Blessed is the one who perseveres under trial because, having stood the test, that person will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love him.
—James 1:12
NFL players appear to be living the perfect life: money, celebrity, and a public that worships them. As we’ve seen in earlier chapters, the reality is much different from the images we see on television and in glossy magazines. All the money and fame doesn’t protect them from the same painful life experiences that ordinary folks endure every day. No one knows that better than New York Jets running back LaDainian Tomlinson or former Baltimore Ravens quarterback Trent Dilfer. Both were voted to the Pro Bowl. Dilfer won a Super Bowl title with the Ravens. And Tomlinson is a lock to be enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame once his career ends.
What these world-class athletes have in common is that each was brought to his knees by sickness and death, and in their worst moments, neither turned to the NFL commissioner or their adoring fans for salvation. In their very darkest hours—alone, weeping, and scared—they each in turn looked to the heavens and begged for God’s mercy and understanding.
While neither of these men fully understands why they had to suffer, perhaps it was in part so that the rest of us could learn from the experience.
UNDERSTANDING GOD’S PAIN
Trent Dilfer had taken his family to Disneyland for a short vacation with Mickey and Minnie in the spring of 2003 when his five-year-old son, Trevin, caught a virus and became feverish. After a doctor diagnosed him with asthma and bronchitis, Dilfer, who quarterbacked the Baltimore Ravens to a 34–7 victory over the New York Giants in the 2001 Super Bowl, packed up his family and returned home.
Trevin was fine on the trip back, but the next day he was struggling to speak. While Trent was out with his daughters— Madeleine, Victoria, and Delaney—his wife, Cass, took Trevin to the emergency room.
The doctors said it could be hepatitis and sent him to a local children’s hospital for observation. On the way there, his heart stopped in the ambulance. The medical crew revived him, but it stopped again at the hospital. When Dilfer arrived at his son’s room, the little boy was surrounded by male nurses, his chest was cut open, and a doctor was manually pumping his little heart.
Doctors told Trent and Cass that Trevin had caught a rare virus; their son’s heart was failing, and there wasn’t anything medically they could do about it. That’s when the seriousness of what was happening hit them like a thunderbolt.
“You don’t really know how to handle it,” Dilfer says. “Everything is a blur. It happens, and you follow what the doctors tell you. You pray. They are telling you that your son is really sick and he might die. But we were just at Disneyland. The kids were happy. You look around trying to sort it all out. There was a lawn chair in the emergency room. I don’t know why. The doctors are telling us there is nothing they can do. He’s not going to make it? What?”
The doctors put Trevin on a heart-lung bypass machine to keep him alive. It was a short-term fix. They needed to get him to the hospital at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, but the medical equipment was sensitive and the tubes and wires connected to Trevin’s chest could slip off at any time. They needed a medical helicopter to fly him to the hospital, but the US was in the middle of the Iraq War and all the helicopters were overseas with the troops.
The doctors decided they were out of options; they’d have to put Trevin in an ambulance and drive him to Stanford. The doctors warned Trent and Cass that they had never used the unit in an ambulance before and it wasn’t a great idea. It was a miracle their son had gotten this far, and it would probably take another one for him to get to the hospital alive. Any bump in the road, a hard stop, anything, and the unit could detach and Trevin would die in the ambulance.
The Dilfers followed behind in a separate car driven by Trent’s friend Brad Bell. For three and a half hours, they drove with lights flashing, sirens blaring. The whole way, they watched the back of the ambulance for bodies to suddenly begin moving frantically inside.
“It was a numb, surreal feeling,” Dilfer says. “We prayed the whole time.”
When they pulled up in front of the hospital, there was a tremendous sense of relief. They had made it and were hoping the new doctors could figure something out. Instead, they told Dilfer that the machine was so fragile, they weren’t sure Trevin would survive until they got him to his room a few flights up in an elevator. Even then, they’d have to put a new machine on him. Each step was life-threatening, they warned.
“It was a series of five nail-biting moments that he had to survive, and we made it through each one of them,” Dilfer shares. “It had been like this for twelve or fourteen consecutive hours. I remember just falling to my knees and saying, ‘Lord, I can’t hold on to this. You already got him farther than we thought You’d get him. He is completely in Your hands; there is nothing we can do. Prepare me for whatever is coming.’”
