I guess I'm an addictions worker

So my life has taken me on many journey's. During my years at Providence College, I constantly fought about what it means to feel 'called' to youth work, but having a particular passion for the church. I guess this last statement needs to be qualified, church has been a struggle for me. I guess once you go down a certain path a lot of 'mainline' churches are no longer an option for you, since you are thinking about life and church so utterly different. Providence was a place I was able to fall in love with the church again(maybe for the first time), but the church I fell in love in with belongs on the fringes of soceity.

After my intership at a fairly conservative church in Winnipeg, it was clear that I needed to take a step back from 'ministry'. Just a quick word on that word 'ministry', I feel most Christian are involved in ministry and how many Christians use this word is crippling to the work of the Kingdom. In spite of many struggles during my internship including a periode of depression and seeing a counselor(I must admit my counselling session were extremely helpful for 'reclaiming my story'), I got through my internship with a better understanding of what it means to be a Christian in postmodern/pluralist world.

So I got married and after going through two horriable jobs I stumbled upon my dream job, a Treatment worker at a therapeutic community in Selkirk. So a therapeutic community is a treatment centre(aka rehab) that does not believe in the disease model. So we feel that addictions and behaviors are largely due to learned behavior( an example is if you grow up seeing you parents drink their problems away and turn to drugs for stress relief a child will see turning to drugs as a viable copping mechanism, this model is very much aligned with the family systems model I learned in counselling class at Providence). Anyways I love the job, I am able to use all my gifts and develope a better understanding about addictions and aboriginal culture, which I feel more called to ministering with than any middle class setting.

I guess in the last little while I feel blessed to have this oportunity to be involved in the healing and restoration process in these teenagers. I keep on meeting amazing people, commited to being a positive presence for these teenagers, who honestly were born into family and situations where they have very little supports and are thrown to the wolves of life. I keep thinking to myself that if I had been put in a similair situation, I'd gotten into drugs, sleeping around, involved in crime without friends and family to give me direction.

My world is definitely changing, learning a lot about the effect of addictions and growing up in a world where teens are left to be the adults in a culture that almost encourgages addictions as normal. Sometimes I wish we could just keep these teens at the centre, because even though they accomplish so much during treatment we are throwing them back to a world that is going to eat them up, where everyone is addicted to drugs in some form or another..maybe the most heart wrenching fact is that most of the teenagers are exposed to drugs by their parents and some of the time before the age of 10. So I am an overworked, underpain, underappreciated, but hopeful addictions worker......