New York Giants outside linebacker Mark Herzlich before a game, Aug. 14, 2015. (Jeff Haynes/AP Images for Panini)
I have stood in some of the loudest places on earth.
When I played football both in college and professionally, there were packed stadiums that shook under my feet with the crowd cheering wildly behind me. There were locker rooms with teammates roaring after a win. On NFL Draft night, my whole future was hanging on a single phone call, and I still vividly recall the celebration after that ring.
But the room that changed my life was not loud at all — it was quiet, and I was hanging on every word shared by a young man from Ghana.
I was sitting at a Pro Athletes Outreach conference, surrounded by other professional athletes and their families. I had no idea I was about to hear one of the most impactful stories of my life, or that it would come not from a coach or a champion, but from a young man from Ghana.
To understand why his words hit me the way they did, you have to understand what was happening in my own life.
I had just beaten cancer. Doctors once told me I might never walk again, let alone carry a football. I fought my way back anyway, made it onto an NFL field, and even lifted a Super Bowl trophy over my head. On paper, I was living the dream. But a question kept following me around, quiet and steady. I had a platform now. People were listening when I spoke. But did I have something important to say?
I was not carrying that question alone. My wife, Danielle, sat right beside me, and she carried a story of her own. As a child, she had been hurt in ways no child ever should be. Two people, shaped by two very different battles, both wondering what God wanted us to do with everything we had survived.
Then the young man from Ghana stood up and began to speak.
He told us that when he was just a small boy, he had been sent to work on a fishing boat on Lake Volta with the promise of a better life and future that turned out to be a lie. By the time he fully understood the depth of the deception, it was too late. He was there not for a summer but for years. Long days on open water, dangerous work, no school, no games, no childhood at all. He was a child, and he was a slave forced to work in these dangerous conditions. For a long time, no one was coming for him.
But someone finally did. He was rescued by International Justice Mission, a team that works hand in hand with local police and courts to find children like him and set them free. And as he stood in front of us that day, he was not a broken young man, he was a free one. He spoke about the life he was building now, and he spoke about his faith in God.
I sat there with my heart cracked wide open. I turned and looked at Danielle; she looked back at me. Neither of us said a word, because we did not need to. We both simply knew — this was it. This problem was what the platform had been for all along.
That was more than 10 years ago now.
At first, we were advocates, telling anyone who would listen what we had learned. Then we became supporters, giving whatever we could to the work. And somewhere along the way, this stopped being something we did on the side and quietly became the thing we do.
Today, I get to serve with IJM full-time, leading a growing group of pro athletes and their families who have all decided the same thing: Their influence was never really theirs to keep. My job, put simply, is to help other athletes discover their purpose and then channel it toward something that will outlast them, to help build a world that is safer for the children, women and men who cannot yet protect themselves.
Mark Herzlich playing with a young boy. (Photo courtesy of IJM)
Some of the fiercest competitors I know, athletes who have won at the very top of their sport, have quietly handed their hearts to this same fight. IJM aims to help steward the gifts and platforms we’ve been given, aligning purpose with the pursuit of justice and restoration for the vulnerable.
NFL tight end Hunter Henry and his wife, Parker, went and saw the work with their own eyes in Kenya, and it would not let them go.
“After traveling to the IJM Kenya office this spring, Parker and I knew we wanted to continue doing what we could to support IJM,” Hunter said.
NFL quarterback Kirk Cousins still remembers the moment that the cause first reached him, as he listened to IJM’s founder, Gary Haugen, describing the battle.
“When I did hear Gary Haugen share … my heart was moved,” Kirk said.
And NHL defenseman Jaccob Slavin speaks about his success the same way I have slowly learned to speak about mine. This year alone, he won an Olympic gold medal with Team USA and then lifted the Stanley Cup, becoming one of only two Americans ever to do both in the same season. Through all of it, he keeps handing the glory back to God.
“The biggest thing that we’ve come to realize is that the resources, the money, and the platform that we have been given is a gift,” Jaccob said.
Every one of them will tell you the very thing I stumbled into that day: When you take what you have been given and use it to lift someone else, it finds its way back to you, many times over.
In the years since that conference, I have had the privilege of hearing harrowing stories from survivors like women in the Philippines describing being bought and sold. I have shaken hands with men who spent years trapped in brick kilns and rock quarries, breaking their bodies for people who treated them as less than human. You would expect those conversations to hold nothing but darkness. And the darkness is real, but it is not what I carry home.
What I carry home is their faith. Again and again, I have watched people who lost everything speak about God with a light in their eyes I can only call holy. They were not bitter; they were grateful. In the darkest place a person can land, their trust in God did not merely survive — it shined. I would walk in believing I was there to encourage them, and I would walk out knowing they had encouraged me.
Second Corinthians 1:3-4 says God comforts us in our pain so that we can turn and offer that same comfort to someone else. I did not truly understand those words until I lived them. My cancer. Danielle’s childhood. That young man’s years on the water. Those women. Those men in the quarries. None of it was wasted. All of it became fuel for the same fight.
Here is what I have come to believe with my whole heart: Every single one of us has a platform. Maybe yours is a stadium, and maybe it is a classroom, a locker room, a front porch, or a workplace. The size of it is never the point. The only question that matters is what you choose to do with it. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And so can you.
If you feel something stirring in you right now, do not let it fade before morning. Go learn about IJM’s Freedom to Play initative, and find your place in this fight. Somewhere out there, a child is waiting to be free. Your platform, whatever it looks like, just might be part of the reason they finally are.
Mark Herzlich is the Director of Team Freedom at International Justice Mission, where he mobilizes more than 100 pro athlete families to help end human trafficking and protect children around the world. A former New York Giants linebacker and Super Bowl champion, Mark believes every person was made to belong and to be free.
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