The Fire Inside

Before he was an award-winning nonprofit CEO, a Certified Intervention Professional, and a nationally recognized recovery advocate, Stacy Dodd was living in the woods outside Joplin, Missouri - homeless, addicted, and invisible by choice. He was thirty-three years old and had not been truly clean since the age of seven.

The Fire Inside: How God Turned Rock Bottom Into A Kingdom Assignment is the unflinching, redemptive memoir of a man who lost everything - his family, his dignity, his father, and very nearly his life - before finding the one thing that could save him.

From a fractured childhood marked by alcoholism and constant upheaval, through decades of meth addiction, crack cocaine, pillaging, prison, and a six-year sentence that became an unlikely turning point, Dodd traces the full arc of his descent and the moment God met him at the bottom of it. A coverless book slid through a prison cell slot. A baptism in front of two hundred inmates. A counselor's parting words that followed him out the gates and kept him walking forward for years.

This is not a story about willpower. It is a story about surrender - and what becomes possible when a man finally stops running and lets God lead.

For anyone struggling with addiction, for the families who love them, for the underdogs and outcasts who have been told they are too far gone - The Fire Inside is proof that rock bottom is not the end of the story.

For Stacy Dodd, it was only the beginning.