REBELLION
Dilfer came from a broken home in Santa Cruz, California. Though he went to church and accepted Christ at ten, there was a lot of residual pain from his parents’ breakup. By his junior year in high school, Dilfer, an A student who starred in football, baseball, and basketball, began to rebel. He was so successful that his drinking and partying went largely unnoticed or were overlooked by coaches, teachers, and family members; everyone was so thrilled when he was offered a scholarship to play football at Fresno State.
College doesn’t usually have the effect of lessoning a kid’s desire to party or his access to drugs, alcohol, or women. They are aplenty and, to well-known athletes, usually free.
Dilfer’s partying increased when he tore a muscle in his arm his freshman year and was redshirted—meaning he couldn’t play, but that the year didn’t count against his four years of eligibility. He was under the radar and making all the wrong sorts of friends.
The following season, Dilfer was healthy again and earned the starting job at Fresno State. He really lived the life of the big man on campus. The team’s winning record coupled with his good grades covered up the fact that he was out of control. He was drinking, womanizing, getting in fights; he wasn’t in a good place.
“At that time in my life, it was all about me, me, me,” Dilfer admits. “But I still had that craving for something better and an emptiness in my soul.”
Trent would feel occasional guilt over his behavior and would drop by the Evangelical Free Church on campus from time to time. That’s where he met Joe Broussard, the Fresno State athletic department’s team chaplain and the college director of the Evangelical Free Church.
The summer after Trent’s redshirt freshman year, Broussard, who would later preside over Trent and Cass’s wedding, stopped by Trent’s apartment to ask if he would work as a counselor at a camp run by the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.
“He took a risk, because while I was expressing my faith, I was still unsure about it. He knew what was going on in my life. He took the risk of having me go down there as a counselor when I should have probably been a camper,” Dilfer says.
The counselors met about two days before the campers arrived, and Trent found himself hanging out with other students who were “living authentic lives for God, and I was so turned on by it, just the wholeness they had in their lives. It’s what I was missing.”
That’s when Dilfer says he made the decision to get serious about his faith. When he returned from camp, he felt changed and wanted to be around like-minded individuals. One who came to mind was a pretty classmate named Cassandra Franzman, the captain of the swim team. He’d first noticed her when they had a class together and the professor was attacking Christianity pretty hard. Cassandra took on the professor, standing up for her faith. It got Trent’s attention. They’d dated once, but she thought he was a goofball and he could only muster a friendship after that. She knew what Trent was up to off the field and had wisely kept him at arm’s length. So after attending the camp, Trent went to her and said he was trying to clean up his life and didn’t want to hang out with the same people anymore. He needed a friend.
She didn’t buy it at first. But in a short time, she saw that he was genuinely trying to change his life. This version of Dilfer was a pretty good guy. The two started hanging out, sharing their ideas about life and faith, and she eventually broke up with her boyfriend to be with Trent. Six months later they were engaged, and five months after that they were married. He was twenty-one.
Dilfer declared for the NFL draft after his redshirt junior season and was selected by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers with the sixth overall pick in 1994. He held out in a contract dispute and played poorly his rookie season, starting just two games and passing for one touchdown and six interceptions.
He got better and in 1997 became the first Bucs quarterback to be voted to the Pro Bowl after passing for 2,555 yards, throwing 21 TDs, and leading the team to its first play-off game in fifteen seasons. Dilfer broke his collarbone in November 1999, and backup Shaun King led the team to four wins in its final five games and took the team to the NFC championship where it lost 11–6 to St. Louis. After the season, the team declined to pick up Dilfer’s option.
He signed a free agent contract with the Baltimore Ravens, which turned out to be one of the best moves of his career.
The Ravens had the league’s best defense, holding opponents to an NFL-record 165 points behind stars like linebacker Ray Lewis, defensive end Michael McCrary, and safety Rod Woodson. When Baltimore won the Super Bowl that season, Dilfer—who completed 12 of 25 passes for 153 yards and one touchdown in the championship—didn’t get any credit for the win. The defense tied a Super Bowl record with four interceptions, and Ray Lewis was named the game’s Most Valuable Player. Two months after the season ended, the Ravens decided against keeping Dilfer as their quarterback and signed free agent Elvis Grbac to a five-year contract. It was embarrassing and shocking and still pains Dilfer to this day.
