THE BBC has recently aired the second series of Freddie Flintoff’s Field of Dreams, a documentary in which the former England cricket star Andrew Flintoff takes a group of young people from Preston on a cricket tour to India. These were young people 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 inspiring, without being naïve about 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 few months after the first series was broadcast in 2022, Flintoff was involved in a life-threatening accident on the TV programme Top Gear: an accident that would 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 better, but not what he was before, which he doesn’t think he ever will be. Better, but not the same; better, but different.

For those of us who have experienced a life-changing illness or injury, Flintoff’s words are poignant and resonant. For the Church, they offer a sobering reminder that God’s work and intentions in healing may be different from ours.

IN 2018, I experienced a work-based burnout (officially termed “exhaustion”), which ended a long and successful career. There was a point, nine months into my year of recovery, when I saw significant progress, and it made my heart leap: finally, I no longer required daytime naps — a watershed in a diagnosis that began with sleeping for 16 out of every 24 hours.

Yet, as soon as my spirit soared, it crashed again, because I realised that, whatever my progression, I was so far 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 wrong benchmark for my healing.

He was showing me that healing does not necessarily mean being as we once were. As Flintoff said, we can be better, but not the same. Recovery is long, painful, isolating, and deeply personal. It is also 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 heart of life-changing injury or illness is loss: loss 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 reminded me 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 might be more bereft, internally I was so much richer — richer because, when we are pared back and vulnerable, our hearts present the fertile soil that God requires for his purposes.

This is what we need to grasp 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 outstanding all-rounder and a once-in-a-generation player, his batting felt effortless, his bowling impactful. I think of him standing at the stumps, arms aloft, yelling “Freddie” with the crowd after another 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 somehow soft at the same time. That imposing physical presence now wears wounds cast visibly in facial scars; but it 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 part of us — all that he has placed in us, and what we endure, including our scars — for his purposes.

Jesus was not the same 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 is precisely by those scars that we are healed (Isaiah 53.5 and 1 Peter 2.24) and have eternal life.

Flintoff’s sporting celebrity has been fused with a life-changing injury. That blend, like the parable of the talents, has taken what he once was, and what he is today, and multiplied his impact. Flintoff’s legacy to cricket remains luminous: he is simply one of the best I have ever seen. Yet, for all that sporting glory, when Flintoff told those young people how injury had changed him, I fancied that his finest legacy was yet to unfold.

Sharmila Meadows is a freelance journalist and copy editor. A former senior policy adviser and ministerial private secretary in Westminster, she writes on cricket, faith, and politics. X: @WritingDesk27