A few days after accepting a scholarship offer to play basketball at the University of Michigan Austin Hatch was involved in a plane crash that killed both his father and step mother. Austin suffered life-threatening injuries and brain trauma. He was in a coma for two months. It was a horrible tragedy made worse by the fact that Austin had lost his mother and two siblings in another crash that he and his father had survived eight years earlier.
Austin has the rare distinction of being someone who has survived two plane crashes. The odds of this happening are 11 quadrillion, 5 trillion to one. Yet as miraculous as this was, the doctors believe it was even more miraculous that Austin not only walked again but graduated high school, attended Michigan, and joined the basketball team to play for Coach Beilein who amazingly still honored his scholarship. Austin even played five games as a freshman before deciding to become a student manager for the team.
Austin couldn’t play like he used to, but his leadership was a huge asset to his coach and Michigan teammates. While talking to Austin on the phone recently, he told me about not letting circumstances define him. He said he made a decision in the hospital while trying to walk again that he would do whatever it took to walk out of that hospital. He wanted to be a miracle for others.
He said, "My life is only a miracle if I can be a miracle for others."
Now as a graduate of Michigan, he is living with his wife in Ann Arbor and giving motivational talks about his experience and life. He is a walking, talking, living, breathing miracle. But Austin isn't just content with being a miracle. He doesn’t just want to show what a miracle looks like. He is living to be a miracle for others through his words, inspiration and leadership.
In thinking about Austin, I realized that everyone is a miracle and has the opportunity to be a miracle for others.
Then I did a little research and found Tara Maclsaac's article where she shared that Dr. Ali Binazir looked at the odds of your existence by calculating the odds of your parents meeting and your parent's ancestors meeting, mating and all the right things coming together to eventually create you. He came to the conclusion that "The odds that you exist at all are basically zero." He explains that "It is the probability of 2 million people getting together to play a game of dice with trillion-sided dice. They each roll the dice and they all come up with the exact same number - for example, 550, 343, 279, 001."
Dr. Ali Binazir wrote, "A miracle is an event so unlikely as to be almost impossible. By that definition, I've just shown that you are a miracle. Now go forth and feel and act like the miracle that you are."
I would add, AND BE A MIRACLE FOR OTHERS... like Austin.
-Jon
