Integrating Missionally

Over at ESPN.com

Here’s an excerpt:

But because so many (maybe millions) are watching, Dungy believes — just as he told Brackett — that God has placed him in this position not for him and his family to suffer but so they can be an example to others, a testimony.

“Our God is bigger than our pain,” Dilfer says.

Dungy saw the evidence of that the day after James’ funeral, when a man approached Dungy to tell him that he’d heard him in the eulogy talk of men striving to be better fathers and role models and of parents not taking their children for granted. The man also said that he’d been inspired to take the day off from work and spend it with his son. Dungy’s seen it in the thousands of letters his family has received, citing one in particular: A girl wrote to tell him that because of what she saw and heard during James’ funeral at the Idlewild Baptist Church in Tampa that she’d come to know God and had been baptized there.

Dungy could see God at work in the letter informing the family that two people can literally see now because they received James’ donated corneas. In January, Dungy managed to pen an encouraging letter to Rhonda Brown, wife of former NFL defensive back Dave Brown, after her husband died at age 52 of a heart attack while playing basketball.

“I [wrote], ‘I don’t know exactly what you’re feeling but I know that the Lord can get you through it.’ That’s the encouraging thing, that I can say to people now, that you’ll make it,” Dungy says.

Day by day, blessing by blessing, Dungy can make more sense of something that seemed so senseless just seven months ago. According to Lutz, Fla., police, James’ girlfriend, Antoinette Anderson, said she’d discovered James’ body and that the 6-foot-7 Dungy, who was attending Hillsborough Community College, had hanged himself from a ceiling fan using a leather belt. James would have turned 19 on Jan. 6.

Listening to Dungy put it into perspective, it’s easy to understand how he’s taken his many difficult professional losses in stride. The man is simply unwavering in his beliefs. He can be calm in even the worst storms. Nothing, it seems, can shake him from his foundation.

“The Lord has a plan,” Dungy says. “We always think the plans are A, B, C and D, and everything is going to be perfect for us and it may not be that way, but it’s still his plan. A lot of tremendous things are going to happen, it just may not be the way you see them.

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