Beyond The Game

It was an unusually hot day in the middle of June in Los Angeles where the New York Nighthawks were moments away from challenging the Lagos in a winner-take-all seventh game for the Professional Basketball League Championship and the player wearing jersey number 21 was the primary reason they were there. A rising league superstar forsaken and banished to the league's dungeon eight years earlier with a seemingly hopeless future in basketball, he had chosen to take his life's most sacred dream and the talent in which he had invested more of his heart than anything and, in return for a deeper walk with God, laid it on the altar of sacrifice. There had been nothing easy about dying and yet the death of his will was the reason he now stood on the verge of seeing his hopes for a championship miraculously resurrected.