You Are Loved | Losing It All But Gaining Everything | Jody

You are loved. My goal is to share people's incredible stories in the hopes of encouraging you to keep going, no matter how hard it is, and to show you how loved you are by your heavenly Father. You are about to hear Jody's story. Multiple people that Jody loved died of an overdose, including six soldiers he served in combat with. It drove him to alcohol, which led to a lot of brokenness. Jody thought he was functioning because he was financially providing for his family, but really, everything was a mess. Eventually, he lost it all, but he learned to lean on God and follow the path that was laid out for him. Watch to see where the Lord led him. So tell me a little bit about yourself. My name is Jody Harris. I reside in Blount County. I am currently married. We have a rich family of six children, ranging from 27 to 10 years old. Awesome. We have four grandchildren also, so there is a kid in every quarter. I love it. I think we came to Blount County in 2000, and I want to say 16, and up until 2023, I had spent my whole life overseas, either military or private security, so about 30 years of combined service there. In all of that, what you will hear some of the military stories is up until 2012, I was what I referred to as a functional alcoholic. In my mind, however, what I thought was functional and what everyone around me thought was functional was two different things. So for me, up until 2012, and I will say up until 2012, because in 2012, as a friend had asked me to go to church with him, I had not been to church in 20 years, and I was like, this really is not my thing, but sure, for you, I'll do you a favor. So we go to this small country church. There's probably 25 people in there. At that time, I had been living in a city, Lexington, Kentucky, for 10 years at that point, and I really didn't even want to be there. A guy gets up. He starts speaking about salvation, how he used to be a drunk, how he was a brawler, he was a bad father, he was a bad friend, and I was just like, wow, I immediately started to see myself. So nothing really happened then. We left, and my friend was like, hey, man, the Lord's telling me that I need you to come back with me tonight. At that point, I didn't know the Lord, so I was just like, sure, I'm leaving tomorrow anyway, and we go there, and there's another man there. He starts talking about this guy that was Saul, who became Paul, tells the same story, a different man, and starts talking about all the trials in his life, and how he was an alcoholic, and next thing you know, these feet get up and take me to the altar, and for once in my life, nothing was rehearsed. I thought I had some things I wanted to say when I got up there, but

truly, all I said was, God, I want to be loved, and I felt a gentleman, a good friend, who was a Christian, a believer, pressed his hand on my back, and when he pressed his hand on my back, I felt something that I didn't know what was then, but I know what is now come into my body. It was just like a gush, like just a renewal of strength, and from that moment, I stood up, and I left that day, and I put down the vodka that I could drink a bottle of a day, and I could drink a case of beer a day, all those things, just put it down, cold turkey, in 2012. That's amazing. God just removed all of that from you. He just purified you in that moment. Yeah, so from there, of course, I became a believer. I want to mention some things that happened before there that I think is really important, because up into 2012, at this point, I would be on my second marriage. I would have a son who I had really never raised, who's now 27 years old and has just relapsed and who I think is in another recovery home as we speak right now. So I will say that there were a lot of things that happened during that time. I actually lost my first wife to suicide slash overdose in turn because of the way that we chose to live our lives and then come back from combat in 2007 and I was in charge of about 48 soldiers there. Of course I wasn't a Christian and we dealt with things the way that men dealt with things or think that the way you should deal with them which was our fists and the bottle and within so many years six of my soldiers slash friends committed suicide with overdose. So it was at that point from 2012 on that God started showing me that man you've been a leader your whole life. You've used your qualities for your own benefit and your own gain. I have equipped you with college education. I have equipped you with certifications. I've equipped you for all these things that you thought one day you would sit at that corporate seat which I did and I got there and it just did not work. Ethically it was right on paper but morally the things they wanted me to do was far outside of what God told me I was as a Christian man, a husband and a friend. So in March of 2023 I was still hesitant about leaving that corporate job slash money behind and God said your boss who has loved you like a brother and even visited your family and had you in his house I'll make him not like you and fire you and shortly after I met some individuals from True Purpose and they're like hey

man God's put it on his heart that we'd like to offer you something let you be a part of something and they offered me a position with them doing vocational rehabilitation and it's almost like there's been healing in that for me not just for myself but for my wife and my kids to get to see actually see me for the first time in their life where I'm not working away from home three-fourths of the year but to get to see me be around good men good women and be counseled and be discipled and watch me transfigure into what I say is a true man of God. So it sounds like you you were living in brokenness around broken people right and you didn't know how to handle it and you met the Lord and he took you on this journey right it was a an 11 year journey of figuring out who you are and where he wanted you but today you're you're living around the broken still but you're leading them out of brokenness like you've developed those skills to to help them restore them to who God wants them to be. And I love the fact I didn't really mention anything about my early childhood but I love the fact that how God would use my entire life's story before I came to him and after I came to him to be a witness now that when he allows me to walk into a halfway house or recovery home and for him to just allow me to open myself up be vulnerable and say hey do not be threatened by the man that pulled up in the pickup or that has these shoes on because the truth of the matter is this man came from two counties away grew up with no indoor plumbing no running water was sexually abused mentally abused and physically abused and to this day I have a son right now who's walking in addiction so God allows me to and I know people's like how do you go through your day and you're happy but I tell them that that relationship that I have with God I know that everything around me is just a season and that if I trust in him and I believe in him and I pray it so that he will make it so and I truly everything that I came from even my friends from before that say you know how did you get to where you're at they can't believe I would take off corporate shoes for service to God And I'm like, if you could just feel for one second, one second, what I feel, I wouldn't have to say one word to you to impress upon you as to why I'm the man that God has me be today.

