Bethany Hamilton grew up in Hawaii with the ocean at the centre of her life. Surfing was not simply recreation. By 13 she was already competing seriously and wanted to become a professional surfer.
On 31 October 2003, while surfing off Kauai, a shark attacked her and severed her left arm. She survived, but the physical loss appeared to place the future she had imagined in direct conflict with the body she now had.
For many people, returning to the ocean after such an attack would have seemed impossible. Bethany returned to the water on 26 November, less than a month later.
Returning did not mean that everything worked immediately. She had to relearn balance, paddling, getting onto the board and competing with one arm. Techniques that had once been automatic had to be rebuilt. She fell. She tried again.
Two years after the attack she won the US national under-18 surfing championship.
Bethany’s Christian faith is not a later addition to the story. It is part of how she describes both the loss and what followed. She has written that shortly before the attack she had prayed with her mother about wanting her life to mean more than surfing and wanting to honour God with it. She did not know what that would mean. Two weeks later, she lost her arm.
Her interpretation is not that the attack itself was good. Rather, she came to believe that the life available to her after it still had purpose. Surfing remained part of that life, but it was no longer the whole definition of it.
She became a professional surfer, author, speaker, wife, mother and mentor. Her story was told in Soul Surfer and later in the documentary Bethany Hamilton: Unstoppable. Through all of those roles, faith remained central to the way she understood fear, courage and purpose.
The Ambassador’s Reflection
The part that moves me is not only that Bethany went back onto a surfboard. It is that she went back to the place where her life had changed.
Fear had every reason to tell her that the ocean was no longer safe, that the dream was finished and that the person she had been could not exist anymore. She did not have to pretend the shark attack never happened. She had to learn how to live with what had happened and still move towards life.
Faith was part of that decision for her. It gave her a way of seeing a future beyond the piece of the story she would never have chosen.
Sometimes a New Life does not mean getting the old life back. Bethany could not get her arm back. She built from where she was. What looked like the remaining part of her story became a whole story of its own.