He signed a free agent contract with the Seattle Seahawks in 2001 and went 4-0 after starter Matt Hasselbeck was injured. Coach Mike Holmgren was so impressed that he named Dilfer the starter the following season and signed him to a four-year contract.
The Seahawks were on the rise and this was supposed to be Dilfer’s big break, but he sprained his knee in the preseason opener and was lost for the year after tearing his right Achilles tendon in Week 7. That’s all it would take for Hasselbeck to reclaim the starting job. Dilfer would later ask for a trade and join the Cleveland Browns in 2005. That same season, Hasselbeck guided the Seahawks to their first Super Bowl in franchise history.
A SENSE OF PEACE
Trevin was Dilfer’s only son, the only other man in a house full of women. He loved to hang out with his daddy in the locker room and often challenged Trent’s teammates to footraces. He had blond hair and was all of about fifty pounds when the virus felled him. The surprise, doctors later told Dilfer, was that it went to his heart. That’s not common.
Trevin was in pain and was kept sedated while in the hospital. Doctors said he needed a heart transplant, but to get on the list he had to prove he had brain activity. They reduced the sedative so he could feel.
“I knew he could hear us. His eyes would flicker. He could grip a little bit, like the slightest touch in his fingertips, but he was in a ton of pain when he did it so we only allowed it to happen one time,” Dilfer said.
They put him on the list for a heart donation.
For the next twenty-five days, friends and family would visit to support Trent and Cass and to pray over their little boy. Any sort of infection would reduce the chances of a successful transplant and would kick Trevin off the donor list. Every day that passed had its worries, and of course, though no one wanted to think about it, everyone was waiting for some other family to suffer the most horrific event of their lives so Trevin could get a heart.
Trent and Cass would stand at the end of their little boy’s bed and rub his feet. Trevin’s sisters, who were staying with their grandparents, talked into a tape recorder so he could hear their voices and know that his sisters loved him and that they weren’t far away.
Then, they sat and waited.
While Cass could patiently sit in the room for hours, Trent had a hard time with it and would go to the hospital’s rooftop garden or to the chapel for prayer.
Dilfer had made millions of dollars. He’d been to the summit of the game he loved. Was God saying, “Wait a minute. Not so fast”? Dilfer says he never went there. He’d recommitted to Christ in college; he’d repented and never looked back.
When Trent and Cass returned from Easter services, there were doctors from the intensive care and cardiac units in Trevin’s room. It was bad news. He had a systemic infection and probably had only a few more days to live.
On April 24, Trent told Cass he’d sit with Trevin so she could spend her birthday with the girls. For Trent, it was time to be alone with Trevin and to say his good-byes. He sat next to the bed and, through periods of heavy sobbing, composed a two-page letter to his baby boy.
Of all the memories Dilfer has of Trevin’s sickness, this is the one that still makes him cry when he speaks of it. It was the most intense, emotional period he ever experienced.
“I woke up early that morning and spent a lot of time in solitude, pouring out my heart to God,” he remembers. “I prayed with Trevin. I talked to him and told him how much he meant to me and how much I loved him.”
Up to that point, Dilfer says, he had dealt with a lot of his own pain, but he had never confronted his wife’s pain or his family’s pain. They were all suffering, but he’d been doing everything he could to keep it together. He needed a clear head to make decisions about his son’s medical care. He had to compartmentalize his feelings so he could be strong for his wife and daughters and allow them to experience their own pain. This required him to keep some emotional distance from the events surrounding him.
But on this day, it all came crashing down. And what Dilfer remembers the most, and the reason he believes he still gets so emotional, is that for the first time in his life he had an inkling of what God must have felt when He watched the life drain slowly from His Son suffering on that cross.
“It was in those moments that He revealed to me His pain for mankind,” Dilfer says. “It is so much more painful to hurt for others than to hurt for yourself. That was the day that I allowed the pain of my wife and my girls and Trevin to hit me. God painted this incredible picture through this experience of His pain for us. Of His sacrifice for us. And it was so intense and so life changing. God allowed me the experience of not just knowing my own pain, but the pain of the ones I love the most.”
In those final days, Steve Stenstrom, a former NFL quarterback who runs a campus ministry at Stanford, put Trent and Cass in touch with a man who had lost his daughter a year earlier. He gave the Dilfers a piece of advice that they have followed ever since.
“He told us, ‘The same spirit that lives in you, Trent, and in you, Cass, is not divided. There is no conflict in the Holy Spirit. So when you are asking for peace on a decision, it’s not the right decision until you both have the same peace.’
