Redemption

Tim Montgomery stepped to the line, and called out the exercise to the other runners, all between the ages of seven and sixteen.  At his command, the students were off and running.  Montgomery shouted words of encouragement as they zigzagged through rows of cones on a grass field in Florida.  Back and forth they moved, kicking their knees high with the former 100-meter world record holder.

Most of the youngsters working with Montgomery don't remember when he was the fastest man on the planet.  They've seen his Olympic medals, but most had to Google his name to learn about the sprinter's glory days.  In doing so, they also learned about his troubled past, a dark period of failure covering nearly a decade of his life.

Topping the search results were not the chronicles of his 1996 silver medal in Atlanta or his 2000 gold medal in Sydney.  Nor was it the 2002 tale of him setting the world record of 9.78 seconds in Paris.  Leading the Google headlines were captions that would make most men bury their head in shame, sending them away in humiliation, never to be heard from again.

At the age of 27, Tim Montgomery stood at the summit of human achievement.  He pretty much had it all.  He was dating one of the world's most famous women, was known as the fastest man in the world, and had enough money that if invested properly, could last a lifetime.  The success and status led to choices that would cost him dearly.  Enmeshed in a self-indulgent lifestyle fueled by the high-living wants of materialism, vanity, and pleasure seeking, Montgomery soon discovered that all the decadence could not fulfill his desires.  Within five years of setting the world record, he tumbled from the pinnacle of success, and most of everything he had acquired was gone.

First went his track career.  He was banned for two years from the sport that had brought him wealth and fame, for using performance-enhancing drugs.  After receiving the ban, he vacated results from March 2001 on, including the world record.  When he stopped running, he tried to find other ways to make money.  He involved himself with former friends from the track community, and soon found himself caught up in a $1.7 million dollar check-writing scheme.  In 2007, he pled guilty to conspiracy to commit bank fraud and two counts of bank fraud.  He was sentenced to 46 months in federal prison.

While he fought the fraud case in New York, he was arrested in Virginia for dealing heroin, in another attempt to make money fast.  Again, he pled guilty and was sentenced to another five years in federal prison.  Six years after he set the world record, Montgomery faced spending the next decade in prison, becoming just another tragic story of a gifted man who threw his life away on worldly pursuits that could never satisfy.  Bearing the brunt and suffering the greatest fallout of his reckless and selfish choices, were his two youngest children, ages five and seven at the time.

Montgomery entered federal prison on April 6, 2008.  Two Olympics came and went while he was incarcerated.  During those prime years, that period in one's lifespan that God designed to be productive, a time to grow and strengthen the bonds of family and career, Tim Montgomery languished behind a fence, filled with regret and pain for the choices he had made.  Although he had accepted responsibility for the acts that had removed him from the world and the people he loved, the years away gave him time to scrutinize those poor decisions and resolve himself to change.  And soon, in that harsh environment, a notable story of redemption was born.

Seeing the disappointment and pain he had caused his family, Tim sought to make the years of incarceration a turning point.  In prison, for the first time in his life, he read voraciously.  He went through the Bible multiple times, enabling the work of transformation to take place.  And the resulting change was astonishing, working its way inside out, reaching distant wastelands of Tim's life.

The Word of God is not mere print gracing thousands of pages.  It's something living and alive, a sword of alteration.  Like a surgeon's scalpel slicing through tissue to remove cancerous tumors, God's Word does the same to a person's life.  Language fails to explain exactly how this miraculous process works.  Similar to the way God spoke the world into existence, creating something spectacular from a void of nothingness, the Word of God does the same to an individual's spirit.  When one engages its pages, something divine is unleashed in the invisible world, undetectable to the naked eye.

More emotionally than intellectually, we sometimes feel as though God has no interest in our lives, that He's unconcerned about our travails and plight.  When we stumble down paths of sorrow, failure, or disappointment, our spirits are wounded, which can easily lead to an avoidance of the Word.  Such negligence births disconnection, a hollow void.  Our spirit is vulnerable, left wanting, yearning for purpose, and meaning.  The emptiness coerces our hearts to consider behavior and actions that once seemed inconceivable.

The path of success can do the same.  Success is a lousy teacher.  It can cause God-fearing individuals to think they're invincible, that they don't need the Word, seducing smart people into believing they will never fail.  This is what happened to Tim Montgomery, and in many ways, to me as well.

