(ChurchLeaders) On July 6, soccer champion Abby Wambach appeared on a podcast hosted by her wife, Glennon Doyle, where Wambach opened up about her childhood experience with church. The soccer star shared she is still healing from years of feeling like she needed to make a choice between God and her identity.
“My first memories of church are actually very beautiful,” said Wambach, who was raised in a large, Catholic family. “I remember the music, I remember loving to sing, my feet planted on the pew while holding the back pew in front of me and just belting out the songs.”
As time went on, however, Wambach came to realize that there was a discrepancy between how she felt inside and what the church expected of her. “Slowly but surely,” said Wambach, “it wasn’t ever something that somebody said…it was a feeling, like an overwhelming sense of understanding both at the same time of who I was inside and who the church expected me to be, and both of those things didn’t match. They didn’t meet up.” The result was, “I understood that I had a choice to make, and it was like, I was either going to choose me or God.”