WHOLE IN ONE

In 1993 pro golfer Paul Azinger won the PGA championship. He had it made, sitting on the top of his profession, when suddenly he was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 33. He wrote, “A genuine feeling of fear came over me. I could die from cancer. Then another reality hit me even harder. I’m going to die eventually anyway, whether from cancer or something else. It’s just a question of when. Everything I had accomplished in golf became meaningless to me. All I wanted to do was live.” He is not alone. All people want to live but at one point or another are confronted by the fear of death. And as our days grow shorter this fear intensifies. Death is the enemy of us all. But thank God for Jesus who in dying destroyed our death and in rising restored our life.

Azinger recovered from his chemotherapy and returned to the PGA tour. But that bout with cancer changed his life. He wrote, “I have made a lot of money since I have been on tour, and I have won a lot of tournaments, but happiness is always temporary. The only way you will ever have true contentment is in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I’m not saying that nothing ever bothers me and I don’t have problems, but I feel like I have found the answer to the six-foot hole.” Azinger found hope in the death, burial and resurrection of Christ. Where is your hope? Azinger put it in these terms. "We are not in the land of the living, going to the land of the dying. We are in the land of the dying, going to the land of the living."

-- Paul Azinger quotes from "Sports Spectrum"


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