the room emptied, everyone avoided eye contact with me, coach included.

Writing about it now, I can still feel a knot form in my belly.

The stakes might seem relatively minor, but at the time, the verdict cut to the core of my seventeen-year-old self.

Most rejections you can write off. You appeal to the “well, I didn’t really try that hard” excuse or some form of “who really cares?” In this case, I had tried my hardest for two full sea­sons. I’d given everything I had and could not pretend I didn’t care. There was no way to interpret this rejection other than as a public confirmation of every doubt I’d ever harbored about myself.

You are no leader, my peers had told me. You do not have what it takes, and we will go out of our way to let you know that.

It was crushing.

To this day, I have no idea what happened or why. The coach called me that evening but offered no explanation. He just wanted me to know that he could tell I was upset but hoped I would still get in the water next season. Looking back, the nerve of this guy!

The season after I graduated there would be two team cap­tains again, and to my knowledge there have been two captains every year since. Something about me, I could only assume, was so noticeably not-captain-material that tradition had to be suspended.

I remember running into that coach when I was back for a reunion a decade later and fighting the urge to ask about it (or kick him in the shins). These are things you never forget.

 

The Jesus I Wish I Knew in High School

While I had grown up in the church, my relationship with God at the time was complicated. I believed in God, I even believed he loved me. But my father was a pastor, I was far away from home, and the Christians on campus were way too eager. I wor­ried that attending fellowship meetings would hurt my chances with the opposite sex. (It probably would’ve helped them.)

For whatever reason, I did not turn to God in my shame. Instead, I turned against him. It wasn’t because I thought I had let him down somehow, or that he was punishing me. It wasn’t even because I had some false notion about God only loving winners.

I knew he was there and I resented him for it.

Meaning, I got mad — at myself for being so un-captain-like and at God for making me that way. Why couldn’t I be more like Myles? Maybe in the back of my mind, I knew that God tended not to work through the kind of personal glory a high school senior craved. But my emotional hurt superseded any of that. The rejection ran deep.

It’s telling that at no point did I question the authority of my coach and teammates. As far as I was concerned, their authority was ultimate. I had also cut off any fellow Christians who might have pointed out my blind spots. The anger at myself would soon manifest as depression.

You’ll note that I haven’t mentioned Jesus yet. For whatever reason, I was scared of Jesus in high school. God felt safer. There were less immediate connotations, political or otherwise, when it came to God, more room to maneuver. Jesus, on the other hand, was a lightning rod, and not just among my peers. Committing to him felt infinitely more specific and potentially demanding. To do so risked alienating those who identified with other tradi­tions (or no tradition). And yet, I found that God-without-Jesus didn’t have much to say to me in my rejection and anger.

What I would learn a couple of years later — and what I continue to learn to this day — is that a faith without Jesus at its center crumbles. I might not have said as much at the time, but my conception of God-without-Jesus was basically a larger, more powerful version of me; or my father; or worse, an author­ity figure like my water polo coach.

But the God-revealed-in-Jesus — “the image of the invisible God” as Colossians 1:15 puts it — challenges and even contra­dicts our expectations of who God should be. We want status. We want favor. We want to impress, and to lead. Yet Jesus was not driven by ego. He was not consumed by what Brené Brown calls “the shame-based fear of being ordinary,”[1] or what I might call “the shame-based fear of not being captain.”

Instead, Jesus gave up his position at the right hand of God to mix it up with sinners like you and me. He refused to relate to others on the basis of their performance or popularity; in fact, he seemed most interested in those who had been voted down by society or cast aside (and not always unfairly).

I wish I had known then that God is not just like us but bigger, whether that be the worst parts of us or the best. I wish I had grasped the good news of the gospel. Because it is only a God unlike us — a God unbound by fear or the need for approval — who can save us from ourselves.

This Jesus was rejected by his closest disciples — his team­mates, if you will — but he did not reject them in return. His right-hand man Peter flat-out denied knowing Jesus three times, at moments when it might have done either of them some good, and yet Jesus refused to disown Peter after his resurrection.

Believe it or not, he gave the man more authority rather than less. The least captain-like was appointed captain.

On the cross, Jesus took on the full weight of our faulty judgments, casual cruelties, and thirst for glory, and allowed it to crush him. The One who could walk on water was drowned for the sake of those who had turned against him. This includes you.

The Jesus I Want You to Know

God is not who you want him to be — and that’s okay. More than okay! He does not play by your rules. The voices that echo through the halls of every high school, and sometimes in our own heads, are different from the voice of God. His approval of you is not subject to any vote or public opinion. It is only depen­dent on the death and resurrection of Jesus.

This means that the rejection you fear — indeed, the rejec­tion you might experience from your peers or from the author­ity figures in your life — is not the rejection of God.

He would rather reject himself than be alienated from you. As Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 1:18–20a: “As surely as God is faithful, our word to you has not been Yes and No. For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we proclaimed among you, Silvanus and Timothy and I, was not Yes and No; but in him it is always Yes. For all the promises of God find their Yes in him.”

For every banquet that goes disastrously wrong in this life, there is one to come in the next life that will not disappoint, where every tearful rejection will be made right and every angry outburst soothed.

Funny as it sounds (and painful as it feels!), every rejection you experience now brings you closer to the heart of God in a way that you can hardly imagine.

Myles and I spoke on the phone recently, twenty years on, and we both agreed that I would’ve made an insufferable cap­tain. Fortunately, God saved me from what I wanted, and he will save you too.

COMMENTS

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