“It’s so simple, but it’s so enlightening,” Dilfer says. “That was the day I developed a peace and decided it was the right thing for Trevin to turn off his life support.” Doctors had said that Trevin could live another two weeks at most, but that he’d be in pain until the very end.
“[Cass] was like, ‘No, no, no, we’re going to keep fighting.’ And I was wise enough to realize my decision was not the right decision because we were not unified. So we kept praying together for unity.”
A day passed, and they were still holding vigil at Trevin’s side, waiting and praying, when Cass went into a back room the hospital furnished with bunks and other items.
She had been gone for a bit when suddenly Trent heard terrible groans, followed by screams and shouts coming from inside the room. He grew concerned and ran to the door where he heard furniture being moved and objects thumping on the floor.
She was in the room by herself, but she wasn’t alone. The heavenly Father she’d loved and trusted all her life had come to wrench her son from her arms, and she wasn’t about to let go without a screaming, clawing, knockdown fight.
“I was scared,” Trent admits in a tired, emotionless voice. “I had never heard this from my wife. It was so painful to hear her wrestling with God.”
The room quieted. Cass was drained.
“She came out with a peace of ‘OK, it’s good now.’ And it was at that time, after she had dealt with God on a personal level, that it unified our hearts that this was the right thing to do.”
The morning of April 27, Trent and Cass took the girls to the garden on the roof of the hospital and told them they were going to let Trevin go home to God.
The oldest, Maddie, screamed and told her parents they were ruining her life. Once things settled down, the family went back down to Trevin’s room and played his favorite song for him. It’s called “One of These Days” by FFH and is about dying and going to heaven.
There were four people in the room: Trent, Cass, Trevin, and a nurse. Trent turned off the machine. And Trevin passed away quietly. From the time he got feverish to the day he died, it was forty days.
“I never asked why,” says Dilfer. “I’ve never been obsessed with what it was or why it happened.”
Dilfer believes that God is loving and merciful and that there must have been something at play that he couldn’t comprehend.
Who could comprehend good coming out of so much suffering?
Forty days of praying. Forty days of hoping God would save his son. Forty days of offering his own life in exchange for an innocent little boy who never had a chance to see all the joy and wonder life on earth offers. For nothing.
It begs the question: Why pray if in your greatest hour of need, God is not there for you? It’s a fair question.
“The truth of God’s Word is that this is not our home,” Dilfer painfully acknowledges. “If the motivation for your faith is what’s going on in the seventy-five or ninety years we have here on earth, then you are missing the truth of God’s promises. What God promises is eternity. This is not our home. When we make the decision to trust in Him and to follow Him, our home is with Him for eternity.”
Dilfer says that when Trevin died, he experienced a peace that is hard to describe. He understands the skeptics will have a field day with that statement, but he’s OK with that. He doesn’t get upset by those who question him because he understands that unless you live it, it’s difficult to grasp. How can a man who just lost his beloved son feel peace?
“There is a Bible verse that’s resonated with me from the time this happened and every day since in my struggles,” Dilfer shares. “‘And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus’[Philippians 4:7].
“I will stand on the rooftops and scream out that, yes, I lost my five-year-old son, my only son. I faced life’s greatest tragedy. But without a shadow of a doubt, I have experienced that promise of a peace that transcends understanding. I can’t always articulate it. I can’t explain it. I can’t fathom it at times.
“I can’t fathom that as we turned life support off and I saw devastation in my wife and felt it myself, at the same exact moment we had this incredible peace of what was happening and we continued to have a peace and my daughters who live faithful lives have a peace. I don’t know how else to say it. Is it a supernatural occurrence when the Holy Spirit of God lives in you and you choose to be obedient to Him? People say that makes no sense. That it’s crazy. And I get it. I get their skepticism. I’ve experienced a supernatural occurrence in my life, and it’s inexplicable.”
THE LESSON
It’s been nine years since Trevin’s death. He’d be nearly fifteen now and probably following in his daddy’s footsteps playing football in the Stanford area. Instead, Trent and Cass are following Maddie, who has become quite a volleyball player and is being scouted by Division 1 programs.
The family speaks of Trevin more easily now. Something will happen around the house, and Trent or Cass will say, “Remember the time Trevin . . .” without getting teary-eyed. The girls have come to terms with their brother’s death, too, and are maturing into beautiful, smart young ladies who are living their own lives with their own hopes and dreams for the future.
