What Makes a Man Useful When His Strength Is Gone? Dr Dillon Caswell
Dillon Caswell on NFL veteran with ALS, his mother’s devastating illness and an unexpected journey into the Catholic Church taught him to serve beyond his own plans
When Dominic asked Dillon Caswell to name a story of heroism that still lights him up, Caswell chose a man who can no longer move, breathe independently or speak with his natural voice.
Tim Green once built his life around physical power. He became a Syracuse University football legend, a first-round NFL draft pick and a defensive player for the Atlanta Falcons. He later worked as a lawyer, broadcaster and author.
ALS eventually took away his ability to move.
The disease also forced Green to rely on a ventilator and communicate through technology that tracks his eyes across a screen. He selects letters by holding his gaze on them, slowly constructing words one character at a time.
Yet Caswell said Green continues to write, raise money and serve the people around him.
“He has every reason to give up,” Caswell told Dominic during an episode of “Heroic Stories.” “But instead, he’s chosen to boast in his suffering.”
A MAN WHO WRITES WITH HIS EYES
Green wrote the foreword to Caswell’s book by selecting every letter with his eyes. He has also written three books through the same process, including a New York Times bestseller, Caswell said.
Through the Tackle ALS foundation, Green has helped raise more than $5 million for research.
Those accomplishments matter. Yet Caswell said Green’s love for his family reveals even more about the man.
“When his kids are around, the first thing he says to them is, ‘Love you,’” Caswell said. “He types out, ‘I love you.’ And then he gets into the conversation.”
Green’s condition gives him a long list of reasons to feel anger, resentment or despair. Caswell said his friend has chosen another response.
“My job is to glorify the Lord in every opportunity that I get,” Green told him.
That witness brought Caswell back to a passage from St. Paul that shaped his understanding of heroism: suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope.
“To me, that’s a hero,” Caswell said. “And I can’t think of any person in my life right now that’s more deserving than him to be called a hero.”
Dominic pressed him further.
“What is it about him that really clicked with you?” he asked. “Tell us more about your story and why someone like Tim is so heroic to you.”
The answer began years before Caswell met Green.
WHEN THE PLAN DISAPPEARED
Before becoming Catholic in 2022, Caswell had built a demanding professional life around sports and physical performance.
He worked toward a board specialization as a sports physical therapist. He treated patients, taught as a professor and worked with multiple athletic teams. He believed he was building the future he wanted.
Then COVID-19 halted much of his work.
“For the first time in my adult life, I was forced to pause,” Caswell said.
Without his packed schedule, he faced a question he had avoided.
“Lord, what am I supposed to do?” he prayed. “I haven’t asked you this yet. I’ve been doing what I think I should be doing, but I’ve never asked you what I should be doing.”
He attempted to read the Bible from beginning to end. Like many readers, he reached the early books of the Old Testament and stalled.
“I thought this was supposed to be happy,” he recalled.
Then he felt called to write, an idea he found almost absurd.
Caswell grew up with dyslexia. He attended specialized classes and struggled with sentence structure and punctuation. He entered health care partly because clinical language relies heavily on abbreviations.
“The Lord put on my heart, ‘I want you to write,’” he said.
His early reflections on language expanded into a book about hope, goals, personal agency and obedience. While working on the manuscript, Caswell continued dreaming about a career connected to professional football.
He prayed for an opportunity to work with an NFL player.
That night, a friend called. Tim Green needed help.
“I prayed for it, and it’s right here in front of me,” Caswell remembered thinking.
Their relationship showed Caswell what hope looks like when physical strength disappears.
“Physically, as he has declined, his spirit has actually gotten better,” Caswell said.
A FAMILY CRISIS AT 17
Caswell’s connection to Green’s story also grew from an earlier wound.
During the summer after his high school graduation, his mother underwent surgery for thyroid cancer. Complications left her unable to speak or move as she once had. Her cognitive abilities were also severely affected.
Caswell was 17.
Before the surgery, his mother had appeared almost indestructible. She worked nights as a nurse, came home to prepare her sons for school, managed their athletic schedules, cooked dinner and returned to work.
“My mom to me was this unbreakable woman,” he said.
After surgery, she could no longer prepare her own meal.
“To see someone you love go through that, what does that do to you?” Dominic asked. “How did you handle it? What were you thinking at the time?”
