Ben Askren made a career out of being hard to beat. An Olympic wrestler turned UFC fighter, he was famous for never giving an inch. For 15 years, that included church. He went every Sunday with his wife Amy, and he was upfront about the terms: "I'm not Christian, but I'll support you."
In June 2025, severe pneumonia put him on a ventilator. His lungs failed so completely that doctors placed him on the transplant list, and he received a double lung transplant. He spent 45 days in a medically induced coma and lost around 50 pounds. "There was multiple times where they thought I was dead," he said afterward. "Like I was dead, that's the other side."
Then he woke up, and the man who had politely declined Jesus for a decade and a half found the question already settled. "I woke up, and I just decided I was a Christian," he told FloWrestling. "It was really weird when I woke up, I'm like, 'I gotta do it.'" He didn't argue his way there and didn't need to. God met him in the one place his toughness couldn't reach.
Behind that moment stood years of quiet faithfulness. "Amy has always been a believer, and we have been going to church together for the last 16 years, and for the last 16 years, she has been praying for me," Askren wrote. Nearly eight months after the surgery, those prayers were answered in the water: "I got baptized last weekend, it was even more special because I was able to do it with my wife!!"
He came out of the hospital with new lungs and a new purpose, and he is plain about what comes next: "I plan on spending the rest of my days spreading the word of Jesus and helping as many people as I can."
If someone you love keeps saying "not for me," Ben Askren's story is a reason to keep praying. Fifteen years of polite refusal was not the end of his story, and it doesn't have to be the end of anyone else's. Jesus can reach a person no argument ever could, even on the far side of a coma.