By Jackson Mefford –
As a keeper, Jesse Bradley saved shots. As a chaplain, he saves souls.
“My identity is not in saving goals anymore but in seeing God save souls,” he says.
For about 18 years, Jesse Bradley had rejected Christ and his salvation. He arrived at Dartmouth College “focused on school, sports and friends, thinking if those three things went well, life would be good.”
Christ showed up anyhow during his freshman year.
In a World Religions class, the professor assigned reading the Bible.
Then a fellow track team member answered his questions about God.
Bradley did extremely well on the soccer team.
“We won the Ivy League title twice, NCAA Division I Elite Eight,” he remembers. “We had a great team, family environment. It was amazing.”
After college, Bradley pursued a professional soccer career in Scotland.
Later he joined a soccer team in Zimbabwe because he felt like God was leading him there.
“I was trying to choose between Queen Parks Rangers, also Manchester United and then going to Africa,” he says. “The obvious place would be to go to England to one of the biggest clubs in the world.”
Playing for the Highlanders Football Club in Bulawayo, he began feeling mysteriously sick.
“I noticed I had migraine headaches,” he says. “I couldn’t handle any light or any noise.”
Next came the chills, double vision, depression, anxiety and heart trouble.
His heart would reach 160 beats a minute even while sitting still. It progressed to a heart murmur and then started skipping beats.
Eventually, once he started developing pain in his left side so bad he couldn’t even sleep. Doctors in Zimbabwe advised him to fly back to the US. This was crushing to the star goalkeeper.
“My childhood dream came true. I played professional soccer overseas,” he says. “I was in Scotland. I was in Zimbabwe.
But American doctors were no help – until he went to Stanford.
The Stanford doctor suggested the cause was the antimalaria pills for Zimbabwe.
“What was supposed to protect me was killing me,” he says. “I was fighting for my life for one year. And it took 10 years to fully recover.”
He leaned heavily on his faith. He earned a master’s degree in theology at Dallas Theological Seminary and served as a pastor in Atlanta, San Diego and San Francisco before becoming a chaplain for the Seattle Sounders, a Major League Soccer team
“My career tragically ended. I felt like I lost my identity,” Bradley says. “But God met me at that low place to rebuild and restore me and even redirect me to be a pastor now.”
