We won 43-10 at soccer

Guess which one is me.

It was an incredibly lopsided score, a thumping to leave our opponents embarrassed for the rest of their lives. Their team was four players, and we were only three.

Actually, we were trying to get as many goals as years I’ve lived on Earth as of today: 48. But the other team quit.

To be fair, I personally made only three goals. And as best as I can remember, the 10 goals made against us were all my fault.

Yes, the victory was because of Mario and Banner Ajcip, exceptional footballers and brothers of the Door Church in Guatemala, where I pastored, where I learned to play soccer. Those two guys teach in our school, and we played against the students of our Christian school.

It felt like being on Jesus’ team. He lets you participate. He lets you feel like your doing something. You work hard. You make mistakes. But he brings the inevitable lopsided victory.

I’m glad I’m on Jesus’ team.

‘I married the guerilla’

With an old student at the Door Christian School in Guatemala City.

When the funeral hearse pulled up at 5:00 a.m., Gladys Barrios knew what it meant. She was a Christian teacher in Guatemala, but her husband fought for the guerrillas. He espoused atheistic communism.

“I lived constantly with the possibility that someone would come and tell me, ‘I’m sorry, but they just killed your husband,’” she said. “When I saw the hearse, I thought, ‘Well, that’s it. He’s dead.’”

Guatemala’s civil war lasted from 1960 to 1996. Just like America’s Civil War, it divided families. It was a bloody conflict of betrayal and treachery as the CIA and the former Soviet Union resorted to dirty tricks and massacres in their attempt to wrest control.

While the communists fought to win the hearts of the people, evangelical Christians made huge gains as people, fearful of death on all sides, considered their eternal state. Today, the country is one-third evangelical, according to some estimates.

For Gladys, the clash of ideologies took place in her household – but with a peculiar pre-marital agreement. “I knew he was in the guerrilla before we married,” she said. “So we agreed that I wouldn’t interfere in his activities, and he would let me go to church and raise the children Christian.

It turned out that the night the hearse arrived did NOT coincide with her husband’s death. Her husband, Luis Ernesto Donado, had been drinking with other high-ranking revolutionaries, and they had crashed due to intoxication. A friend died, and they asked Gladys to visit the morgue, identify the cadaver, and advise the wife who had just become a widow. Read the rest of her incredible story.