- April 24, 2024
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"So I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the crawling locust, the consuming locust, and the chewing locust, my great army which I sent among you."
– Joel 2:25
Jason Rodgers comes back to this line from the Bible time and again. He needs it when the days are long, when recovery feels so many locust-eaten years away.
“That’s a promise from God,” Rodgers said. “It takes time. Things are not as I wish them to be, but God says he’s gonna give them all back.”
He spoke these words in the backroom workshop of Big John’s Used Appliances, where he and all the men in Open Door Ministries start out during their first month or six weeks of recovery. The real open door, Rodgers believes, is the one the program has shown to him through which God can reach him.
The locusts swarmed over Rodgers in Daytona Beach and started eating his life years ago. He had a “long, up and down” history of drug addiction. At 35, he had been a chef, and had even been “saved” before, he said. But a drug prescribed in too great a dosage can become its own kind of god, and it is a jealous god. In early 2016 it had him first surfing from couch to couch in his friends’ homes in Daytona Beach, then cast him onto the benches in City Island Park.
When addiction’s cruel god had ridden Rodgers from Daytona Beach to Bunnell, and once again into jail, suddenly there was balm in Gilead.
He heard about Open Door Ministries via a “dry program” in the Flagler County jail. Open Door, on its website, defines itself thus: “A residential Christ-centered ministry focused on the restoration of people with substance addictions and life-controlling issues through the application of biblical truths, rehabilitation and life skills that will help them transition back to their families and communities as positive contributors.”
Rodgers had known Jesus once, hadn’t he? A reunion couldn’t hurt. Try anything.
He was released from jail Aug. 1 and entered the program the very same day. There was no going back to where he had been — the last place he lived had so much substance abuse going on that returning would have triggered an immediate relapse.
The open door was, in a literal sense, that which led into a single-story house — kitchen, common area, bunk room — in Bunnell occupied by five other men wandering this desert alongside him.
And though the Promised Land is not yet even a mirage on the horizon (it’s a six-to-nine month program, and he’s still in it), already Rodgers has tasted manna on the journey.
“It treated the spiritual malady,” he said of his entry into the ministry. “Provided a home, food to eat, a path back into employment.”
He spoke, and still speaks often, to Pastor Charles Silano about his situation. Silano, pastor of Grace Tabernacle Ministries and leader of the Flagler County Opioid Task Force, helped him to realize the source of his spiritual malady.
“I think the core cause of a lot of our problems is not being spiritually lined up,” Rodgers said.
The house helped him paint a line.
There are meetings nearly every day, some of the kind found in Alcoholics Anonymous, others to “celebrate recovery.” There are opportunities to work at Big John’s for four to six weeks, hooking up and testing appliances. Rodgers has remained after his first month, and he spent time doing free storm prep for locals’ houses before Hurricane Dorian.
It’s a regimented lifestyle through the Open Door, but with enough free time for self-motivated personal growth. The program builds you up, Rodgers said, until you’re safe enough to let walls fall down.
"You feel God’s love through other people. Real love takes the place of the severe emptiness.”
Jason Rodgers
“In the beginning,” he said, “you’re immersed in people who won’t bring you drugs, but positive reinforcement. You feel God’s love through other people. Real love takes the place of the severe emptiness.”
The area of Bunnell where the house is located is a hotbed of drug activity. Yet Rodgers said he and his brothers in recovery feel secure. He calls it “a house full of peace.”
Silano said there had been 14 men in the program so far this year; seven had successfully completed their six to nine months, another three were called away by other opportunities. It’s a classic 12-step program that allows up to three tries per person.
Open Door Ministries has had rough times since its founding in 2013: One year saw four men lost at once when substances were smuggled into the house; it only takes one snake in the garden. But Silano has confidence in the process.
“It works,” he said. “We have a 100% success rate for those who engage with the program.”
Once you introduce the concept of recovery, he said, it knocks on your brain. A lot of these people need trauma recovery.
“It’s not a moral decision,” Silano said of using drugs. “People are living in emotional pain or they get over-prescribed. No one wants to live in the bushes on the margins of society.”
He speaks from experience about emotional pain. Coming to America as a “below-the-dirt poor” immigrant child from Italy in 1958, traumatized by the culture shock, led him to a life of crime as a way to gain money, and therefore respect. His main enterprise before his reformation in prison, as it happens, was drug trafficking.
“I didn’t feel part of a community,” Silano said. And he believes community, not sobriety, is the opposite of addiction, one reason for the communal setup of Open Door.
“When addicts come in, they’re angry,” he said. They want to get high, but they don’t. They are uncomfortable in their own skins. And one of their biggest resentments to be exorcised is being told to simply try harder.
“People have lost a lot,” said Rodgers of those resentments he shared, “and we want to get that back right away.”
“You can’t incarcerate this problem away,” Silano said, “you can’t afford to. Recovery centers are cheaper and more effective.”
To foreground that this is a struggle undergone by human beings with inherent dignity, people for whom he believes Jesus Christ sacrificed himself, whatever their worthiness, Silano hosts an annual public gala with the Open Door participants. He wants to elevate the disease to the level of cancer in the public’s awareness, he said.
This year it will take place Nov. 13, 6:30 p.m. at Hammock Beach Resort.
“Addicts are some of the most brilliant people you’re ever going to meet,” Silano said. “They’ve learned to think outside the box. If you can harness that outside the disease, you’ve got major contributors to society.”
Rodgers is ready to contribute. He believes he has found the only thing that can fill the “God-sized hole” in his soul, and it has given him hope. Something to look forward to.
“There’s hope,” he said. “You don’t have to feel defeated by the circumstances you’re in.”
Open Door has recently expanded. A woman’s house has been built, and there are plans to upgrade the original to that new house’s floorplan: four bedrooms. The original house is not only beset on all sides by abuse, but was once itself a hub of it.
“It was a crack house,” Silano said. “Dilapidated, depraved.”
But they fixed it up. It took time. He sees it as an illustration of what recovery can do.
In his ministry, Silano comes back to a verse from the Bible time and again, Matthew 7:24-25:
“Therefore whoever hears these sayings of mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock."