Before my personal failure, I walked in close relationship with God.  My heart burned with passion for the things of God.  But slowly, over time, I started to neglect the Word, reaching a point where I did not read it for years.  Aberrant behavior soon followed, costing me everything I held dear.

Perhaps you're reading these words and can relate.  You once experienced the presence of God.  You walked in close communion with God.  You can remember when your heart exploded with a measure of life that was otherworldly.  Everything was fresh, alive, and promising.  You held high hopes for your life; your future appeared bright.  Now your spirit languishes in a wilderness of dissatisfaction.  You feel lost, alone, hollow, empty.  Internally, you long for the promises you believe God once spoke to your heart.  You just know they're out there somewhere in the void, waiting to reunite with your heart.  But you don't know how to get there, how to find them.  You have no strength to believe, no faith to receive what God has promised you.  You don't want much from God, just a measure of reprieve, some sense that what you once felt and believed is true, that God's promises remain in spite of what you've done or how you've failed, and notwithstanding what someone else has done to you.

At his lowest point, Tim Montgomery began to delve into God's Word.  There, he found words that exposed his hopeless dilemma with brilliant light.  Those words were not dead, nor were they coded.  They were alive, living words that interpreted his life and situation.  When he opened the Word, he encountered more than wise sayings; he encountered a Person - a living God, holding conversation.  And when Tim chose to listen to His words, to follow them, to bury them in his heart, the miraculous unfolded in his life.

During Tim's prison years, the Word began to transform him.  It struck the distant wastelands of his past, digging up promises from that past.  Returning from the land of the dead were lost and buried dreams.  At the most improbable time, the mother of Tim's oldest child reentered his life.  God had burdened Jamalee's heart for the man she once loved, while he was locked up.  "I just knew the heart of this man, who he was inside.  He was not the man who had made the horrible public mistakes.  He was a good man, misguided; a man with so much potential to do good."

Jamalee was determined to help Tim become the man God had designed him to be.  She committed herself to that task.  A year and a half later, Jamalee and Tim were married at the prison, as God's plan of redemption pushed forward.  Ten years after they first met, Tim was finally becoming the family man Jamalee had always known he could be.

Next on God's road of redemption came the reduction of Tim's cumulative prison sentence of 106 months.  Forty-nine months after entering prison, Tim was released.  Again, the Word worked in mysterious ways, causing the unthinkable to unfold, as Tim walked out of prison a free man four years ahead of schedule.

And then came the restoration of his calling.  Ultimately, every person has a call on his or her life.  God births desires in every heart.  He imparts gifts and talents.  The coupling of those talents with our desires formulates into some sense of calling, something we feel inspired to do with our lives.  Often, when we fail to fulfill our calling, we feel disjointed, and experience discontentment.  Life becomes blasé, barren, if you will.  When we engage our calling, pursue that sense of purpose with passion, we are happier and more content.

In prison, Tim ingrained himself in the Word, and the hunger for his calling returned.  His world-class athletic ability was not a gift or talent to be wasted.  It was to be used to help others.  So, he started right there, in the wilderness, training other inmates, working with them on the weight pile, designing custom programs to help better their lives.  He created diet and fitness plans for the guards.  And as he spent the hours in prison pursuing his calling, God birthed a business idea to further that calling upon release - NUMA Speed.

NUMA stands for Never Underestimate My Ability.  The company focuses on coaching athletes across all ages and disciplines.  The confidence Tim lacked in himself to break the world record without performance-enhancing drugs is what he tries to instill in each athlete he coaches.  After less than a year, he has eighty clients.

To those closest to Tim Montgomery, the change in his personhood is obvious.  The rock-star lifestyle is gone.  His disgraceful fall and prison experience have brought him closer to his family.  The Montgomery whom Jamalee knew previously, would have preferred to go out partying.  Now he opts to take his kids to Starbucks or visit the father of a client in the hospital.  "There's nothing else I want," he says.  "I had everything else - fast cars, money, clothes, jewelry, traveled the world.  And I still ended up at the bottom."

At the core of God's heart lies redemption.  Stories similar to Tim Montgomery's tale of redemption fill the Bible's pages.  God's ultimate act, the death and resurrection of His Son, was one of redemption – not only a redemptive act to secure one's eternity, but also an act to redeem one's life from the tentacles of failure, setback, and disappointment.  Never underestimate what God can do.  No failure is too great and no problem too big.  According to God's spoken Word, nothing in your life is irredeemable.  Embrace His promises and watch the powerful work of redemption unfold in your world.