Their recovery from Trevin’s death took time, though. “When my kids get sick, it is horrific,” Dilfer says. The family moved just outside Palo Alto a few years ago. “We live twenty minutes from where Trevin died. We’ve been back to the hospital twice. When [Delaney] was four or five, she had to have her gallbladder taken out. The room was directly above the room Trevin died in. We had to walk the halls for five days while she had the gallbladder taken out, and there were complications with the anesthesia. I mean, revisiting that, to go there for doctors’ appointments with my kids at the same hospital. To see the nurses. We are confronted with this all the time. I still fight a lot of this stuff, but what God impresses on my heart is, Why don’t you get it? It’s so much bigger than the present stuff you are dealing with.”
When Trevin died, he was five and a half, and his youngest sister Delaney was one. He had been a little rough around the edges at first, but after she was born he “softened up like a cupcake,” says his father. Overnight, she was the greatest thing that ever happened in his life. He’d become someone’s big brother after all, and that’s quite a responsibility.
What’s weird, Trent says, is that Delaney is the spitting image of Trevin in every way.
“She looks like him, she’s built like him, she acts like him, she talks like him, her eyes are this grayish-blue, which are like his,” Trent reflects. “Every day we look at her, we see Trevin. It’s crazy. I appreciate God’s little nuisances and how He manifests Himself in a million different aspects of life.”
Dilfer, who now works as a football analyst for ESPN, says he’s had time to heal and gain perspective on Trevin’s life and all the lives his son touched.
“The takeaway for me is that so many things that we put a tremendous value on while we are here on earth pale in comparison to the eternal value of our souls,” Dilfer says. “Even—and this is the one people really freak out with—even our kids.
“You gotta let go because they are not ours. They are a gift, they are a responsibility, they are treasures, but we don’t own them. Ultimately God holds us in His hands, and He has ownership.
“The more I learn to let go of the things that are important to me in life, the more clearly I begin to understand how much God loves me and loves us and values our eternal state so much more than our present state.
“And yet, He still allows us great experiences while we are here. We should live life to the fullest. We shouldn’t live life indifferently. There is tremendous value in what we do with our time here. But it is all a backdrop to our eternal lives. I get it now. That is the wisdom that has come from all this.”
And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast. (1 Peter 5:10)
“I CAN’T FIND THE HEARTBEAT”
LaDainian and LaTorsha Tomlinson returned home after the 2005 Pro Bowl and went to the doctor for a checkup. LaTorsha was pregnant with the couple’s first child, a little girl they would name Mckiah Renee, and like all young couples, the Tomlinsons were overwhelmed with pride and excitement as they made plans to start their new family. With each visit to the doctor’s office, Mckiah would grow bigger, and they would marvel at the little miracle growing inside her mother’s tummy. Her birth was scheduled for May, just a few months after her father had one of the best seasons of his career, scoring a league-high 17 rushing touchdowns, finishing fifth in the league with 1,776 total yards from scrimmage, and earning his second Pro Bowl invitation. For the powerful running back with a 1,000-watt smile, life couldn’t have been any better. The good Lord seemed to give LaDainian two helpings of everything: good looks, athletic talent, money, a pretty wife, and now, a little girl to spoil into his old age.
That’s how the world saw it anyway.
God had something else in mind. The doctor’s visit that started ordinarily enough was about to change the Tomlinsons’ lives forever. The date was February 22, 2005.
“I remember the doctor saying, ‘Hmm, that’s weird. I can’t find the heartbeat,’” Tomlinson says. “He said, ‘Let me go get another doctor. Maybe I just can’t see it or something.’ So another doctor comes in. And he says he can’t find the heartbeat either. And then you start to sense that something really bad is happening.”
The couple rushed to the hospital where doctors again tried to find a heartbeat. God, please look out for our little girl, Tomlinson thought. But the baby’s fate had been sealed days or even weeks earlier.
“I never asked God why,” Tomlinson says. “My first thought was to make sure my wife got through this. I felt like I had to be really strong in front of her. And I tried to make some sense of it and see some positive. I don’t know how the thoughts came into my head. You just can’t believe what’s happening in that moment. I remember saying to her, ‘Everything happens for a reason, even if we can’t understand it now. God has a plan.’”
