A life-changing ATV accident in 2014 sent multi-time Olympic gold medal swimmer Amy Van Dyken on a years-long journey towards faith.
“I went over a six-foot cliff. I wrapped backwards around a tree. When I landed, I was face down. The ATV hit my head, and then my husband found me and saw that my back was broken from that high up, and I wasn’t breathing,” Van Dyken recalled on the Sports Spectrum “Get In The Game” podcast. “And so he rolled me over and lifted up my neck, and I started convulsing, and my eyes went two different directions.”
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She made it to the operating room for a life-or-death surgery. She remembers “my doctor showing me my X-ray…He was like, ‘Amy, you’re not understanding what I’m saying. I’m trying to save your life right now.”
According to TODAY at the time, the injury was so severe and the surgery so risky that Van Dyken had to say goodbye to her husband.
“So, I said goodbye to my husband, you know, and I told him, I said, ‘Listen, if I pass away, I want you to be happy, I want you to date, I want you to get married, all the things.’ And he got in my ear and he said, ‘Babe, if this is too much, I understand, and you can let go.’ And I told him, I was like, ‘Who do you think I am? Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do,” Van Dyken said with a chuckle.
She recovered, though she is now paralyzed from the waist down, and lives with her husband in Scottsdale, Arizona. Faith is now an important part of her life, and she just got baptized on Good Friday earlier this year.
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After the accident, she realized she needed to “get” her faith together. So she started attending a church off and on for 12 years in Arizona.
But it wasn’t until conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s murder last September that Van Dyken began taking her faith seriously.
Her relationship with Jesus has changed her life, giving her control over her anger and taking away the thoughts of “not wanting to be here” that came after the accident.
“I know I’m here for a reason,” Van Dyken emphasized. “We had a service on Sunday where our pastor was saying, ‘Listen, you know, God doesn’t give you these things to make you hurt…the world is full of sin, but He gives you these things so that you can take those trials and tribulations and show somebody else how you got through it and teach them about Jesus.'”
“And it really hit me because I do have a platform and I have a big platform with the disability community. And so I have been going online and talking about Jesus. And I really think that that is why I am here on earth was to have this accident, you know, to do great things and then have the accident,” she explained.
Praise God for how He used a scary accident to bring Van Dyken into a deeper relationship with Him.
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