Sunday Serenity: From Pain to Purpose

Good evening. Happy Sunday, Cadre family. I'm Jason Lennox. I am your resident recovery champion, and I am excited to be here tonight talking to you on Sunday. Serenity about pain and purpose and how pain can be utilized for and transformed into purpose. And I want to distinguish that there are two ways I think that can happen. So I wrote a book and published it at the end of 2022. And it was a memoir of my life, and the title, a perfect tragedy subtitle was actually finding purpose in pain, loss, and addiction.

So that's using my own pain to find my own purpose. And so that's one way that that happens. But what I want to talk about tonight is how my pain, or somebody else's pain perhaps, could be used to help someone else find purpose. And so I want to take you back to last week. I'm having dinner with an old friend, and we've had a couple gatherings lately. And, you know, I could just tell that, hey, good evening. Speak wonder. Good to see you here. I could tell that he was, you know, struggling a little bit.

So we got talking and things got a little emotional, and, you know, he's just kind of struggling to figure out what he wants to be doing, where he wants to be, and, you know, just like, what is that purpose, and what are we doing here? And, you know, it was hard. But as we continued to sit and talk, one of the things that came to me was a quote by a man named Rory Vaden. He's a very successful branding expert, and he's in the National Speakers Association. I heard him at a conference a couple years back.

The statement that he gave that forever will sit with me is you are best positioned to serve the person you once were. In other words, as he's helping people figure out where they want to be, what they want to do, that's what he's saying. You don't have to look any further than where you've come from, the person you once were. That's where you can be most powerful and most useful. And so I shared that with him. And so, again, that's me helping, using my own story. But as I was sharing this with him, it took me back to just where he's come from.

He came from a lot of pain, he's had a lot of stuff go on. In 2016, he invited me to attend this program with him, and I went to an introductory session, and I said, frankly, the reason I'm here is because of this man. He has joy and peace in his life. And the last year has been the most horrific year I think, I've ever seen of any human. I mean, he had lost. I'm not gonna go into details, but he had lost four immediate family members in a matter of a year in horrific fashion. Again, not going into details, but something that would just about take anyone on this planet out.

And here he was, still finding peace and joy. So, point is, that's what got me there. So because of him, I'm attending, I'm thinking there's something about this program that works. Sure enough, when I ended up doing it six months later, it was a weekend event, and it was, I would say to this day, the most transformational weekend of my life. And it created for me a way in which I could heal and transform and find purpose within my family and kind of go through all that stuff that had been holding me back for so long and rebuild and kind of mend relationships because of the pain and the things that he was experiencing and the way that he was able to handle that.

Here I am transforming my life and turning that into experiences for my family. And so I think my point here is, we all have pain. We all go through things, and certainly we can use that and come out the other side and figure out how we can help people who've been there, just like us. But just the act of sharing pain sometimes helps other people see things. And so as I was sharing this back to him, saying, you have an incredible story that so many people would benefit from. Just hearing where you've come from and what you've done with your life and all the pain you've had to get through, that inspired me.

That inspired me to go do a bunch of stuff. Good evening, Cadre. Good to see you here, too. That inspired me to do a ton. Okay. So I really just want to end with thinking about. And I used to attend certain recovery meetings, and some of these meetings I would go into, and the people would say, you know, if you haven't been sober for a year, you don't get to talk in this meeting. And I just thought that that was the most, the craziest, the wildest rule that anyone could ever come up with. Now, I understand conceptually, okay, perhaps it takes a little bit to have some good, sustained recovery and be able to, you know, teach others.

To some extent, I get that. But at the same time, the people who are in there, when I went to treatment, the people that I listened to most, were the ones that that were. Had just gotten there. They were three days in, four days in, five days in, and they kept telling me they were talking and sharing about their pain and their experiences. But that's the only person I could relate to, not the person who had been sober for a year or two years or ten years. I didn't know how the heck I was going to get through the day.

So it was the person at any level of recovery. And so again, I just bring that back to, we all have pain. We all have something to share. And when we share about those things, I mean, first of all, it's healing for us to share about that. But second of all, to have somebody else hear and feel that again, I told you about my buddy, and the way that I looked at him was so much different because of what he shared and because what he had gone through. So he inspired me to do a lot better. And here it's full circle.

I'm sitting across from him saying, dude, there's a lot more here for you to be out here doing. So, again, my call to action is just to think about that pain. It's tough. We go through those times. We got to deal with those clinically, with the right methodology, with sometimes therapy and whatever else is needed. But on the other side of that, and sometimes even in the middle of that, our sharing of that changes other people's lives. And so I invite you, and I encourage you to think about those painful moments and think about the pain that you've struggled with lately, and even currently, and think about where you can share that and who might benefit from that.

Because again, I'm a firm believer that what we're here, what we're meant to do on this planet, is to support each other and to share our own experiences for those that are soon to have them or might be having them. That's where I've learned the most about my life, is watching people who were in the position I was once in. So, thank you all for joining. And again, I just urge you to consider, and yes, you, Larry. Thank you. Yes, that's what I mean. The ripple effect my buddy shares with me, I go out, I do a little work.

Now I'm sharing, and I'm coming back to him. And who knows who you all share with and what this turns into? If three of you, four of you, five of you, turn around this week and go and share about your pain, you might open the door for somebody else in your life that never would have been willing to share that, never would have been willing to fight through something. So that's the ripple effect we have. And again, just urge you all and invite you all to consider. Yes, speak wonder and overcomer, how we can all be overcomers and use that pain, share that pain and really just be in this world with other people.

That's what we're meant to do. Would love, love, love to hear any of your stories as you go through this and even from past a reach out. Would love to chit chat a little. And again, there's a lot of purpose in pain. There's a lot of purpose in pain. That's where I've found most of my life. And I'm so grateful that I've found a way to use that pain and to think about and to hear and talk and sit with other people who are going through their pain and continue to come out the other side and use that to benefit the world because there's a world that needs us.

So keep sharing. I hope you all have wonderful weeks and hope you all take some of this and run with it and share with the people in your lives. You never know what will come back. I look forward to catching up a little bit next week. Wishing you all a wonderful, wonderful week.