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.