I love that because of your history, you can relate to those people on a level that that others can't, right? You've been there, you understand, and that just opens a door for them to be vulnerable and speak to you. And so it is you're talking to someone who's still in brokenness that maybe hasn't found the Lord or who's lost hope. You talked about our soldiers who lose hope. That's why there's so many suicides by overdose, right? They've lost hope completely. What can you say to them to give them that hope back? What could you say to help get them out of the pit that they're in? And which all of us in recovery, we all know we have our own walk, we have our own story, and I can only tell you what worked for Jody Harris. And I will tell you, and I know most people just think it's cliche when I say, nothing worked for me until 2012 when I said, God, I don't know how to love. I've never loved my entire life. Honestly, I want someone to love me. I knew the Spirit told me right then, dude, I got you. Like, I will love you like nobody else. And when everyone else stops loving you, I will love you more. And I also want to share with people that, you know, if you think that worldly things will fill that void, I was that man. I was the person that made hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, was single, had the cars, had the boats, had the motorcycles, but at the end of every night at four in the morning would sit there with a gun and being like, I have everything, but I have nothing. I have everything, but I have nothing. There's, if there's only one thing I could tell everyone in this world, that there is nothing that will fill this void, but God. And God is the only thing that will truly fill that longing from like, I don't have anyone. I'm alone. I'm by myself. I can never be worthy. I can never do this through God. God has gave me, and I always use the word confidence. And I always thought confidence was, he was giving me the power to do things. But, and the Spirit spoke to me after years of studying the word that confidence is truly all the things that I can't, God does for me. Your desire to be loved. I actually think that the enemy uses, because God is love, right? The enemy, his number one thing is to twist what our understanding of love is, to make us feel unloved or to confuse us into what true love looks like. So what would you say you thought love looked like before you experienced the true love of God? And what does that look like to you today? Or how is it different today? So for me, I was raised by very hardworking men. And the only thing I was taught my whole childhood was to be a good husband, father, and a man, you are a provider. So the only thing I did my entire life, I truly thought because I was financially providing and only financially providing, that was all I gave that I was loving.

As to fast forward all these years and see different stages of my oldest son's recovery, and he'll tell me, you were never there for me. All you did was try to love me with money. Those are his words to me. And then I've had so many other people say, you can't buy my love. Whether it's a child or an adult or a friend, my whole life was built around lending and providing for people. I thought that was what I was supposed to do. So in turn, yes, I sit before you now and God has allowed us, he provides. But what God did to me to show me, and it was not punishment, he took everything away from me. There's no more six figures. He took that away and said, I want your time. I want you to serve others. I want you to take your son to a ballgame, take him to the gym. I want you to take one day a week with your wife. I want you to go... to a discipleship class. I want you to go to a small group. I want you to do something at church on Sunday to serve. I want you to give your time going into these homes and letting individuals know that who, either the legal system or the world said, you messed up, this is the end of the line, that this is the only beginning through me. Amen? Yes. That's good. I love that. He taught you to lay your life down, right? Yes. There's no greater love than that. That's beautiful. So Jody, is there anything else that you want to share about your story or anything else you'd like to say to somebody who was in a place like you or just any other word of encouragement that you have?

Yes, for, and this is especially, and everyone could take something from this, but especially those individuals out there who would say, I am my brother's keeper. There's a lot of ways that you are your brother's keeper, but if you truly want to be your brother's keeper, we have to learn to love as God loved us. And that is unconditional, meaning that there are gonna be a lot of times that you love someone and there will not be anything reciprocated, but God sees it. That's awesome. Yeah, I love that. Well, that's fantastic. We do a lot of interviews and I thought that after a while, the stories would all start sounding the same, but I love how God is so uniquely in each of our lives and I love everything that he's done through yours and especially the people now that you get to reach and just share with them the love that God has given you. You felt unloved, God gave you that love and now you get to share that with the world and now you get to share your story with everyone watching. And that's such a beautiful story of redemption. So I'm really grateful that you were willing to come and just open up and be bold about your testimony and share that with us today. Thank you so much for having me.

Thank you. God bless. Thank you so much for watching. Wasn't it awesome when Jody talked about how he learned to lay his life down for others? His story is a great reminder that we are called to love others as God loved us, even when they don't love us in return. The organization Jody now works for that he talked about is called True Purpose. I encourage you to check them out. They do an incredible job of helping men and women live sober lives while finding their God-given purposes. Join us next week to hear another incredible story. Be sure to subscribe or follow so you never miss an episode, but most importantly, I pray that you know no matter how far you have run from God, it is never too late. There is always hope because you are loved.