Arab Portraits

Arab Portraits

In 1991, I spent several days in Beirut, Lebanon. It was ill advised for American citizens to set foot in the war-ravished nation at the time, and illegal to do so from the standpoint of the American government. The illegality was partially a result of numerous acts of terror inflicted on American personnel in the mid-eighties, particularly the Embassy bombing that killed 63 and the Marine barracks bombing that killed 241 American soldiers. The latter caused the Reagan administration to withdraw all U.S. forces from Lebanon.

During my days in Beirut, I encountered a city and people that undermined depictions portrayed in the Western media. When I journeyed beyond the bombed out city into greater Lebanon, I experienced the same. But for a few billboards flashing anti-American sentiment, the supposed hatred of Americans was unseen in the areas of the country in which I traveled. No one was burning American flags or chanting "death to America." I never once heard the term "The Great Satan" in reference to me as an American or the United States in general.

On one trek, I crossed the mountains of Lebanon and entered the Bekaa Valley, traveling as far north as the city of Baalbek, a known Hezbollah stronghold. Though I attracted cross looks and drew curious stares, never once was I threatened or made to feel unwelcome by the general populace. Most of what I encountered contradicted the images being transmitted across Western airwaves, depicting an illiterate people blinded by hatred and powered by religious fanaticism. In fact, once I chose to look beneath the muddled exterior and beyond prejudice, I stumbled upon portraits of life that undermined the media's representation of the Arab people as a whole.

With my arrival in Beirut, I was consciously aware that certain hostile viewpoints did exist, and those beliefs could activate at anytime during my stay in Lebanon. Attentively, I took in my surroundings when I'd venture out to experience the Lebanese culture, feeling some urgency to safeguard myself from potential danger that might be lurking in the shadows. In hindsight, I recognize such caution was more a result of flawed preconceptions created by the nonsensical rhetoric of the Western media, forming some images in my mind of the Arab world that were anything but true.

Throughout my time in Lebanon, I met no one who openly spoke hostile words in my presence. Though I found myself in one chilling situation where the stakes were high, it was an isolated incident, materializing as a result of my ignorant curiosity, and not because someone targeted my nationality or ethnicity.

While in Lebanon, militant Islamic groups were still holding U.S. citizens as hostages. This included the journalist Terry Anderson whom I've written about previously. His seven-year ordeal in Lebanon was both a riveting and harrowing tale of survival. And this crisis was always at the forefront of my thoughts, further fostering my early prejudgments.

My first night in Beirut, I was greeted by a power outage, something one might expect in a country emerging from the throes of a seventeen-year civil war.  Minutes later, an explosion rocked the city. My sparse hotel shook violently in the wake of the blast. Once the building stabilized, I darted to the window and peered outside. In the moonlight, an ominous funnel of thick smoke mushroomed skyward. Some radical group had blown up the clock tower of the American University just down the hill from my quarters. The explosion solidified every preconceived notion I held about Beirut and the Arab world, which grew in measure the first half of the following day.

I woke up early the next morning, and soon was moving around the city. Near the university, military personnel had cordoned off the area. Of what military group, I was uncertain. Throughout Beirut, checkpoints were set up and manned by various groups brandishing weapons. Some of these factions were the official Lebanese Army, others a hodgepodge of militant Islamic groups, yet others various factions of the Christian militia.  Neighborhood bands of unaffiliated armed men also manned inspection points, as did foreign troops such as the Syrian army.  All of this was a result of wobbly peace accords set into motion and the ever-present sectarian tensions between rival Sunni and Shiite factions, along with the encroaching presence of Hezbollah (Party of God), the Shiite political movement and terrorist group backed by Iran.

By noon, I had crossed more than a half-dozen checkpoints. Initially, this was intimidating, reinforcing my preconceptions of the Arab world. But by midday, I had grown accustomed to the blockades and was able to occupy myself with the task of uncovering Beirut. And what I discovered was enlightening.

On the surface, I found chaos and destruction, and a physically obliterated Beirut. Hamra Street, often labeled the Champs-Elysees of the Arab world, was anything but a romantic boulevard lined with blossom trees, outdoor cafes, and trendy shops. Every building had suffered damage. Embankments of rubble replaced the dreamy ambience of decor, eradicating most signs of life. Yet, amidst such desolation, I witnessed a stunning gesture of kindness from a woman who went out of her way to approach me, directing me away from impending trouble looming nearby. Such acts of kindness became the norm, leading me to discover a resilient and beautiful people.

