Cameron Michael Fathauer

I’ve been thinking about a journey,

The one beneath the story told,

Not the tale you think you know.

The one that’s been there,

Long before I grew old.

It took me back to that summer:

Twenty years old writing at dawn

Praying in basements,

Journaling for recovery,

Buying tents for strangers who were just trying to hang on.

I didn’t know those were the same old signs:

Echoes of high school bible studies,

The orphanage drives,

That same conviction,

Still threading my earliest lives;

The same person the accident tried to erase

But couldn’t bury alive.

And that is what has me thinking

That maybe the reality we long to see

Isn’t wrapped in so much mystery—

It’s just Someone else entirely.

* * *

For ten years I handed people a cinematic arc: broken kid → car accident → miraculous new creation.

It made for a great story. People cried. I got invited to speak.

I wasn’t lying. I just didn’t understand the story I was telling.

The accident didn’t create a new Cameron.

It merely failed to erase the old one.

Long before anyone called me “inspiring,” I was the weird kid convincing the varsity basketball team to hear me preach sermons after practice.

I was the middle schooler creating t-shirts and running basketball events to raise money for an orphanage in Haiti. (If you want to watch a real throwback, check out this fun video I made in middle school describing the fundraiser).

I was the fifteen-year-old writing theology essays nobody asked for on my free WordPress website.

I never thought I was impressive. I just had this internal conviction about what to do next, and I did it. I didn’t wait for adults to approve the projects or give me permission to lead. I just moved forward, sensing God was establishing something even when I couldn’t articulate what.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ I’ve always been this way.

The accident didn’t give me that voice or sense of drive. It almost took it.

Most severe TBI patients need permanent supervision—only 30–40% ever regain functional independence. And of those that do, many have severe permanent deficits in executive function, processing speed, and personality change. Their former baseline rarely returns (Skandsen et al., 2010; Izzy et al., 2022).

Yet mine did return. Not because I willed it or worked harder than others in rehab. But because God, for reasons I don’t fully understand, preserved something that medically should have been lost.

Instead of the standard archetype: before → trauma → after

This is the true pattern of my post-TBI life: calling → interruption → restoration → continuation

I married Chelsea at eighteen during recovery—not because trauma made me bold, but because I believed in God’s vision for marriage. We had four children during law school not because the injury gave me unusual strength, but because God had already established patterns in my life that continued despite the interruption. The book I wrote at 26 reflected thinking that existed before September 2015, just refined through intense life experiences.

None of this is self-congratulation. It’s quite the opposite.

Because I didn’t achieve my way back to myself. Medical literature said higher-level thinking would be my greatest challenge. I had no business scoring well on the LSAT or the bar exam.

That was all grace.

Some may see my life as evidence that you can overcome anything with enough determination. But that’s not my testimony, and that message is not as helpful as it is common.

My testimony is simple and honest: God preserved what He’d already begun, despite trauma that should have ended it all. It’s more than an overcoming story. It’s a tale of preservation.

God had already established my steps long before that Lexus hit me. The accident tried to destroy that trajectory. Medical predictions said it should have worked.

But God’s faithfulness doesn’t depend on my skull staying intact. His purposes aren’t derailed by speeding cars. What He establishes, He maintains—even through coma, cognitive limitations, and neural-shattering that should’ve altered everything.

When someone overhears my story without looking at it closely, they may believe the wrong miracle:

“Boy overcomes catastrophic injury through grit and God.”

But that’s not the right miracle, which is far more humbling:

That God remained faithful to the child He made—even when a car tried to unmake him, even when science said the story was over.

That’s the testimony I’m learning to tell, and that’s the testimony I need to believe.

Because it’s less about my recovery, and everything about His refusal to let go.