Meet Zach

While I was busy helping other teenagers at a Crisis Accommodation Shelter, my 17 year old son Zach was having his own crisis. He stopped going to Church, stopped talking and I would arrive home in the morning after an overnight shift to find him still in bed when he should have been at school. My beautiful boy with so much promise started to console himself with alcohol, cigarettes and marijuana. I felt like I had lost my son and I was heart-broken.

As Zach continued to deteriorate for the next seven years, I don’t mind telling you that my confidence was pretty shaky and I wasn’t sure what the outcome would be. The boy who’d been a ‘pleasure to teach’ in school and received an award for Academic Industry struggled to complete Year 12. He couldn’t seem to apply himself to a job for more than a few months and was withdrawing further and further into himself.

In January 2010, during worship at Church, I saw a picture in my mind of myself at the Qld Christian Womens annual Conference with a display of Faithbooks. I thought ‘God, why would you choose me? I don’t feel like I have much faith and besides I don’t even have any faithbooks or even a success story ... so I did what I do best ... I procrastinated! Conference 2010 came and went.