After lifetime of supporting others, pastor embraces community’s help
Son relearning to walk, talk after brain injury
Pastor Scott George, founder of Central Florida’s largest nonprofit for the working poor, is pacing the halls of a brain-injury rehabilitation center in Atlanta, where he has spent nearly every day of the past month at his son’s bedside.
He pulls out his wallet and unfolds a worn 3-by-5-inch note card, staring at its handwritten message.
“We must accept finite disappointment but never lose infinite hope,” it reads, a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.
Of the hundreds of cards and notes — part of an outpouring of support for a man who has spent his life trying to help others — this message is the one he keeps with him. He reads it daily.
“I don’t even know who sent it,” he says, “but it reminds me that my goal is to live a life of giving people hope. That helps to make sense of this.”
In a room nearby, his eldest son, 29-year-old Austen George, a
Winter Park insurance broker engaged to be married two days after Christmas, is struggling to
relearn to walk, talk and function. It is a miracle, the doctors told his family, that he is alive at all.
At a September bachelor party for a friend in the Florida Keys, while jumping into a swimming pool, he struck the back of his head against the concrete lip. Though the injury didn’t look like much on the outside — it needed only a few stitches to repair the wound — inside his brain had bounced hard against his skull.
He was airlifted to a hospital in Miami, where he spent the next 40 days in a coma.
For the elder George, senior pastor at Pinecastle United Methodist Church, the time is symbolic. In the Bible, Jesus is said to have spent 40 days and 40 nights in the Judean desert, a period of testing. It is one of the small ways George sees a spiritual hand at work healing.
“I never asked why,” he says. “I’ve tried to ask the question: What? What do we do now? I really believe that this is ultimately going to help us to help other people.”
From the beginning, the recovery has been a community effort.
“They’re a very special family to a lot of people,” says Eric Gray, executive director of United Against Poverty, the Orlando nonprofit that George started as the Destiny Foundation nearly two decades ago. “He’s someone looking not just to maintain good works in
the community, but looking to launch good works. He’s a social pioneer.”
In 2001, disturbed by the number of working families who were struggling to cover basic rent, utilities, transportation and food, George opened a social service agency with a “hand up, not a hand out” motto. It offered job training, resume writing, help applying for benefits and a cost-share grocery store where food was heavily discounted but not free. Later it added a medical clinic. Adults had to register and invest their own time and effort in order to qualify for aid. George also recruited local churchgoers to volunteer.
But nine days after the Destiny Foundation opened came the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. With tourists afraid to fly, hotel-occupancy rates in Central Florida plunged from 66 percent to 44 percent, and the region’s unemployment rose to a seven-year high. Thousands of people lost their jobs.
The Destiny Foundation helped many of them, and by the time the Great Recession arrived in late 2007, some 10,000 people a month were pouring through its doors. When the recession also dried up donations, George sunk six figures of his own money into it and worked six months without a salary to keep it going.
The sacrifice nearly cost him his home, but the organization ultimately was saved through a merger, and George continued to work there until
mid-2016. In the process, he forged some powerful friendships that have blessed him in a time of need.
One volunteer put him in touch with the founder of the renowned Shepherd Center in Atlanta, which specializes in spinal cord and brain injury rehabilitation. Austen was transferred there in October.
John Rivers of 4Rivers Smokehouse and a longtime supporter, quickly set up JoinAustensArmy.com, a charitable fund for donations to cover Austen’s expected long-term recovery expenses once he is moved back home, hopefully in January.
Former UCF Athletic Director Todd Stansbury, now at Georgia Tech, and his wife, Karen, who used to work at Shepherd Center, invited Scott and his wife to stay at their home in Atlanta and brought them meals to the hospital.
George’s 400-member congregation in Pinecastle reached out to Peachtree Road United Methodist Church in Atlanta, which happened to have an empty, unfurnished house where George and his wife are now staying, free, for as long as they need. It’s five minutes from hospital.
“I’m looking at a stack of thank-you cards and notes from his congregation right now,” says the Rev. Bill Britt, the senior minister at Peachtree Road. “They’re inundating us, so I’m aware of how thankful the Orlando community is.” Friends in Maitland rented a U-Haul, filled it with donated
furniture and household items bought at Goodwill stores and drove it up to Atlanta a few weekends ago to furnish the place.
After 12-hour days by his son’s side, George said, it is a great comfort to have a place each night that feels a little like home.
His wife, Tammi George, has not been back to Orlando since the accident. Austen’s fiancée, Aubree Ringler, business development director for Baker Barrios Architects, only recently returned to her job.
And Scott George finally returned to the pulpit the last Sunday in October. It was the shortest — and most emotional — sermon in 40 years of preaching.
“I told them I was empty, but I was full of faith,” he says.
He’s now flying home on weekends and returning to Atlanta each Monday. He still doesn’t know if his son will fully recover. But in 70 days and counting, Austen has progressed to level 5 out of 10 on a recovery scale, a point where he is alert and can respond to commands. Last week he stood for the first time, and he now speaks in complete sentences.
“Dad, you smell like coffee,” he said one morning, as the father bent down to kiss his son.
“I know it doesn’t sound like much,” George says. “But it meant everything. I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s in there. We got our son back.’”