At dusk, I stood on the Corniche, the famed roadway running alongside the sapphire waters of the Mediterranean. The panoramic view was spectacular, the great sea stretching endlessly west, the mountains of Lebanon jutting skyward to the east, cradling the city in an ostensive nest. As the auburn hues of the setting sun washed over the city and the last hints of pink fell from the sky, I immediately understood why Beirut was called the Paris of the Middle East. Even in war, Beirut was spectacularly stunning.

Aside from Beirut's natural beauty, I found a deeper beauty in the Lebanese people. In the midst of great uncertainty, and in a time of death and loss and suffering, I found a people who defied every impression conveyed about them in the Western media. I did not find hatred or religious fanaticism; I found elevated levels of compassion, love, and kindness.

Often, certain areas of the world look like they're on fire with malevolence and hatred when you watch the news. You see isolated images of people shaking their fists, committing certain acts, and a long-lasting opinion frames itself in your subconscious. Soon your view of others, people you've never met, is skewed by prejudice. Preconceptions develop, causing judgments to be cast without ever knowing a person or a story or a place.

In my travels throughout the Middle East, I've always found the Arab people to be lively, passionate, benevolent, sympathetic, and kindhearted, similar to any other people group on this planet, and not unlike most Americans. Beyond the obvious cultural differences, lay dreams, hopes, and desires congruent with our view of the world. The great majority of Arab men and women work hard to make a better life for themselves and their families. They hope to live in peace and security, to find their lives in the folds of blessing. They love their children and grandchildren as much as you and I. At a heart level, they're no different from any Westerner.

Arab people have extended grace to me in a plethora of circumstances in more than two decades of traipsing the globe. To this day, I carry fond memories of such encounters – a cab driver in Palestine, a hotelier in Cairo, a flight attendant in Amman, a restaurant owner in Beirut.  Concerning the latter, the man’s restaurant was blown up and his livelihood destroyed, yet his disposition on life remained intact as he said, "It's okay, it's just material loss. I still have the most important treasure ... my family. I will not hate those who did this to me because if you love more, you win."

It's unfortunate that images in the media shape and mold our Western viewpoint of other people groups and in no uncertain manner, paint Middle Easterners, specifically those of Arab descent, in the darkest light, colored by extreme prejudice and bigotry. This kind of targeted discrimination has created some of the greatest atrocities and injustices by leaders and governments worldwide, including our own.

One does not need to travel far to revisit the days of Stalin or Hitler or Mao. Following the horrific events of 9/11, our own government embarked on a witch hunt, profiling and targeting Arab citizens, looking to atone for the massive breakdown and failure of our billion dollar intelligence agencies. To this day, Guantanamo houses men who've never been charged with a crime. Over half of the 166 prisoners at the detention center are unindicted. Most have been held captive for more than a decade, unable to have contact with their wives and children. Recently, certain John Grisham books were banned from the prison, rejected because "their legal content is problematic."

A Defense Department spokesman said the following when asked for explanation of the Grisham ban: "We will continue to provide them with appropriate reading materials based on what we believe is consistent with our responsibility to maintain good order and humane treatment. The detainees in our charge are humanely treated with multiple outlets for enrichment." Grisham retorted, "My knee-jerk reaction, in response to their humaneness, is to ask where does waterboarding fit in? Gitmo is a sad perversion of American justice."

I ask two deeper questions: What kind of "humaneness" and "enrichment" is found when you've separated men from their wives and children illegally? If you cannot charge a man with a crime, what's "humane" about holding him captive because of his ethnicity?

In closing, I'd like to address one last portrait of the Arab world, the chemical weapons attacks in Syria.  I can't comprehend how one can view images of innocent women and children gasping for air, dying as their respiratory systems shut down due to sarin gas, and not be resolute to do whatever it takes to prevent such further atrocities.  To dismiss these horrifying acts simply because they involve people of a foreign land is inhumane.  If the nations of the world had taken such a stance during the last century when Hitler was gassing Jews, Poles, Czechs, Slavs, Hungarians, Romanians, along with Christians, people of The Resistance, and other ethnic and religious groups, the world would look much different today. Absent intervention, the death toll of the Holocaust would have far exceeded the eleven million now known.  May we remind ourselves of a chilling truth: Neutrality pledges silent allegiance to the perpetrators of such acts.