September brings back good football memories for many people across Alabama.
But for Ron Wooten, it marks another kind of memory — this September makes 33 years since his neck was broken during a bad tackle while playing high school football.
The accident paralyzed him from the neck down.
“It was the second game of my senior year,” said Wooten, who played both quarterback and linebacker for Meek High School in Arley, a small community in northwest Alabama.
They were playing at Red Bay High School when the tackle happened, and when Wooten came to, he realized he couldn’t move.
“And I said, ‘Oh no, dear Lord — don’t let this be happening to me.’ And I just cried,” Wooten remembered. “But when I did that — the Bible talks about a peace that passes all understanding — the most wonderful peace came over me. I quit crying. I just knew everything was going to be alright.”
Circle of prayer
Wooten grew up at Meek Baptist Church and had a strong faith, so he asked the players nearby to pray for him. Both teams held hands and circled around him, and someone announced over the loudspeaker that the young man had asked for prayer.
From then on, Wooten said his life has been one marker after another of God’s goodness.
It started with the fact that he was lying on top of a Red Bay player who never moved a muscle, even though it took three hours for a helicopter to arrive and transport Wooten to a hospital in Birmingham.
Later, that player and his father came to visit Wooten, and the father told him that since his son was a little boy, he had always kicked people off when he ended up in a pile. When the father asked his son why he hadn’t automatically done that with Wooten, the son said something had “told him not to” this time.
“I know that ‘something’ was God,” Wooten said, noting he probably would have died if the player had kicked him off.
That night, some of Wooten’s teammates asked the doctor on the field what his chances were, and he told them he didn’t think Wooten would make it to the hospital alive.
But he did.
He made it through 27 days on a ventilator, during which time he lost 65 pounds. And he continued to see God work.
A changed life
When Wooten got home from the hospital months later, there was a letter waiting for him from a woman who had been in the stands the night of his accident in Red Bay. She wrote that when everyone had been asked to pray for Wooten, she knew she wasn’t in a place with God where she felt like she could pray.
But that night she felt God stirring in her heart, and began a relationship with Him.
“It changed my life,” she said in the letter.
Another man who heard Wooten share his testimony years later told him he had been mad at God for a long time, but when he heard Wooten share his testimony, he knew if Wooten could trust God’s goodness, he had no reason to be angry for what had happened in his life.
“I tell people to turn to God instead of getting mad at God,” Wooten said. “We’ve had all kinds of things happen, but God’s handled all of them.”
Since Wooten was injured at 17, his mother, Betty, has cared for him, and his father, Don, did too until he died of pancreatic cancer eight years ago. Though they still pray Wooten will walk again, the family has seen God provide in other amazing ways even when times were hard.
“God’s been good to us,” Wooten said. “I’ve had some heartache, don’t get me wrong. But God’s taken care of me.”
That’s his message when he shares his testimony or teaches Sunday School, and a few years back when he served as pastor of Curry Christian Fellowship.
“God has been with us all the time, every day, every minute,” Wooten said. “We depend on Him for every single thing.”
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