Jesse Bradley

Jesse Bradley had the life he'd dreamed up as a kid: two-time Ivy League champion goalkeeper at Dartmouth, then professional soccer in Zimbabwe with the Bulawayo Highlanders, then Scotland. He also had a secret that all the winning couldn't touch: “I had success on the outside, but inside I couldn't figure it out. Why am I still empty?”

In this episode of Who Is Jesus To You?, Pastor Jesse tells David Harris Jr. how a kid raised with no faith at all — “our family was kind of like Baskin-Robbins, 31 flavors spiritually” — opened a Bible for the first time in a Dartmouth world religions class taught by a professor trying to undermine it. What the skeptic found instead was a person he couldn't dismiss. He peppered a Christian teammate named Mike with literally hundreds of questions, examined the historical evidence for the resurrection like the analytical athlete he was, and discovered the thing that undid him: every other path was about climbing, striving, and earning — the only life he'd ever known — and this one was grace.

Then, at his athletic peak, came the ordeal that anchors this conversation. A routine prescribed anti-malaria drug quietly built to toxic levels in his system: a racing heart at 160 beats a minute sitting still, migraines, panic attacks, vision problems, cognitive decline. Ten different doctors had no answer — and every one of them told him to keep taking the medication. As a brand-new Christian, Jesse prayed and asked God directly: what is causing this? The answer he heard contradicted every physician he'd seen. He stopped the drug. Weeks later, the CDC confirmed toxic levels of it in his blood. Had he obeyed the doctors instead of the voice, this episode wouldn't exist.

What followed was a year fighting for his life and a full decade of recovery — much of it in his parents' basement, his identity as an athlete stripped away, learning who he was when he couldn't perform. Jesse walks David through the battle plan that carried him: writing Psalm 46:1 on his wall until it moved “from the wall, to my mind, to my heart,” and what he now calls “the power of the second thought” — goalkeeper mode for the mind, rejecting every lie at the net and answering it with Scripture. “It's not just how much you're in the Word,” he says. “It's how much the Word is in you.”

And then there's the phone call. After the single darkest, most hopeless night of his entire recovery, the phone rang the next morning. It was his Uncle Dan — a professional comedian, the family member least likely to ever turn to God — calling from a hotel room in Davenport. What Dan said about a Gideon Bible and the Gospel of Mark is the best single line in the episode, and we're not spoiling it here.

Along the way: leading his grandmother to Jesus at 2 a.m. and telling his stroke-silenced grandfather the news the next day, the four-year-old boy he and his wife adopted who opened a Bible and pointed to Ruth 1:16, “gritty gratitude” — the discipline of listing ten thank-yous when you feel thankful for nothing — and what it looks like to pastor in one of America's least-churched cities while serving as chaplain to the Seattle Sounders.

Ask him who Jesus is now, and the answer comes from the valley: “Jesus is my indestructible hope.”

Watch the full conversation above. Find Pastor Jesse's free resources, devotionals, and podcast through his Choose Hope website, or connect with him on social media @jessejbradley.