Before his presentation to my Careers in Sports and Fitness class, Rick and I sat in a booth, eating burgers and fries and sharing stories. I asked him if he had ever seen circumstances that he couldn’t explain working together to shape his life.

"I was raised in the Byzantine Catholic Church, with mass spoken in Romanian. I never understood a word of it," he confesses, "and at the time, didn’t get anything out of it." He reflected another moment and then said, "But I’m glad I had that experience."

Then, he shared a different experience that had moved him from that fringe edge of indifference into the realm of faith.

"I was the GM of a minor league team and was helping announce a game. I looked down at my stat sheet for a moment and when I looked back up, couldn’t understand what was going on. The game had stopped and everyone was standing up and looking at the front row right by first base."

What had happened was that a line drive foul ball had hit a five-year-old kid in the temple, dropping him like a shot bird. "When I got down there, that kid was dead. He had blood gushing out of his ear. No pulse. They defibrillated him and got his heart going again."

"He flat-lined again in the ambulance. They life-flighted him to a children’s hospital. While he was on the helicopter, he flat-lined again."

"Three times?" I asked.

"That kid died three times," he nodded.

"We went back to the stadium and the players from both teams were all in our dressing room. Our manager said, ‘Boys, this kid isn’t going to make it. But we’re going to pray for him anyway.’

"A lot of those guys were crying openly. We all kneeled down in that dressing room and we prayed for that kid."

"Next morning, we called the hospital and they said, ‘We can’t tell you about his condition,’ but they did confirm that he was still alive. We drove over to the hospital and found out what room he was in."

Rick paused, looked away and forced himself to keep his eyes clear. But he couldn’t keep his voice from thickening. Then, he looked back at me and finished. "We walked into that room and that kid was jumping up and down on his bed. Jumping up and down."

And since then, Rick has never wondered whether or not prayers make any difference.

2/18/11

H. Arnett