Video Transcript: Jordan Rodgers - iamsecond.com

So there's a Nike ad from the 80s that was really inspirational to me. There's a  woman, it's a close up on her. She's running, sweating, and she says, three  years ago, I was overweight had high blood pressure, diabetes, and I was  knocking on death's door, and years later, here I am training for the Boston  Marathon. The camera starts to pan out. She's running on this wide country  road, and it says, Who says you can't run away from your problems? I showed  signs of being a good kid. Loved being active, loved getting outside, riding my  bike, playing basketball, just getting out, playing with friends, but things you  know, started to get squirrely. I didn't quite feel like I fit in. There was just turmoil, it certainly led me to want to change how I felt. If I were to personify addiction, it  would be charming, charismatic leader. Silver tongue got many to follow it  dominant, not allowing attention to go anywhere else, promising better things.  Better thing always around the corner. It's always something more sweet. So  heroin entered my life when I had just turned 15. We were at one of our friend's  house one night, and a buddy of mine was like snorting something, and he  came up and he had this look. It was just like contentment. He called it Shiva.  We snorted it right there off the hood of a car that night. It was one of the most  amazing feelings I've ever felt. Get this warm, tingly sensation that sort of  washes over your face and then over your body. I just had this like black hole in  my soul, and I just wanted to change the way I felt. I just wanted to get high in  new and different ways, drink like mushrooms, Xanax, Valium pills, horse  tranquilizers. Wanted to go all in. I was living in a pink motel. I would go in the  bathroom with the sort of green tinged fluorescent lighting that would kind of  flicker off and on above me. I'd take the syringe, I'd fill up a cap, draw up. I'd  take a spoon, take a piece of black tar heroin, drop it in, the spoon, pull out the  plunger and the rig, and mix it up, put it back in, and then draw up, and then fire  it in. I feel nauseous thinking about it. Do a shot of coke and your heart goes the million miles an hour, really, as soon as I hit the plunger, I would just it would like be a vomit button, that I would just puke sometimes before I even could get the  rig out of my arm. And it was this, yo yo. Just go up and down and up for days,  up days on end, no sleep, no food, water. Full blown heroin addict tells me,  sorry, man, none of us want to hang out with you. We're afraid you're gonna die  when you've got heroin addicts telling you that they're afraid to hang out with  you, you might have issues. Everybody around me was telling me, man, you  would just be so much better off if you would just stop doing drugs. And every  time that I stopped doing drugs, I didn't feel great, like everybody told me I would I felt worse. I felt torn up. I felt like I wanted to die. I thought about death often. I  had been court ordered to a treatment facility. I waited in jail to get into this  treatment facility, and I was acting a fool. I was I was crazy. I was acting smarter  than everybody else. I thought I knew it all. I was breaking some rules, you  know, they didn't really apply to me. They never had. They basically came to me  one day and they said, Jordan, we've decided that you are gonna be discharged

early, and I thought, great, you full see that I'm smart, that I deserve to get out of here, and they say, No, actually, an officer is here to arrest you and escort you  back to jail. They take me to county jail and I was in a purple jail cell. Was with a bunch of guys, and two guys were arguing over a toilet paper roll. At that  moment, I thought, This is not what I'm made for. I absolutely deserve to be  here, but I don't belong here, and I no longer had the drugs and alcohol to blame it on. I was completely stone cold sober, and here I was sitting in a jail cell, and  I'm facing some serious, serious consequences, and several years in prison at  this point, and I knew that beyond a shadow of a doubt, no matter how hard my  consequences were at that point, that I was going to shoot dope again if  something drastic didn't change. God, whoever you are, whatever you are. I  need help. My life has drastically got to change. I was in that moment, broken,  and that's when I hit rock bottom. Most people say drugs are your problem. Stop them. Well, really, for a dope fiend like myself, drugs are a solution. You take  away those drugs, and now we've got problems. I thank God that I had 13  months of incarceration, and I needed every minute of that to have a fighting  chance. And so it's a fight. I got out. I got released into a homeless shelter. I just  knew I needed help. I still wanted to shoot dope. The world is a trigger. When  you're early in recovery, drive by a gas station, you walk into a bathroom, this is  a good place to shoot dope. I needed to do something drastic, trying to find  places and groups to go to to get some hope, and I just wasn't getting a lot of it.  And so I said I would go to one last group, and I wanted to look for a sponsor.  Need to look for a mentor to help guide me. I'm getting to my wit's end at this  point, and so I look around, I didn't really hear anything crazy inspirational that I  thought, Yes, I want to give my life to one of these people to help walk me  through recovery. And I walked outside, and I surveyed the area, everybody's  out there smoking cigarettes, and I just thought, Man, I just don't think I can do  this. I don't think recovery is for me. There wasn't a lot of hope in that moment.  So I start walking in my car, and this dude called out my name. Says, Hey,  Jordan, do we need to talk? And I just, I was speechless. I said, yeah, yeah, I  do. He said, Hey, I heard, heard you got a little tripped up. I'm gonna walk with  you. I'm gonna guide you through this process where you at in the work Call me  tomorrow. Let's get into it. And this dude just took me under his wing. He  showed me the love of Christ, whether he knew it or not, and walked me into  recovery, into freedom, and just snatched me up at one of the most integral  parts of my life, and I'll be forever grateful for that Man. It was a song that my  mom sent me while I was locked up. Said something to the effect of, I cry out to  you, Lord, as I am desperate in my plea, save me from my prison so that the  righteous may gather about me and sing of your good works. It's when I'm in  those moments and when I'm crying out in the desperation God's working in that and I don't always feel close to it. There are a lot of things I don't have answers  for. Why am I still here? I've had to bury friends who I think are much better 

dudes than I could possibly be. They were kind and gentle and giving. So I don't  have those answers. I know that he loves me. I trust that he knows the plan that  he set out for me, and so I'm comforted by that in those messy moments, that's  

where God's doing his biggest work is in the mess. My name is Jordan Rogers  and I am Second.