Darryl Strawberry finds a Savior | God’s work of restoration

Former MLB player Darryl Strawberry, right, and his wife Tracy pose for a portrait at their home in St. Peters, Mo. Photo by USA TODAY Sports Images | RNS

In 1980, the New York Mets selected an 18-year-old baseball phenom, Darryl Strawberry, with the first pick in the Major League draft.

Being a Mets fan in the 1970’s was tough—just ask my BreakPoint colleagues Eric Metaxas and Roberto Rivera. So it’s not an exaggeration to say that many saw the outfielder from Crenshaw High School in LA as a potential savior for the moribund franchise. And he delivered.

Strawberry played in eight consecutive All-Star games, seven of them while playing for the Mets. And in 1986, he helped the Mets win the World Series, hitting a moonshot in the seventh and deciding game that put the game out of reach.

But while Strawberry delivered on the field, his life off the field amply demonstrated that the so-called “savior” was desperately in need of, well, a real Savior. And, God be praised, he found Him.

It was clear early on that Strawberry was, to put it mildly, a troubled young man. As a recent profile of Strawberry on HBO’s “Real Sports” told viewers, his friends worried about what would happen to Strawberry after his playing days were over.

Their fears were well-grounded. While playing, he became a regular cocaine user. And after retiring, he was in and out of rehab at least five times. He was arrested several times and spent eleven months in jail. He despaired of ever breaking his addiction. As he told a judge, he had given up on life.

Well fortunately, God had not given up on Darryl Strawberry. At a Narcotics Anonymous convention he met Tracy, a recovering addict herself. He told her to stay away from him, but she didn’t. And when he relapsed, it was Tracy who went banging on crack house doors looking for him. She took him home to her parents’ house and to St. Louis.

And when Tracy became a Christian, she eventually led Strawberry to the Savior he had desperately needed all along.

Today, Darryl and Tracy, who were married in 2006, run a ministry for people struggling with addiction. When Bernard Goldberg entered their home, he was struck by the lack of any reference to Strawberry’s big league career. He told Strawberry that he saw “no indication that [he] used to be a major league baseball player,” to which Strawberry replied “you said it clearly ‘used to be.’”

As Strawberry told Goldberg, the old Darryl Strawberry “had to die.” Not just the addict, but the self-centered celebrity, as well. In its place, there’s now a new man—just as the Gospel promises—dedicated to restoring people whose lives are teetering on the same self-destructive precipice as his once was.

There’s that word again, restoration. Those “re” words are what the Gospel is all about.

Look, we see evidence of human brokenness all around us. But in its midst, grace abounds. God unceasingly works to heal wounds created by sin and to restore the wholeness—the shalom—our sin causes us to forfeit.

— by John Stonestreet

John Stonestreet is the Director of Strategic Partnerships for the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview and is heard on Breakpoint, a radio commentary that is broadcast on 400 stations with an audience of eight million.

“The Imperfect Marriage: Help for Those Who Think It’s Over “ A marriage guidebook for the not-so-perfect marriage—filled with extremely candid, practical, and biblically based principles.