“She asked, ‘Why does this have to happen?’ . . . She said, ‘This is not fair.’” One can only imagine how confused they were. A couple in their midtwenties, riding on top of the world, faithful in their belief in God and His plan for their lives. . . . Did they do something wrong? Were they being punished? L.T. had made many right decisions in his life, worked so hard to be successful. He had always wanted to be a family man, always dreamed of kids, chose his wife in part because he thought she’d make a great mother. What happened? The last time the world saw L.T., he was racking up the yards and flashing that high-wattage smile—but that’s just entertainment. This was the real stuff. Just him, trying to console the woman he loved more than life itself, while fighting back his own grief and trying to stay strong for everyone else.
“I said [to LaTorsha], ‘What if I was to tell you our baby girl was to be born, and a year later, we’d lose her then? . . . What if she had something wrong with her like a disease that would give us challenges for the rest of our lives?’” He was trying to ease his wife’s pain by finding some good in a horrible, unexplainable event, the best he could. “That’s kind of how I started to deal with the fact that it wasn’t going to happen at that time,” he said. “We weren’t going to have a baby now. OK. But I always felt like it would happen for us, and we’d have children and a family.
“I cried when I was by myself. When I was driving, I shed tears. It was rough on me, too, but I leaned on what I always knew—my faith. That’s the foundation in my life. My faith tells me that everything happens for a reason and that God doesn’t make mistakes. It just wasn’t going to happen now.”
L.T. delayed his off-season workouts and spent time with his wife while she continued to grieve. Miscarriages occur in 15 to 20 percent of known pregnancies, according to the Mayo Clinic, but that’s little consolation to the families suffering through the loss.
When Tomlinson’s pain was at its worst, he found solace in the belief that God had a plan for his life and that’s what allowed him to move forward. Instead of dwelling on his daughter’s death, he decided to focus on the parts of his life that he could control.
As the 2005 season unfolded, LaDainian had a great purpose in his life. His goal was to be the best running back to ever play the game . . . and he and LaTorsha had privately decided to try and get pregnant again. Family meant everything to them, and LaDainian and LaTorsha were certain her miscarriage was just a horrible misfortune that would someday reveal a greater purpose. So they tried. And tried. And tried some more to make a baby . . . Nothing.
L.T. returned to football with a vengeance. In 2005, he rushed for 1,462 yards, set a team record with 20 touchdowns (third in the league), passed for 3 touchdowns, and was named to the Pro Bowl.
The 2006 season was even better and might well be remembered as the best of his career and perhaps one of the best years for any running back in NFL history.
Tomlinson rushed for 1,815 yards and set NFL single-season records for most rushing touchdowns (28) and most total touchdowns (31). He also set the NFL record for most points in a season (186), breaking Green Bay Packers great Paul Hornung’s forty-six-year-old mark (176), and he was named the NFL’s Most Valuable Player, beating out New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees and Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning, with forty-four of the fifty votes cast.
A FATHER’S PAIN, A SON’S ANGUISH, A FAMILY’S LOSS
Because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. (Romans 5:3–5)
L.T. grew up about twenty-five miles south of Waco, Texas, on a settlement known as Tomlinson Hill. His ancestors had worked there as slaves of a farmer named James K. Tomlinson. When President Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, the family kept the Tomlinson name and stayed on the hill to farm.
L.T.’s father, Oliver Tomlinson, had four boys when he married Loreane Lowe in 1973. LaDainian was born six years later. The family moved to Marlin, Texas, for better opportunities, but the couple eventually split. When one of L.T.’s older half brothers, Charles, was stabbed to death in a fight, Oliver was distraught with grief and left the family.
It was during this time that the Tomlinson boys found God. L.T. was sent to a Christian camp in Missouri during the summer. It was fun, L.T. says, and the principles of faith and Christianity began shaping his perspective on how to live his life. Upon returning to Marlin, the boys encouraged their mother to take them to church; and in due time, with God working in the quiet way He does, Loreane became a pastor with her own congregation.
L.T. enjoyed church, but didn’t get serious about Christ until his freshman year in high school at University High School in Waco. He had an older cousin, Ernest Lowe, who was a senior. And LaDainian idolized him. When Ernest was saved that year, it didn’t just change his life; it changed the life of his young admirer too. Marlin is a small town where boredom, booze, and girls usually resulted in trouble. But L.T. made a conscious decision not to pursue that life.
