From a Pit to the Pulpit

BURLEIGH – “I loved baseball. I loved playing it. I don’t even like it today,” former Major League Baseball player Darryl Strawberry told an enthralled audience of 500 at The Lighthouse Church March 19.
While Strawberry achieved impressive stats and achievements throughout his 17-year professional career, including 335 homeruns, 1,000 RBIs, and membership on four World Championship teams, he followed a destructive lifestyle of drugs, alcohol and domestic abuse. This not only earned him three suspensions from baseball but a prison sentence as well.
Through the misuse of his fame and fortune, Strawberry had broken a personal pledge to avoid the mistakes of his own alcoholic and abusive father, Henry.
“As long as you’re hitting 25-30 homeruns a year, you can do what you want, because you’re Darryl Strawberry. I went out partying until 4-5 in the morning,” he said, explaining that it was the same unfortunate path that so many young athletes follow.
“I had it all, but I really had nothing,” Strawberry counseled.
His road to complete transformation was not smooth or straight.  He had moral lapses, as well as two cancer scares and the loss of a kidney. But he credits many sources for sustaining him on this journey, from his mother, Ruby, who maintained a constant prayer vigil for him, Evangelist Morris Cerillo who helped him take the first step of his Christian walk in 1991, and his current wife, Tracy, whose personal example helped steer Strawberry toward serious biblical study.
“I turned off the TV; I turned off the cell phone. I stopped watching the news and I started studying the Word. I wanted to know why I exist.”
The answer to the question of his most important life purpose, Strawberry said, was not in being a baseball player, or even a restaurant owner (he closed the Queen’s eatery, Strawberry’s Sports Grill, in 2012), but a disseminator of God’s Word.
“I went from the pit to the pulpit,” Strawberry said, admitting he was, at first, a reluctant preacher.
He was able to do this by resisting those things which held former sway, and saturating himself in the Bible.
“The old me had to die, so I could be resurrected like Jesus,” he said.
Thirteen years of sobriety gave inspirational credence to Strawberry’s transformation.
“Jesus was not concerned with my homeruns. He was concerned whether all was well with my soul,” he said.
 All does seem well with Strawberry, a man of God, a man now at peace.