Lord Jesus, if you are willing to use me, give me life

As he lay close to death on a dusty Helmand road in Afghanistan in 2007, Pte Derek Derenalagi made a simple plea to God. Derenalagi, had just been thrown 30 yards from his vehicle after it was blown up by a 44-gallon oil drum, filled with explosive, scrap metal and nails, “I remember everything because I was conscious for two hours after I lost my legs,” he said. “It wasn’t easy because I was struggling to breathe and I didn’t believe I would make it. My mind was overwhelmed with fear and I just looked up to the sky and said a prayer. I said, 'Lord Jesus Christ, if you are willing to use my life to motivate and encourage others, then please give me life again’. He was airlifted to Camp Bastion and taken to the operating theatre. It was only when he regained consciousness from an induced coma that he became aware of how close he came to death. “I woke up from a coma nine days later and the doctors came to speak to me and told me that I had been pronounced dead,” he said. “They said they were preparing to put my body in the body bag when one of the medical staff realised I had a slight pulse.” On the last day of August 2012 at the London 2012 Paralympic Games, he took his place in the Olympic Stadium for the final of the men's discus. The 37 year old, was roared on by the crowd from his adopted home of Great Britain as he stepped on to the field on his prosthetic legs and, although he did not win a medal, for Derek it was just being there that counted. He would have loved to mount the podium but recognised that his mere appearance at the Paralympics verged on miraculous. In the five years that had ensued, he helped galvanise public support for those seriously wounded in the service of the country. He was pivotal, indeed, in the creation of Help for Heroes after the charity’s founders, Emma and Bryn Parry, visited him at Selly Oak Hospital and found themselves moved by his dignity in the face of extreme adversity. “It was devastating for both of us to see somebody so injured when we visited him in hospital,” Emma Parry remembered. “But to see him five years later, having battled everything to get through to the Paralympics, is absolutely extraordinary.” His resolve to reach the Paralympics was forged in the grimmest of those hospital days. Watching the Beijing Games from his bed, he decided that his ambition was to wear Britain’s colours at London 2012 and worked indefatigably at identifying his strongest sport, the discus.