“What I leaned on was my sports,” Tomlinson says. “I’d say, ‘Well, Walter Payton or Emmitt Smith wouldn’t be out partying.’ In order for me to get where I wanted to go—college and then the NFL—I had to be different from a lot of what was around me. I had to stand out in a different way. And that helped me make good decisions.”
Tomlinson wasn’t a saint. He’s careful to mention that. He tried to do the right things, but as he got older and peer pressure increased, he would “backslide,” as his mother put it.
“When you are a kid, you are still learning and evolving as a human being and a man,” Tomlinson says. “But my foundation was always my belief in Christ and the teachings of the Bible, and that kept me out of a lot of trouble, especially when I saw my buddies selling drugs or going to jail or joining a gang. I stayed away from those things.
“There are consequences with every choice you make, to our society, but also to God. And He always knows what you are doing,” Tomlinson continues. “I remember my mom used to have us read the paper, and she’d point out where somebody our age was getting in trouble and she’d talk about choices and consequences. People my age going to jail; people being killed. And you started to think, I don’t want to be like that. I want to do something great with my life. I want to live like God wants me to live.”
L.T. met LaTorsha Oakley at a party at Texas Christian University in Waco, Texas. She was a Bill Gates Millennium Scholar and was attending on scholarship. Their first date was at a late-night IHOP near campus, where he spent most of the evening talking about his mother. They were married in 2003.
Faith and family mean so much to L.T. that he has reminders tattooed on his body. He has the initials LT on his right arm above an image of God’s hands in prayer. He has a University High School Bulldog on his chest. There is a large family tree on his back, and on his shoulder he has the words My Inspiration tattooed under a picture of his mother.1
LaDainian’s father, Oliver, returned home after nearly a decade, and the two reconciled. With the miscarriage of his daughter, LaDainian began to understand how his father must have been affected by the death of his son Charles years earlier, and the two began to get close. It was almost two years to the day of the doctor’s visit when L.T. learned his wife had miscarried, that he would be tested again.
On February 23, 2007, L.T.’s half brother, Ronald McClain, was driving their father back to Waco after a trip to the family home on Tomlinson Hill. A tire blew, the truck veered off the road, and Ronald overcorrected, flipping the truck and sending it into a ditch. Oliver, seventy-one, died immediately, and Ronald, forty-eight, died later that afternoon at Waco’s Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center.
Things just kept piling up for Tomlinson, a man whom God had given all the blessings of wealth and fame and who appeared to be living the dream life. He’d lost a grandmother in 2004 and an aunt in 2005, LaTorsha had the miscarriage in 2005, and now Oliver and Ronald had died in the truck accident.
“When I lost my father, I was shaken up a bit because we had reached the point where I was just getting to know him good, hanging out and the whole father-son relationship. And I remember thinking, What’s going to happen next? And for a while, I was definitely in a depressed state and just really sad.”
L.T. worked through his grief by staying close to his family while training, and he was heavily involved in his Touching Lives Foundation, which promotes education, self-esteem, and cultural self-awareness. He funds programs like a School Is Cool scholarship, a holiday program that gives books and toys to sick kids at Children’s Hospital, and a youth football camp and charity golf tournament.
In 2007, Tomlinson led the league in rushing for a second consecutive season with 1,474 yards, moved past Chicago Bears running back Walter Payton on the all-time rushing touchdown list with number 111, and was voted to his fifth Pro Bowl.
In 2008, L.T. fought to overcome toe and groin injuries. After a slow start, he finished the season with 1,110 yards and 11 touchdowns.
He was thirty years old when the 2009 season began. He sprained his ankle during the preseason and was forced to miss the home opener against the Baltimore Ravens. His production declined, and L.T. finished the season with 730 rushing yards and 12 rushing touchdowns.
Four years after learning they had miscarried, L.T. and LaTorsha were still trying to have a baby. In spite of the money and fame, the one thing L.T. wanted more than anything in life was still eluding him. And the couple couldn’t understand why. They put their faith in God the day their first child died and were convinced He would make His plan clear and reward them. The couple went back to the doctor for tests. Could there be something wrong with their reproductive systems? Could one of them be sterile? . . . The tests were negative. The doctors said they were in perfect health.
Then a family member asked LaTorsha if she was aware of a medical condition that ran in the family and affected childbearing.
