‘Everything Felt Different’ After This Olympian Got Baptized
By Movieguide® Contributor
Olympic gold medal figure skater Scott Hamilton explained how giving his life to the Lord and getting baptized helped him find freedom from his past mistakes.
“I’ve failed in possibly every way you possibly can fail as a human being, and it’s like, okay, how do I deal with that? I failed, oh man, I failed in skating, I failed in business, I failed in relationships, you know, I’ve let people down,” Hamilton told Andy Erwin on the “Storytellers” podcast.
“A lot [of these failures] are not intended. It’s just rooted in being a clueless knucklehead, other times it’s just you get caught up in something and you just don’t realize that you’re hurting people,” he continued.
He has countless examples of things he could have done better, for a long time, the shame weighed Hamilton down. Through the Lord, though, he can move forward.
“For a long time, I kept all of my failures in a bag and I’d carry them around with me, and I felt really terrible about the person I was and what I’d done and all these failures and hurting my mom and hurting my dad and, you know, taking my family, I never showed the kind of gratitude I should have…” Hamilton explained. “All these things just kept happening, and it was really wild.”
“It was when I came out of the water, when I decided to dedicate my life to Jesus, when I decided that I wanted to be baptized and I wanted to be cleansed of my sin. I wanted to move forward…” he continued. “So I got baptized, and I came out of the water, and everything felt different, in an unexpected way different.”
“So I go back, put my dry clothes on, it’s, you know, Sunday, so I’m going back to the house to watch football. My wife and son and her best friend Carey are going out to lunch, and she came up to the car, because we drove separately, and she goes, ‘How do you feel?’” Hamilton added. “And I just looked at her and I said, ‘lighter.’ I dropped the bag [of past mistakes]. Just drop the bag. There’s no reason to carry that stuff around anymore, not when you understand what’s been done for you. Just drop the bag, it’s done, it’s over.”
Since then, Hamilton’s life has never been the same. Through life’s triumphs and trials, he has had the Lord to lean on, which has made all the difference.
READ MORE: OLYMPIAN SCOTT HAMILTON FINDS FAITH AMID LIFE’S CHALLENGES AND TRIUMPHS
One of those trials the skater has trusted God through is his battle with cancer.
“The gold medalist previously beat testicular cancer in 1997 and two similar benign tumors in 2004 and 2010 before he was diagnosed with his latest in August 2016,” PEOPLE reported.
He decided not to treat the most recent cancer and has experienced God’s faithfulness.
“It’s been remarkable,” he said. “I went back to the scan three months later and they said, it hasn’t grown. I go back three months later and they go, it shrank 45%. I said to my surgeon, ‘Can you explain this?’ And he said, ‘God.’ I went back in, and it shrunk 25% again.”
Though it had grown the next time he got it checked, he still looked to God.
“It had grown. And then COVID hit and going into any kind of hospital situation was almost impossible. So in my spirit, in my inner being, I realized, I’m totally at peace with not even looking at it again unless I become symptomatic,” Hamilton explained.
READ MORE: GOD USED CANCER TO TRANSFORM THIS OLYMPIAN’S LIFE
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