The Long Way Home to Home Plate

In 1999, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays made Josh Hamilton the first overall pick in the Major League Baseball Draft. He was eighteen years old with a hundred-mile-per-hour arm and a swing that scouts called once-in-a-generation. The baseball world laid itself at his feet.

Then he lost it all. Addiction to drugs and alcohol consumed him. For nearly four years, Hamilton was out of baseball entirely — broke, broken, and sleeping on strangers' couches. The first overall pick had become a cautionary tale everyone assumed was finished.

But in 2007, Hamilton resurfaced with the Cincinnati Reds. By 2008, he stood in old Yankee Stadium during the Home Run Derby and launched twenty-eight home runs in the first round while sixty thousand fans chanted his name. In 2010, he was named American League MVP.

Hamilton never claimed he saved himself. "It wasn't me," he told reporters. "It was God."

That is the shape of redemption. Not a person pulling themselves up by willpower, but the Almighty reaching into the wreckage and making something new. The Apostle Paul wrote it plainly: "If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come" (2 Corinthians 5:17).

Your past does not get the final word. The God who made you is also the God who remakes you — and He wastes nothing.