Video Transcription

From somebody who thought I was going to end up as a statistic because growing up without a dad being diagnosed with SPD and ADHD and whatever else you know it's like “oh then you're going to be more likely to have addiction and you're just a product of your environment.” These are all things and lies I believed.

One of my favorite quotes I've ever heard was one word from God is more powerful than a lifetime of lies from the enemy. And it's true.

So I’m Sawyer. I moved here about five or six years ago. My dad died when I was very young. I grew up with the stepdad that wasn't the best, let's just say and so I really had no understanding my worth or who I was or what my place in the world was.

I'm living with my grandparents and I saw their lives. My pappy was a Southern Baptist pastor. It was his love that I saw for people who wronged him that really made me understand like what the love of God looks like and I asked him one day, I said, “How can you love some people who have consistently done you wrong?

He just said, “God told me to love him. What they do is between them and God.” That was one thing that really stuck with me.

After he passed, like I hit a low, I think I did heroin for the first time. I shot up and it was just looking for an escape. Anything to get away from what I'm dealing with, what I have to focus on.

Little while after, I chewed on a fentanyl patch. I was living out of a van and I was working full time. I was going to college. Found myself living in a trap house in the winter because that's better than van and Michigan winters. I remember saying it's like “I just don't want to feel anything anymore.

I tried crack cocaine for the first time. Farther and farther down the rabbit hole of just misery, depression, no idea who I was. I was looking in the mirror just like understanding where it was coming from but just not knowing how to get there.

After that, you know, I was moving drugs from point A to point B while smoking 'em and you know, after a while, found myself in Florida trapping pounds from Oregon to there.

I was going to a store, got pulled over. They found a dab pen I forgot I had under the front seat a big thing down there in Florida and so they arrested me. Went to jail and I was cooperative and so they marked it down to 40 days time served. I was just sick of living one foot and one foot out. Just my entire life it seemed in there.

I was able to read a lot of Philippians because I knew that to be like Paul's prison epistle even though most of his writings were in prison but that one really spoke to me.

I turned twenty-six which is a big year for me because my dad died at twenty-six. I didn't think I'd outage him and the thought crossed my mind. I have to be somebody now that my dad could look up to. So, I went back. I got involved with church. I ended up getting completely clean in November about six years ago now.

Since then, I just found community there like people who gone through it. One of the most impactful things, there was a guy named Don. He ran a Celebrate Recovery and he was another biker dude and I remember to my first year sober and it was the first time I seen a grown man cry. That was pretty intense because I always understood it as you know like real men just they tough it out. They work through it. But you know God showed us that he cares. You know even he cried when someone he cared was dead at the time you know even though he knew that there was power to raise that man from the dead. He still wept for him and he still cared. and He you know he cares for us deeply. You know he cries over us all the time.

Since then, you know, I just been able to like they started me driving, funny enough, the kids to get to the church. So, I went from driving drugs from point A to point B to getting kids to church. They gave me a year to kind of, you know, get my legs underneath me, started me in youth counseling with the youth, working there, doing that.  I've recently graduated Explorations Bible College.

I've learned that God loves me. I, like, it was like the first time I actually realized my worth. You know, like I'm worthy of having a purpose. It's like I rediscovered my value and my worth because I never really had that poured into me and that's what God's me through the church, through men of God, who've been through it, who know what's happened.

So I was in worship and I was going through stuff and all these doubts and insecurities were coming against me. I just felt him say. He's like word for word. “Listen here boy. You don't make yourself worthy. I've made you worthy. Now walk in it.”

And I was like “Oh. Yes sir.”

And it's true like he's made me worthy like he has deemed us of such value like we're worthy because God has deemed us worthy because He died for us. That worthy like He experienced death even death on a cross so that we could be made the righteousness of God so he could have relationship. He didn't have to do that and He did because He cares that deeply for us.

You know we were separated from Him. I had no life, no purpose, no worth outside of Him and He was like, “No, you have worth and I'll prove it to you.”