God’s Grace and Josh Hamilton

One of my favorite games in the long baseball season is the All Star Game.  I love watching all of the game’s greatest and best come together for one game and just play baseball.  I also love the festivities surrounding the All Star Game, especially the Home Run Derby.  Well, tonight, a member of my beloved Texas Rangers, Josh Hamilton, hit a record-setting TWENTY-EIGHT homeruns in the first round (even though he went on the lose the Derby). 

For anyone who has been following baseball this season, I’m sure you’re familiar with Hamilton’s story.  He was drafted first overall by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in the 1999 Draft.  Some scouts said that he was a better pure talent  than A-Rod and Griffey.  He was drafted out of high school, could hit like none other, was fleet-footed, and could pitch in the 90s.  Then, through a series of the Lord’s Providences, this good ‘ole boy got involved with drugs and alcohol and in the next few years ruined his life and any chance he had at playing professional baseball, not even playing baseball at all from ’03 through ’05.  In a recent issue of Sports Illustrated, Hamilton’s father-in-law, Michael Dean Chadwick said “He’d be at the lowest of lows, and he’d sink lower.”  His “…rock bottom, [Hamilton] says, was the night in the late summer of 2005 when he awoke from a crack binge in a trailer with a half-dozen strangers around him; with nowhere else to go, he appeared like a ghost at his grandmother’s door — his sunken face as white as snow, his 6′ 4″ frame shrunk from 230 pounds to 180.”  Last July, Hamilton told his story in an ESPN article, in which he says “How am I here? I can only shrug and say, ‘It’s a God thing.’ It’s the only possible explanation.”

Since that article last July, Hamilton has gone on to be only the fifth play in MLB history to have more than 90 RBIs at the All-Star break (he has 95, along with 21 homers, and a .310 batting average).  This is even more amazing when you realize that he did not play ball AT ALL from ’03 through ’05, and that his only other professional experience since then, other than part of last season with the Cincinnati Reds, was a partial season of class A minor league ball.

Yet, in the midst of this amazing, monster season Hamilton is having, people are missing the point.  During the Derby, ESPN’s Rick Reilly said that tonight was a bad night to be an athiest, and that Hamilton had gone and got religion.  He and many other people don’t understand!  Baseball is fleeting.  Hamilton’s Home Run Derby record will be broken (he himself broke a record that was a mere 3 years old).  Someday he will be forgotten, but His and my God won’t.  God’s glory won’t.  God’s majesty won’t.  See, I think Hamilton does get it.  In the last part of the ESPN article from last summer, he closes out with these words:

“You see, I may not know how I got here from there, but every day I get a better understanding of why.”

Sometimes, the Lord’s Sovereign Providences don’t make a whole lot of sense.  And sometimes He has us go through a whole lot of rotten stuff (some of it out of our hands, most of our own doing), but in the end, He is always good and merciful to His children, and I for one am thankful for examples like Josh Hamilton that give us yet another picture the miraculous and saving Grace of Almighty God.

The entire SI article can be read here, and the ESPN article here.

*Update*

Peter Gammons has posted an article on ESPN.com talking about Hamilton.  It’s amazing and somewhat ironic that everyone talks about and credits Hamilton with turning his life around and “overcoming demons”, yet every time I hear Hamilton talk about his story, he is glorifying Christ and crediting HIM with his miraculous turn-around.