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After tearing cartilage in his knee on the last play of practice one afternoon last fall, professional football player Trent Dilfer wrote in his prayer journal, "Lord, my knee is giving me lots of trouble since surgery a week ago. The more it hurts, the more I feel I must trust you."

His career already at a standstill nearly a year after a rising young star replaced him as quarterback, Dilfer prayed the injury would draw him closer to God and make him more sensitive to divine purposes. "I also pray that your Spirit would allow me an attitude of great joy and peace in the midst of this setback," he wrote. "Lord, I trust that you would use this attitude to encourage somebody else on my team who is experiencing a setback of their own."

In an age when athletes flush with victory give thanks to Jesus on national TV, Dilfer personifies the quiet, unseen side of the faith of Christians in the National Football League (NFL). Like any other believer at work, Dilfer exercises his faith not so much in stardom's glory but in the crucible of everyday aches and frustrations.

After finishing below. 500 in 1998, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers replaced Dilfer during the 1999 campaign and went on to win a division championship. High expectations—he was the sixth player selected in the first round of the 1994 NFL draft and led the Buccaneers to a playoff victory in 1997—died down when the Buccaneers traded Dilfer to the Baltimore Ravens after six seasons. He went from backing up rookie sensation Shaun King in Tampa Bay to backing up highly touted Tony Banks in Baltimore.

"I couldn't be more thankful that in the past couple of years God has allowed me to deal with a great deal of change, adversity, and unknowing, because my greatest growth usually comes in times of despair," Dilfer says.

"As I've gone through great adversity professionally," he adds, "God is beginning to paint a very clear picture for me of how he's drawing me closer to him—where my heart is, what are my true deep thoughts and motives when the lights are off and nobody's around, and what that has to do with football. Are my motives to become faithful so that I'll be rewarded in football, or are my motives to be faithful so I'll just continue to trust him?"

Dilfer, whose career has since reignited in Baltimore, doubts he would have gained this spiritual perspective had he not suffered the professional struggles that led him "to be still and wait on him."

The gospel of success
In an industry in which the very air one breathes is laden with self-importance, the 6'4", 229-pound quarterback makes genuine humility one of his top spiritual quests.

"Thank you, God, that you are using football as the means to break me so that I may know you better," Dilfer wrote in his prayer journal on September 29.

The 28-year-old native of Santa Cruz, California, with the close-cropped beard does not expect faith to necessarily produce success on the football field. "I tend to differ from some athletes in the NFL who have been very outspoken in their faith," Dilfer says. "I don't think that our success level dictates the amount we can glorify God."

He thinks a false assumption is spreading throughout the increasingly Christianized league that "the more successful I can be, the more I can glorify God, because now I can show the world that I serve a powerful God who can give me victory and great circumstances and blessing where he's not giving it to others. But as I search God's Word, I don't see him saying that."

Rather, he says, Scripture indicates that God calls believers first to be faithful, and secondarily to develop 100 percent of what he has given them—whether they are athletes, business owners, spouses, parents, or any other vocation.

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January 8 2001, Vol. 45, No. 1