Caswell said the crisis forced him to grow up rapidly. His father was attending truck-driving school to change careers and support the family. Caswell began accompanying his mother to appointments, asking questions and helping her access care.
He had been recruited for college football and basketball. Those ambitions faded behind a more immediate responsibility.
“What was more important to me was being there for my mom,” he said.
The experience taught him “what it means to die to yourself to serve others.”
His family had lived paycheck to paycheck, but his parents trained their sons to search for joy during hardship. That habit helped Caswell ask a different question when suffering arrived.
“What is the hope in this?” he said. “Where is the perseverance? Where is the character development that we can turn this negative into a positive? And what’s the next move that we can do?”
A FATHER’S PROMISE, FULFILLED 32 YEARS LATER
Caswell also credited his father with building a foundation of discipline and service.
As a child, Caswell followed him into the garage. His father handed him scraps of wood, nails and small jobs that kept him occupied while teaching him how to care for tools and finish a task.
Years earlier, Caswell’s father had worked as a custodian at a Catholic church. He developed a relationship with a priest named Father Brown and promised that his future children would be baptized Catholic.
The baptisms never happened during their childhood.
Decades later, Caswell called his parents and told them he had entered the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults and planned to receive baptism at the Easter Vigil.
Afterward, the priest who baptized Caswell mentioned Father Brown during a homily. It was the same priest Caswell’s father had known.
Caswell called his father with the news.
“Thank you for making me good on my promises,” his father told him. “I promised Father Brown that my boys would be baptized into the church. And 32 years later, I’m half good on that promise.”
THE INVITATION THAT OPENED A DOOR
Caswell said his wife, Brandy, also became one of his heroes.
She had served as a Catholic missionary for seven years. While they were dating, she asked about his faith and offered a simple invitation.
“Why don’t you come do a Catholic Mass with me this weekend?” she asked.
Caswell went. He found the Mass poetic, rooted and reverent.
“I felt like I was home,” he said.
He returned alone the next weekend because he wanted to learn whether the feeling came from the Mass or from sitting beside a woman he loved.
The feeling remained.
He entered RCIA without telling Brandy at first. He wanted his decision to have a foundation strong enough to endure beyond their relationship.
His first attempt at finding the class became a tour through the parish campus. He wandered into a session about discerning whether a guardian angel or a demon was speaking.
“Wow, this is heavy for a person that’s considering entering the church,” he remembered thinking.
He eventually found the correct room. Three of its four chairs were already occupied.
“I think that’s your seat,” the instructor told him.
Caswell sat down.
HARD QUESTIONS AND AN HONEST CHURCH
Caswell’s path into Catholicism still included serious objections.
The clergy sexual abuse crisis stood at the center of them.
He believed the Catholic Church claimed to carry the truth of Jesus Christ. He needed to understand how such devastating evil could exist within it.
The answers he received from Brandy and his RCIA instructors mattered because they refused to avoid the issue.
“They faced it head on,” Caswell said. “They owned it.”
Their willingness to call the abuse evil, acknowledge human failure and face difficult questions helped him trust the community.
“I can ask the hard questions, and they’re not running away from them,” he said.
A LIFE WITHOUT A FIVE-YEAR PLAN
Near the end of the conversation, Dominic asked Caswell whom he sought to serve beyond God and his immediate family.
Caswell began with obedience.
“I’m here to serve wherever the Lord is asking me to serve,” he said.
A friend had recently asked about his five-year plan. Caswell answered that he had learned to stop building his life around one.
“I’ve learned to be obedient to what the Lord is asking of me,” he said.
That obedience brought him into sports rehabilitation, where he works with athletes who often hear long explanations of everything wrong with their bodies.
Caswell wants to return hope to that process.
“The physical training matters, the conditioning matters, the rehab matters,” he said. “But taking care of the spirit, the mind and the body” also reminds athletes that they remain resilient and created in the image of God.
His work has expanded to include members of U.S. Special Forces, Catholic speaking and a book he once felt unable to write.
He still struggles with commas and semicolons. Editors can handle those, he joked. His task is to offer the ideas placed in front of him.
A man may lose movement, speech and plans for the future. He may still love his children first. He may still write books one letter at a time. He may still enter a room with joy. He may still serve.
And he may still choose hope.