Bulletproof?
Theme of the Week: Dying Right
Sunday, March 12, 2006
 1 of 1
Who Said It…Paul Azinger
The Americans," said Spaniard Seve Ballesteros about the 1991 Ryder Cup team, "are 11 nice guys and Paul Azinger!" But when Paul won the Sony Open in Honolulu in 2000, Sports Illustrated reporter John Garrity wrote, "He barely resembled the carefree Zinger of old. He is no longer the brash youth who traded glares with Seve Ballesteros."
What changed? After winning the 1993 PGA Championship, Paul's perspective on life was radically altered. He wrote about it a year later in Links Letter: What He Said…Bulletproof?
"Going into the PGA, I was having a lot of pain in my right shoulder. But I put off having a biopsy until after my win. The results showed cancer. All of a sudden, at age 33, I wasn't bulletproof. Everything I'd accomplished in golf became meaningless.
The next thing I know, I'm in an x-ray room lying on an ice-cold table—shivering from nervousness. As the technician adjusted the machines, a genuine feeling of fear came upon me—I could die from cancer. But then another realization hit me even harder: I'm going to die eventually anyway. Whether from cancer or something else, I'm definitely going to die. It's just a question of when.
In that moment, something Larry Moody, who leads our Bible study on the PGA Tour, had said to me came to mind: "Zinger, we're not in the land of the living going to the land of the dying. No! We're in the land of the dying going to the land of the living."
Adapted from Links Letter (1/95) by permission.
Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today International/Men of Integrity magazine.Click here for reprint information on Men of Integrity. 1 of 1
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Lord, help me match my stance toward physical death with my confidence in the eternal life You gave me.
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