FEATURE FEATURE
GIVING UP THE
DREAM BY FRANK STIRK
I
“
t was a clean hit. He was a big boy. He was six-foot-seven, and I’m sixfoot-three. My head snapped back against the glass,” says Edmonton resident Matt Cline, recalling the concussion he received in October 2006 playing for the Chilliwack Bruins of the Western Hockey League. At eighteen, he was one of his team’s top players with a good shot at getting into the NHL. At first, Cline figured he’d soon get back in the game. “It wasn’t one of those concussions where I was in the hospital and unconscious,” he says. “We thought I’d be out for maybe a week or two.” But when recurring headaches forced him to miss training camp the following year, he knew that his dreams of hockey greatness were over. Cline says the sting of missing the
14 SEVEN SPRING 2020
NHL was one that took a while to fade. “The hardest part for me was not being able to reach my potential. I always wondered how good I could have been. In those two years after I got hurt, I had a really hard time watching hockey because I’d be seeing guys that I had played with or against moving on to realize their potential, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to. Whether I ended up playing pro or not, I just had a hard time not knowing what my peak potential was.” What he didn’t know was that God would use his injury to chart a very different course for his life. “I knew nothing other than hockey at the time of my injury, but I did always trust God to lead me even when I had no clue what to do. After I got hurt, I opened my Bible randomly to Matthew 6 and read where it
says, ‘Do not worry, for who of you by worrying will add a single hour to your life?’ This became my life verse, and it gave me peace beyond understanding.” Today, Cline, who’s now thirty-two, heads up Restored, a Christian ministry he started that helps people overcome their addiction to pornography. Cline himself used to be a porn addict. He got hooked when he was only eleven and was well into his twenties before he finally got clean for good. Cline knows first-hand how easy it is to let porn get inside your head—and how hard it is to break free. Due in large part to the explosion of social media, long gone are the days when boys would sneak a peek at Playboy centrefolds by flashlight under the covers. With online porn now just a few clicks away, the
