It is one thing to meet one’s hero – and another thing to hear one’s hero talk about his.
It is one thing to meet one’s hero – and another thing to hear one’s hero talk about his.
But that is what happened when more than 500 people
from all walks of life – churched and un-churched – got in line at the
LifeWay Christian Store in Monroe, to meet Steve Borden, a.k.a. Sting,
world champion wrestler.
Borden signed copies of his book, “Sting: Moment of
Truth,” which offers a testimony of how God changed his life and saved
his marriage and family.
Jeremy Pendergraft stood near the front of the line,
wearing a black tee-shirt with the image of a skull on the front and
sporting multiple earrings and several tattoos up and down his arms.
“Sting is awesome,” Pendergraft said. “He’s a great
wrestler with a great heart for wrestling. It took us everything we had
to get here but we knew we had to come. I didn’t know about the book.
It’s cool he found God and all.”
As the line slowly got shorter, Jeffrey Housley, 23,
patiently waited toward the end with his wife and several teenage boys.
A Sunday School teacher at New Chapel Hill Baptist in West Monroe,
Housley had been looking for a way to impact the boys who were in his
class.
For several months he had prayed for a way that the
boys, all wrestling fans, could meet Borden. The young teacher said it
was an answer to prayer when he discovered Borden would be at the
LifeWay store earlier this summer.
“These guys have all grown up watching him (Sting),
and they’re at this age where most of them have all grown up in church
and are now wanting to experiment with other things,” Housley said.
“I’m hoping he can give them a little insight, … that he can share
with them when he realized that God was what he needed.”
Borden met with the students in a rare one-on-one
meeting in the store’s backroom after the book signing. After sharing
his testimony, he encouraged the boys to embrace their faith.
“After I got saved, my brother, who’s now my pastor, told me to let my example be my testimony,” Borden said.
“Don’t be shy in sharing your faith,” he told the
boys. “The more you talk about it, the stronger your faith will be.”
As Scott Tarver, acting store manager, started
picking things up at the end of the evening, he reviewed what had
happened in the last two hours. “We brought in a crowd of people
tonight who would never have come in our doors for anything else,”
Tarver said. “That’s our purpose. I talked with people tonight who
didn’t have any church background but who bought the book and the movie.
“I don’t know if anyone got saved tonight, but I can
assure you the products they left with have the potential to change
their lives,” Tarver added.
“It’s immeasurable.”
For more than 20 years Borden was part of a
multi-million-dollar industry in which he was a nine-time World
Championship Wrestling titleholder. His fans relished his descent into
the ring from arena rafters and his trademark wrestling moves known as
the Stinger Splash and the Scorpion Death Lock. His black and white
face paint and black trench coat meant impending doom in the ring, and
his skills helped him defeat other greats like Hulk Hogan and Stone
Cold Steve Austin.
By the mid-1990s, Borden had reached the height of
success within the wrestling world – enjoying international fame, money
and everything he ever had wanted.
But something was missing.
“I realized I had achieved everything the world
calls success, but I was not happy,” Borden said. “There was something
in my life that was really, really empty.”
Traveling away from home and his family for months
at a time, Borden turned to pain medication and alcohol to escape the
issues that were building in his life and within his marriage. He
admits things were out of control.
“In 1996, God really began working on my heart,” Borden said.
For two years, Borden said he was desperate to find
God. He went forward at a Promise Keepers rally and prayed the sinner’s
prayer and prayed it again at an evening church service. But he says
his expectations of God were wrong.
“I wanted God to wave a magic wand and make
everything better, but my life just continued on the way it was and
things got worse and worse,” Borden said.
“My mistake was I thought I’d just get my fire
insurance, so, I would be sure I’d go to heaven. But God couldn’t work
in my life because I wasn’t surrendered to him. I needed something
supernatural to happen in my life. I needed God.”
After breaking down and confessing to his wife his
addictions and the immoral lifestyle he had been living on the road,
Borden said he then turned his life over to God. Borden finally
understood what Scriptures like John 8:32 (“You will know the truth and
the truth will set you free”) meant. He stopped abusing painkillers and
using alcohol, and even his language changed overnight.
Borden’s wife accepted Christ a month after he did.
“I didn’t have to be a chameleon anymore and wear
all these different hats depending on who I was with,” he said.
He continued to wrestle for two more years and had
many opportunities to share with fellow wrestlers like Hogan, Ric Flair
and Bill Goldberg the reason he had begun to act so differently.
“We have experienced blessings and miracles in this
marriage, and we just know God is alive and well,” Borden said. “The
joy and peace is just so amazing in my marriage now.
“I look at my wife with eyes that I never knew I
could look at her with. I know now what love is, and it’s not a
feeling.”
While he considers himself semi-retired, Borden
still makes his way back to the ring when he is called – both in the
United States and overseas. He said he enjoys surprising the fans with
an appearance. As his alter ego Sting is known for saying: “The one
thing you know about Sting is you never know about Sting.”
And the one thing Steve Borden knows is this: “Don’t
walk in mediocrity with one foot in the world. Go for it (with God) and
watch what happens.” (BP)
(Steve Borden’s book and DVD, “Sting: Moment of Truth,” are available at LifeWay Christian Stores)