How God Turned Former NFL Star’s Tragedy Into Purpose
By Movieguide® Contributor
Former NFL running back Matt Forté joined the “Jesus Calling Podcast” to share a tragedy helped him find his purpose outside of football.
“When I was a freshman at Tulane, one of my good friends on the team was Brandon Spencer,” Forté said. “He was a senior and on defense. So he’s the older guy that I looked up to because I was a freshman. His senior year ended, and he was on his way to possibly getting drafted or getting picked up by an NFL team. He had his degree, he had graduated, so even if football didn’t work out or even if it did, he had a really good degree behind him to be able to continue his life and purpose.”
“He was sitting in his car outside his girlfriend’s apartment, and a jealous ex-boyfriend or someone came up and ended his life. That was hard to deal with because at the funeral, I saw Brandon had two children,” he continued. “They would never grow up to see their father do great things or be able to hug him. The future of their lives has all been changed because of gun violence. And not just his children, but his mom and his family and everyone who was there. And you see how that affects not just that person’s future, but the future and the lives of everyone who’s connected to him.”
It wasn’t until later on in the NFL when Forté noticed “that on the news there’s a lot of gun violence that they talk about each and every day or weekend, especially in the summertime. And I just kept seeing the same pattern over and over again. And knowing up close and personal what happened with Brandon Spencer at Tulane and seeing what that can do to a family, and just seeing it at large happening every day in Chicago, I wanted to use up my platform in the NFL to start a foundation that’s main goal is gun violence prevention.”
Forté then began his What’s Your Forté Foundation. Its “mission is to invest in the equitable economic advancement of youth and families through partnership and purposeful relationships.”
The foundation provides financial training, offers a career opportunity camp and reaches at-risk youth.
“Being a former football player is great, and like, people remember those things, but when you touch their life, it’s something that really takes some stress of off them and expands what they want to do. It helps them out. That’s what they’ll remember, and that’s exactly what I want to do,” Forte said in 2021 of his foundation’s work.
In a recent interview with Sports Spectrum, Forte talked about the important balance between our faith and our works.
“It’s a delicate balance. Your faith has to have works. You know, James tells us, ‘Faith without works is dead,’ like a body without breath,” Forte began. “So, it doesn’t hang everything on the works, but we do have to actively show and live out our faith because that is what it is.
“Otherwise, it’s not faith. It’s just you kind of, you believe something, but you’re not actively showing it,” he continued. “That is what becomes contagious and allows other people to see something different about that guy or that girl. And you have to walk it out. You have to walk out your salvation as you continue to grow in Christ. And if not, we’re kind of spinning our wheels in the mud.”
