The story of my story

A bunch of winging spoilt kids. A bunch of of non-winging and non-spoilt kids. The friction and contrast between these two groups created my burning bush experience.

I spent five years of my life working with young people ranging from the abused, rejected, seriously mistreated to your average, everyday issues young person. There was no doubt that I loved my job but it was hard. Emotionally these young people where always able to find that soft or even damaged place inside of you and aggravate it. The story of their lives and the direction they were walking in challenged my faith. Their emotional state trigger my own hurt and painful history. It was a beautifully challenging job.

My position at that particular time was working directly with 'at risk' young people in a residential setting (a half way house, a youth refuge). 'At risk' was a term used to describe those who are endanger of hurting themselves through self harm, drug abuse, promiscuous behaviour, bad decision after bad decision. After about a year, when I had been there long enough to see the comings and goings of many young people, I began to get frustrated at the pattern I was seeing. There is a culture among the kids that call the refuge system home, an extremely detrimental culture. A young person would come, kicked out or removed from their family or simply a runaway, they would encounter such a negative culture among the other residents at the house and spiral downwards. They would then eventually break too many rules at the refuge and be 'exicted' to continue onto another refuge where the cycle would begin again.

It made me angry. These young people had been given a second change, a roof over their head and amazing workers that would bend over backwards to help them. Yet rarely did they reach out for the opporunity at hand. Instead they chose to follow the behaviour of the other people in the refuge, competing for attention to see who could self harm the most, take the most drugs, miss their day program, steal. It seemed like every service and every youth worker was at their disposal but they dropped it all to the ground.

Around this frustrating time I saw the movie documentary Invisible Children. This film told the story of Ugandan young people who were stolen from their family by war rebels and forced to do unspeakable things. The young men where forced to kill their friends or be killed themselves turning them into war machines. The young women too where forced to fight or repeatably raped and made to marry rebel leaders. They had to fight a useless war that has lasted for years. The games of innocent childhood were replaced by killing, raping and stealing.

In the closing scenes of the documentary it shed a beautiful light on the issue. Children that where rescued were able to be rehabilitated. Granted, not all where able to rebound as easily as others but there was hope. What was apparent was the thirst many of them had to harness every opportunity and help that came their way. Amazingly many were able to bounce back after the atrocities they had seen and often committed that would overshadow many of the experiences of our young people.

I began to wonder to myself why the young people in my care did not have this ability, spirit or mentality to be redeemed. What was in the culturural makeup of these Ugandan young people that was not in our culture.

It occurred to me that maybe God had a plan. Here, by that I mean Western countries, we have everything we need. Even the most disadvantaged in our countries is advantaged compared to the rest of the world. We had gained the world but at the expense of our souls. We needed healing.
On the other side of the socio-economic scale they needed our things. They need our food, they need our education, they need tools to farm with or to create micro enterprise. But we needed their spirit. There are two deficites but also two gifts. We would find our healing in their healing. If we could give of what we have that is uselessly in abundance, our awareness of them and their story would give us spirit.

I believe a great way from the the people of western countries such as Australia and America to be aware of others around the world is through news. Good news services bring to us the ills and perils of the rest of the world but can also bring the life that is out there as well. The news helps bring our lives into perspective. It can also move us to be generous.

I want to bring these stories and the importance of watching or reading the news to young people. After working with young people for five years believe they suffer from a severe case of inward focus. The news would help them look out to the amazing and sometimes treacherous world outside, inspiring generosity and giving us some well needed heart and soul.