|
 Josh Hamilton's future was clouded with trouble until his wife, a guy named Roy Silver, and voices of truth intervened to give him hope.
by ken snyder
"But the voice of truth tells me a different story...."
THE VOICE OF TRUTH,"
a song by the Christian group Casting Crowns, is what you'll hear when you call the cell phone of Katie Hamilton, wife of Josh Hamilton, who spent his rookie season with the Cincinnati Reds in 2007.
The Voice of Truth is also, in a literal and spiritual sense, what Josh had to listen to before he could put behind him a life-threatening and typically debilitating addiction to crack cocaine. It was that Voice of Truth that enabled him to crack the Reds' starting lineup as their centerfielder.
Hamilton's struggle and eventual return to baseball was one of the top sports stories of 2007.
He went from No. 1 pick overall in the 1999 major league draft to addiction and being entirely out of baseball for 3 years. In 2007, drug-free and restored spiritually and physically, he surprised everyone with his return to the game at its highest level.
The song tells the story of Peter's walking on water and David's defeating of Goliath after they heard the Voice of Truth. Josh Hamilton's miracle was hitting 19 home runs in just 298 at-bats in his debut season after what he had to overcome.
This miraculous journey is, as much as anything, a story of family and faith.
"They keep on telling me time and time again, 'Boy, you'll never win.'"
NOT TWICE OR THREE TIMES but eight times Josh Hamilton went to drug rehabilitation --and not once did his trips lead to recovery. Talk about "You'll never win!"
With no place to go and a court order preventing him from going to his own home where his wife Katie, along with his daughter and stepdaughter lived, he arrived on the doorstep of his grandmother, Mary Holt, at 2 a.m. after a drug binge. He had lost one-fourth of his weight from a 6'4" frame that today carries muscled, can't-pinch-an-inch 240 pounds.
"I had nowhere else to go," says Hamilton, "but something clicked in my head. My grandmother had always told me I could come to her for any reason, at any time."
Hamilton had grown up a baseball's throw from a classic "praying grandma."
"As long as I can remember, my grandmother was always at church when she wasn't working," he says. "She also never missed any of my games--any sporting event growing up, never missed one."
How the home of a grandmother could provide refuge and produce recovery that eight stints in rehab couldn't is a mystery known only to God. But it wasn't the only miracle that brought Josh to where he is now, poised to roam the outfield this season for the Texas Rangers, to whom the Reds traded him in the offseason. . . .
|
