It started with a prayer.

A quiet minute alone, a time for reflection and acceptance. An appeal for strength, for clarity, for guidance.

Spencer Shrader is used to making time for those moments. Steadfast and resolute in his faith, Shrader leans on prayer regularly to guide him through all areas of life. He carries himself with a calm kind of confidence and the peacefulness of someone who knows everything will work out how it's supposed to.

What does someone like that do, though, when they suffer a traumatic injury? When they have to endure a kind of pain they never imagined, when their life flips upside down with no warning?

How do you justify that as part of some greater plan?

For Shrader, it's simple: you just do.

So, Shrader's moment of prayer after he tore his ACL and MCL in his kicking leg in a collision during a PAT attempt in Week 5 of the 2025 NFL season – while he was on pace for the best season of his young career – wasn't born out of desperation. It wasn't in anger or sadness. Instead, it was in contemplation and introspection, a moment for the 26-year-old kicker to realize who he wanted to be.

He wanted to be strong.

"When you have a strong faith, and that's your rock and that's your backbone, you're always looking at the silver lining of situations," Shrader explained, two-and-a-half months later. "Is this going to be something that builds you up, that makes you stronger, that prepares you? Are you going to be able to get physically stronger, mentally stronger, emotionally stronger through this? Or is this going to be something that derails you and prevents you from growing in those areas?"

It took a couple of weeks after the injury for Shrader to fully shift his mindset into one of acceptance, and to process that his everyday life as an NFL kicker would be drastically changing. But, as a kicker, Shrader had already trained himself to be mentally unflappable and routine-oriented down to the most minute detail. That mindset doesn't just go away.

"You just have to reframe everything," he said. "And then really it just becomes like it was before, just a different procedure. So every day now I'm coming in, I'm getting better, I'm rehabbing, I'm still seeing the guys, I'm still in the team culture, I'm still going to meetings. My role obviously has changed, I'm not on the field anymore, but I'm preparing myself as if I was."

Since that fateful Sunday in October, Shrader has been doing everything he possibly can to get back to full strength. He was given an approximate timetable of nine to 12 months for full recovery but, ever the competitor, quickly set his sights on getting back in six to nine months instead.

"It really just depends on the individual and how fast your body is healing and what you're doing as far as your rehab modalities," Shrader, who remains under contract with the Colts and intends to come back healthy for the 2026 season, said. "So it's kind of a moving timeline, but so far everything's been going super fast.

"I try to compete with myself every day in trying to get my body back to where it needs to be. I do my rehab here, and then I go home and do red light on the knee, I'll do vitamin E oil on the scars. I have some different treatments that I'll do to try to prevent the stiffness so I can come back the next and continue to raise (the bar)."

As of the beginning of January, Shrader had already transitioned back into the weight room, with the next benchmarks being running and then kicking. There's still no strict timeline for any point of Shrader's recovery, though, because it's so dependent on the individual. For many people, that would be a difficult and intimidating obstacle to overcome – but not for Shrader, who doesn't need anything but his own goals to motivate him.

And those silver linings Shrader mentioned? Well, he found three of them. He recognized that being strong doesn't just mean having a good kicking leg, so he put just as much effort into strengthening his mental fortitude and learning about his anatomy as he did in the literal rehabilitation process.

"Those three things, the physical strengthening of learning about my body, what's happening physiologically, biologically, and then getting myself back to a point where I'm ready to play again – the emotional strengthening of going through such a traumatic event and understanding how many people go through that," Shrader explained. "(You can) use that to strengthen you. You're going through a trial, no one wants to go through that. Well, that can still strengthen you for the future trials that are going to be inevitable in a long career."

Whether it was asking his surgeon questions – and learning every little detail about his procedure – or working diligently with the Colts' training room staff, Shrader was fully present and involved in everything he possibly could be when it came to rehabbing. He'd always been curious about health and wellness, and his injury presented him with the opportunity to dive more deeply into that interest.

"Our bodies are such a gift, and it's so cool to just – you get one body, so why not maximize it," he said. "That's what you do everything with. So I learned all about the knee, different ligaments in the knee, like why can't my ACL heal itself, but my MCL can?"

Being able to fully invest in learning about his body and how it works was another way for Shrader to get back on track mentally; to put it bluntly, he needed something to focus on. He wasn't practicing, he wasn't playing, he wasn't being pulled into meetings left and right anymore. So, why not find a way to still be productive and continue to better himself?

Learning about his body in such an in-depth way also opened the door for Shrader to discover the power of one's mind. Of course, he knew about the power of one's thoughts thanks to both his faith and his mental discipline as a kicker, but this was different. This time, he realized the tangible effects of his positive thoughts.

"Your mind is what controls your body, and I don't want to sound too pseudoscience, but you can actually heal yourself with a more positive mindset," Shrader said. "You're consistently giving your body positive feedback of like, 'We're going to be okay, this is just temporary, we're going to get back, we're going to get stronger,' and then your neurons are what respond to that. That's what they talk about with mind-to-muscle connection in the weight room...(it's) the same thing when you're recovering and rehabbing every day."

Shrader also sought out teammates who had gone through similar injuries, and they checked in on him – in fact, quarterback Daniel Jones, who sustained a torn ACL in 2023, was one of the first people to reach out to Shrader after his injury. And punter Rigoberto Sanchez, who tore his Achilles in 2022, became even more of a mentor to Shrader as the nine-year veteran helped the young kicker navigate the ups and downs of the rehab process.

"You ask any guy in the locker room that's played long enough, everyone's going through something," Shrader said. "Rigo was big with that. We had conversations all the time about his process, his mentality through that, and that really helped me get better."

Thanks to the support of his teammates, and other kickers around the league, not once since his injury has Shrader felt alone or isolated. He quickly learned he always had a place to go to for encouragement, and that he had a team full of friends who truly cared about his well-being. There, again, is another silver lining.

In a way, that's really what the last two-and-a-half months have been for Shrader: a walk of faith and a search for silver linings. With his own determination and belief, he's strengthened himself physically, emotionally and mentally. He's learned new things, broadened his perspective and proven to himself he can stay the course through a difficult time, all while remaining true to himself.

And it all started with a prayer.