It was like lightning had struck, as though God Himself had cleared His throat and was about to speak. It had been four years since the doctors uttered those five life-altering words: “I can’t find the heartbeat.” Four years since she sat at the hospital in her husband’s arms trying to understand why. Four years since they placed their faith in a plan they couldn’t understand, but believed someday He would make clear to them. Four years of lovemaking and no pregnancies.
She returned to the doctor’s office and learned that she had Sjogren’s syndrome, an autoimmune disease that can cut off the blood supply to a fetus. The good news, they learned, is that it was treatable!2
Now, if they could just get pregnant. They’d been trying for years—unaware that if LaTorsha had become pregnant before they learned about her condition, there is a chance her subsequent babies would have died too.
A few weeks after learning of his wife’s condition, LaDainian arrived at Qualcomm Stadium for a November 15, 2009, matchup with the Philadelphia Eagles. It was a big game because the AFC West division lead was on the line. When LaDainian got to his locker, he found a purple bag with a note: “Please Open Immediately—LaTorsha.” He thought it might be a necklace. Instead, he found a pregnancy test kit.
Yep, he was going to be a daddy.
L.T., the father-to-be, rushed for 96 yards and 2 TDs that day to guide the Chargers to a 31–23 victory and into a first-place tie with the Denver Broncos in the AFC West division. If that wasn’t enough, he also surpassed former Buffalo Bills running back Thurman Thomas and former Pittsburgh Steelers running back Franco Harris to move into twelfth place on the NFL’s all-time career rushing list with 12,145 rushing yards. And his two rushing touchdowns gave him 146 for his career, moving him ahead of former Oakland Raiders running back Marcus Allen and into third place on the all-time list.
“Once we found out about the disease and the injections and what was necessary to keep our baby healthy, everything was golden,” Tomlinson says. “That couldn’t have been anything other than God that led us here. You can’t convince me it wasn’t God’s plan. The doctors didn’t know. They had no idea what was wrong.
“I started to wonder, ‘God, You said it would happen. Are You lying to me?’ I was starting to feel like that. That was around the time we started to have the doctors check us and make sure nothing was wrong. At the time, I felt like God was saying, ‘Are you losing faith in Me?’ and shortly after that it happened and I was like, ‘OK, God, I’m sorry. You had a plan. I started to wonder when we couldn’t get pregnant. You had a plan. What was I thinking?’
“He didn’t let us get pregnant until we learned what to do so the baby would be healthy,” Tomlinson says. “We tried for years and started to doubt a little, and then as soon as we found out what the problem was and there was a solution for it, we got pregnant right away. That’s not part of God’s plan? Of course it was. There was a plan all along. It’s hard not to question and wonder. But it goes to show there is a reason for everything.”
Tomlinson was released from the Chargers on February 22, 2010, exactly five years to the day after he learned of LaTorsha’s miscarriage. In March of that year, he signed a two-year free agent contract with the New York Jets and would play a significant role that season, rushing for 914 yards and 6 touchdowns.
LaTorsha’s labor was induced on July 7, 2010. Doctors pulled out the head, and then showed LaDainian how to pull out the rest of the baby. In one big swoosh, Daylen Oliver Tomlinson burst through the line. His stats: 7 pounds, 1 ounce, 20 inches.
By January 2011, LaTorsha was pregnant again. The couple had their second child, a daughter named Dayah Lynn Tomlinson, on September 10, 2011. She was 6 pounds, 12 ounces, and 19 inches long. After spending the night sleeping on a bench at the hospital, Daddy drove to MetLife Stadium for the Jets’ Sunday night season opener against the Dallas Cowboys.3 In his new role as a third-down back, he rushed 5 times for 16 yards and led the team with 6 receptions for 73 yards in the Jets’ 27–24 victory.
L.T., nearing retirement, says he is growing the family he and LaTorsha always dreamed of. And when they are old enough, he will tell them about the lesson his Lord and Savior taught him during the most difficult stretch in his life and of the great reward he received for his patience and trust in God.
1. http://www.magaarchive.tcu.edu/articles/2001-01-CV.asp?issueid=200001.
2. http://articles.nydailynews.com/2010-08-08/sports/27072042_1_/adainian-tomlinson-baby-girl-moments.
3. http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/jets/2011/09/ladainian-tomlinson-becomes-father-sleeps-on-hospital-bench-night-before-season-opening.