An All-Pro Quarterback Who Walks by Faith
Feb 02, 2020When was the last time you were going along, minding your own business, and in a moment everything changed?
All-Pro quarterback Drew Brees grew up attending his local church with his family. He says he’d go to Sunday School with his friends, and then go into big church and fight with his brother the entire time, not paying attention to what was going on in the service.
In Drew’s junior year of High School football, in the second to the last game of the season, in the playoffs, he suffered a torn ACL in his knee. This was during a time he was supposed to be being recruited. He had to wait for a month for the MCL to heal before they could operate on the ACL. He’d seen friends suffer that injury, and if they came back they were never the same.
He started thinking about what had been his life until that point could be over.
He sat in church on his 17th birthday, in that same pew where he and his brother used to goof around and never pay attention; and for some reason that day was different.
That day Drew was locked in on the pastor as he was saying how the Lord was looking for a few good men to advance His kingdom, to spread his word, and to live the life God had planned for them.
At that moment Drew surrendered His life to Christ and realized God had a bigger plan for him than just sports.
Going into his 5th season in the NFL, Drew didn’t have a contract. He was going to be a free agent. He got hurt the very last game of the 2005 season with the San Diego Chargers. He’d never dislocated anything before, but he knew immediately what had happened. Drew said except for maybe a spinal injury, the dislocation of a shoulder is the worst injury for a quarterback.
As he walked off the field, holding his elbow up, he thought, “I’m probably never going to put on a Chargers’ uniform again.” Then he thought, “I may not ever play football again.”
A few short months later Drew and his wife made a trip to New Orleans. It was 6 months post Hurricane Katrina, and they looked at the sheer devastation. He thought to himself, “I’m not going to trust what I’m seeing with my eyes because my eyes are telling me not to come here.”
And yet the Lord was telling him, “This is your calling.” It’s not about just coming to play football and be a part of a resurgence of a football team. It’s about the resurrection and rebirth of a city, and they could be a part of that.
So trusting God beyond what their eyes could see, Brittany and Drew moved to New Orleans in 2006.
Four years later Drew led the Saints to their first ever Super Bowl victory.
They were up on the Colts by 14 with 3 minutes left, but he knew Payton Manning and what they could do, so he just did what he had to do to finish. They got the ball back, and he basically just had to take a knee to win the game; and the Saints were
World Champs.
Mickey Loomis, General Manager for the New Orleans Saints called Drew Brees “The perfect person for an imperfect situation.”
Drew says, “We want to see and touch and feel something to know it’s real for us, and yet 2 Corinthians 5:7 says we walk by faith and not by sight.
God has a plan; and at times you’re not going to understand it, and you’re not going to see it, but you have to trust Him. You have to have faith.
“For we walk by faith; not by sight.”
Here it is on a number sticker: “The most unlikely situations help us see what’s happening through eyes of faith.”
