THE BBC has recently aired the second series of Freddie Flintoff’s Field of Dreams, a documentary by which the previous England cricket star Andrew Flintoff takes a gaggle of young people from Preston on a cricket tour to India. These were young individuals with difficult lives, gathered in series one from Flintoff’s Lancashire home town, in a bid to instil in them purpose, aspiration, and life skills through cricket.
The stories that emerged were touching and provoking, without being naïve concerning the challenges. This second series has proved every bit as moving, but this time — for Flintoff, as much as for those whose lives he’s transforming — carrying critical lessons about healing and recovery.
A number of months after the primary series was broadcast in 2022, Flintoff was involved in a life-threatening accident on the TV programme Top Gear: an accident that will require several operations and a year-long delay to the Indian cricket tour. On his return to his fledgling Preston team, Flintoff told them that he was higher, but not what he was before, which he doesn’t think he ever might be. Better, but not the identical; higher, but different.
For those of us who’ve experienced a life-changing illness or injury, Flintoff’s words are poignant and resonant. For the Church, they provide a sobering reminder that God’s work and intentions in healing could also be different from ours.
IN 2018, I experienced a work-based burnout (officially termed “exhaustion”), which ended a protracted and successful profession. There was some extent, nine months into my yr of recovery, after I saw significant progress, and it made my heart leap: finally, I now not required daytime naps — a watershed in a diagnosis that began with sleeping for 16 out of each 24 hours.
Yet, as soon as my spirit soared, it crashed again, because I realised that, whatever my progression, I used to be to date from what I had once been. In those moments, God taught me something seminal: that he was not asking me to be what I once was, and that that was the flawed benchmark for my healing.
He was showing me that healing doesn’t necessarily mean being as we once were. As Flintoff said, we may be higher, but not the identical. Recovery is long, painful, isolating, and deeply personal. It can also be where God goes to work, and, in his hands, it becomes something really precious — the master potter, shaping from our lives something altogether more useful for the scars we bear.
At the center of life-changing injury or illness is loss: lack of the capacities and vigour that we once knew, which, in turn, can manifest as lost earnings, status, and relationships. Some years on from my burnout, a radio play jogged my memory of the Westminster lifestyle that I had once known, and of how much I had lost. In the midst of those reflections, God showed me that, while externally I is perhaps more bereft, internally I used to be a lot richer — richer because, once we are pared back and vulnerable, our hearts present the fertile soil that God requires for his purposes.
This is what we want to know about healing, and what Flintoff’s story expresses so well.
AS A journalist, I write extensively about cricket. Cricket fans like me will remember Flintoff as an impressive all-rounder and a once-in-a-generation player, his batting felt effortless, his bowling impactful. I feel of him standing on the stumps, arms aloft, yelling “Freddie” with the gang after one other century or wicket. I remember him batting and bowling the mighty Australians into oblivion in 2005, and again in 2009.
He was also everyman’s hero. Relatable and approachable, a sportsman of immense strength, yet in some way soft at the identical time. That imposing physical presence now wears wounds forged visibly in facial scars; but it surely is all of those qualities that make Flintoff connect so powerfully with the Lancashire young people for whom life has not been easy. It’s a reminder that God harnesses every a part of us — all that he has placed in us, and what we endure, including our scars — for his purposes.
Jesus was not the identical after he died and rose again. Despite his glorious resurrection, he still wears the scars of the cross: the King of kings, for ever marked. Yet it’s precisely by those scars that we’re healed (Isaiah 53.5 and 1 Peter 2.24) and have everlasting life.
Flintoff’s sporting celebrity has been fused with a life-changing injury. That mix, just like the parable of the skills, has taken what he once was, and what he’s today, and multiplied his impact. Flintoff’s legacy to cricket stays luminous: he is solely among the finest I even have ever seen. Yet, for all that sporting glory, when Flintoff told those young people how injury had modified him, I fancied that his finest legacy was yet to unfold.
Sharmila Meadows is a contract journalist and replica editor. A former senior policy adviser and ministerial private secretary in Westminster, she writes on cricket, faith, and politics. X: @WritingDesk27
