When a Calling Can't be Denied

Lauren Sisler, ESPN reporter, and I pledged we'd tell our stories of family loss and healing to addiction. Eight years later, we're doing just that.

How do ambitious dreams of making a difference become a reality?

Not easily. Patience, resilience, a dog-with-a-bone, and a won't-let-up mentality are required. But if you dream and dare and never let up, doing the daily work, you will most likely arrive at the destination of your Calling.

That's why I'm taking a moment to celebrate the full circle of my friendship and work-in-common with Lauren Sisler, the ESPN college football sideline reporter known for her "shimmy."

Lauren Sisler, ESPN reporter, with David Magee on A Little Crazy podcast.

Eight years ago, I recruited the talented young woman for work at a media company. She wasn’t yet an ESPN personality, though she shared that dream with me, and I never doubted. And neither of us was known for sharing our stories of family trauma and significant loss due to addiction. 

But, Lauren and I figured out in our early conversations that we had substantial common ground which ran much deeper than our roles in media. She had lost both of her parents to overdose within hours of one another -- that's not a grammatical error; it's true, both of her parents died of overdose within hours of one another -- when she was a first-year gymnast at Rutgers. 

I had lost my oldest son, William, to overdose not long after he graduated from college and had nearly lost another child who came back to life and has had a miraculous recovery, in addition to my own journey with addiction and recovery.

Lauren and I pledged in those early conversations eight years ago, delivered in a hushed whisper in the workplace because nobody much knew our stories, that we would one day share our stories more intentionally to help others. I could see in her eyes that she was called, and determined, she says she saw the same in me.

Only two months after she took the job I'd recruited her for, I left, taking a job in Oxford, Mississippi so I could be close the University of Mississippi where I planned to launch my work, helping students.

I’m off to start my work, I said, and within 30 days on the job, I'd written a newspaper column titled My Son William's story about his spiral into addiction, and death, and within months after that, the movement was underway to create the William Magee Center at Ole Miss to help students.

Similarly, I watched Lauren become an ESPN reporter as she dreamed and use that platform to elevate her ability to tell her story of family trauma and healing due to addiction.

A calling can’t be denied, and today, Lauren and I are fully involved professionally, personally, and quite publicly in sharing stories of hope, healing, Faith, and recovery to help and educate — to save — others.

We recently got together to celebrate how our dreams from eight years ago are becoming reality with a conversation on my podcast, A Little Crazy with David Magee. You can listen here!

Lauren’s story is essential and inspiring, and our coming together eight years later, doing exactly what we’d told one another we would do, reminds us that getting where we need to go isn’t always easy, and it doesn’t usually happen overnight. 

But with patience, and determination, and by doing the work — you can and likely will arrive there, even if does take eight years.