The First Round Nobody Expected

In 1999, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays selected Josh Hamilton with the first overall pick in the MLB Draft. He was eighteen years old, brimming with talent that scouts called generational. Then addiction swallowed him whole. For three years, Hamilton disappeared from baseball entirely — lost to crack cocaine and alcohol, living in his grandmother's house, pawning his equipment, a cautionary tale the sports world had already written off.

But God was not finished writing.

Hamilton clawed his way back through rehab, minor leagues, and a second chance with the Cincinnati Reds in 2007. Then came the night that still gives me chills. July 14, 2008, Yankee Stadium, the Home Run Derby. The man who had been out of baseball entirely just five years earlier stepped to the plate and launched twenty-eight home runs in the first round alone. Seventy thousand people rose to their feet for a man they had counted as dead.

That is what redemption looks like. Not a cleaned-up version of your old life, but something so improbable that the only explanation is grace. The Apostle Paul wrote it plainly: "If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here" (2 Corinthians 5:17).

Whatever has buried you — whatever years the locusts have eaten — the God who specializes in comeback stories is not finished with yours.