Part Three - God Provides

While pondering whether I should go tubing or not, I heard my friend sitting next to me gasp, so I turned and saw a jeep rushing towards the van we were riding in. Our driver had missed a stop sign and we were in the middle of another highway.

My friend in the back and I were both ejected from the vehicle. While he was pronounced dead at the scene, I was life-flighted to Sioux Falls, SD. My list of injuries included: broken right hip, several broken ribs, fractured kidney, broken right thumb, swollen left ankle, torn MCL in my left knee, and others. Every doctor told me I would need to red-shirt, or sit out, the next season and heal. I told them they didn’t know the strength that God provides, and I would be taking the mound in February. Rehab was hard. School was hard. I was sad, hurt, weak, broken, but I held onto the fact that God would provide the strength I needed. 

God provided strength and also a kind professor who told me that I could see her before class and grab my homework to complete on my own time instead of sitting through her class. She saw my exhaustion and helped me survive as I recovered from my injuries. I had her for several classes, and each time she always encouraged me to keep writing. I am forever grateful for her kindness and encouragement.

By God’s grace, I started in our first game on February 21, 2009, just 213 days after our accident. We lost, and it didn’t bother me as much as it would have before the accident. I had lost so much more than a game that previous summer. The following day I pitched my second game, and we won, and the tears started flowing. Winning no longer mattered, because it didn’t remove the pain of losing another friend. So I held on to the ministry-minded approach my dad instilled in my back in Sioux Falls, SD many years before.

I can tell you that I was far from the same pitcher my senior year. I had to pitch a differently because I lost a lot of my physical strength from my injuries. God, however, didn’t change one bit, so if you were to look at my stats you would never know what happened to me the previous summer. I ended my career as a four-time Pitcher of the Year for our conference, and all the glory belongs to God…but I didn’t know that yet, it would be 10 years before I would discover that truth.

Read Part 4 tomorrow and see how God transformed my view of His Word.