I've died a lot, and I know I'll die some more.
The crazy thing about faith I've found - is that believing doesn't make a better person, just an informed one.
And here we are at the end of the beginning, and what a beginning it has been. Beginning Febfast that is.
I've not had a drink for 30 days now - I started a couple early to bring me up to speed, and if the truth is known to get back on my feet.
Sometimes when I write I listen to - not just music, but a piece, one piece, normally no words, over and over again. It gets me in a groove, a head space, a pain that has me feel what I need to write. I'm locked in and living the story, I see it unfold and find myself wild with the adventure, or collapsed in the grief.
Over the last 30 days Febfast has been my piece on a loop, repeating over and over again, every morning, everyday, every night. The story I've been locked into is one of many young persons. A story of lost love, of broken friendships, of falling short, of fear and heavy thinking, no escape, great struggle, and faces all turned to see the demise.
If it sounds heavy, it's not, it's the wild, it's the chaos we don't understand that goes through a young persons head that has them the highest suicide rate in the world - in our country, in our back yard, over the fence, down the street up the street, with the spray can in the hand and the bottle in the other. These are our kids.
I'm not preaching, I'm feeling, and febfast has taken me back, to days I was closer to the struggle - not even my own, but young peoples in youth shelters, on streets, in prisons, in care, out of care, in parks, in foster homes, friends homes, hospitals, and schools.
The addiction I see isn't dressed up in nasty clothes and bad kid colors, it doesn't come from poor homes - just broken ones.
I've sat at night not drinking and thinking, looking at my kids and not being able to let them go. I can't keep them knowing they are loved just the way they are, they won't be. We don't live in that world, we live in the world where love and friendship is an investment. How much your mum and dad earn, your dress sense, what you achieve, what opportunities you've got to give, is all about whether love and friendship will pay dividends.
To be loved just as you are, to be taken seriously even if it makes no sense. This is the stuff of grace, and it's this I found had young hopeless thinking take a dive towards the adventure of life.
I know this because it's not a young thing, it's a people thing - and I pray for that same acceptance everyday, just to have a chance to shine, to know why I'm alive.
I haven't come to the the end of February easy, for my insides are holding me to ransom. It's not booze they're desperate for, but the focus to not end. I want to own this pain I feel, I want to thrash it about till it bleeds and goes away with all the lost hope, the fleeting moments to end it all, the shot up and drunk down days and nights, the agony of not feeling worth the love of a friend, the young faces fallen before their time.
How do you let a young person know there's so much more to life than now, and all our nows make up the adventure for tomorrow - when I struggle to grasp this each day myself.
I don't have a great faith - but the faith I do have is telling me the way forward is together. Embracing that which offends, letting go the expectations that blinds, walking like a beginning - loosing all our ends.
Drugs and alcohol is dirty stuff mostly swept away in it's abuses, thanks for not sweeping the Night Writer ponderings away.
I am going to keep my Febfast abstinence up for this week so as to allow you all to catch up on the opportunity to walk the journey together with our Australian young people and sponsor them through me.
http://www.febfastfundraising.com.au/chris_hobart
Oh and here's the piece I've been playing over and over whilst pondering, play it while you read and feel something about where I've been.
The Night Writer
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