Stories

"No such thing as a hopeless case'

On March 29, 1998, I walked into the Good Shepherd for the first time – homeless, friendless, penniless.

I was only 25 but I had already wrecked a promising life with a decade of hard drinking and drug use.

I had tried every method and treatment program to stop drinking. But nothing worked. I was to realise, slowly and over time, that my alcoholism was a symptom of a much worse spiritual illness.

I came with a bag of clothes and a ‘baggage of issues’. Anger! At God, for cursing me with alcoholism until I shared a dining hall three times a day with the truly homeless, the mentally ill, the abused, the addicted, those whose lives were shattered, yet they still shuffled through each day.

Anger! At the Church for leading me astray as a young boy – until I met the Brothers, whose unconditional love of the people whom the world has rejected showed me who Christ really is.

Anger! At ‘the System’ for being what it is – by the world, for the world – until it dawned on me that my alcoholism had been removed by the grace of Christ, and that true healing would come by following Him as He led me through life.

In my view, the ministry of Good Shepherd Centre is a ministry of maintenance: feed the hungry, clothe the naked, touch the untouchables. For many of these people, poverty and addiction and mental illness are the expected pattern of life.

Yet there is no such thing as a hopeless case. Some who are reached by this ministry are saved and able to turn their lives around. In my case, a middle-class white boy from the suburbs who was largely the author of his own misfortune got a first-hand look at the difference between ‘lost’ and ‘found’.

Eleven years later, those who knew me then and now are astounded at the change. The story of my salvation began when, through his servants here, Jesus Himself gave His life so that I could have life more abundantly.

Hallelujah! Praise God!