Another night at Overcomers Outreach

It was Overcomers Outreach night last night, which, as always, was a good night.

At the beginning of the evening, as I was making my way to the back entrance of the Cathedral, after I’d been loitering about in Lincraft and JB Hi-Fi then reading in the QVB, I saw this fellow approaching with three others and thought to myself ‘now who is that and where do I know him from?’. Because I used to work at Matthias Media I feel like I've seen half the Anglicans in Sydney somewhere before and usually I put it down to that. But then, as I got closer and went ahead up the steps he looks at me and says “Alison – XX (his name, which I shall just leave out, because even though he wasn’t there with his own addiction I have to be careful to extremes about making connections or breaking “who you see here and what you hear here stays here”), friends with AB, now AC (girl I know, now married, whom I met because she stayed with me in Brisbane when Moore Theological College sent a mission team to my church up there)”.

I’m doing a mental scramble to put all the pieces into place. Then he says “I don’t know if you remember this, but you were taking a photo of AB and I at graduation and trying to work out how to use my camera and you took a photo up your nose”. We worked out this was Moore College Graduation 2003. But stagger me, but for that reminder I’d have permanently and happily forgotten that I ever took a photo up my nose on someone else’s camera! Anyway, he’s a good bloke, now an Anglican minister who was ahead of the masses on the church planting front, who drove for an hour and half to bring three people from his church to OO because they needed help.

Then the meeting itself was a little smaller than usual, though with lots of new people suffering addictions other than alcohol, and thanks be to God we had some others come along also who were further along those roads so they could be matched up to talk with the newcomers. But, you know, the thing I feel convicted of every single night that I go to these meetings and sit there listening to folks share their stories is how dependent they are on God just to make it through each day. Many of them will say they can’t make it to the bedroom door without going through Steps 1-3, and constantly redoing the rest of the steps (you can see the steps here, which are essentially the gospel applied to the lives of addicts). I don’t have an addiction, but that doesn’t mean I have any less reason to be dependent on God than they do, I just don’t live that out in the same way – and I am reminded of, and challenged on, my misplaced self-sufficiency every time.

So when we got to the praise and petition prayer points, which I often pass on as a “supporter” simply owing to time constraints, I got one in and my petition was that I’d learn more and more to live in moment-by-moment dependence on God like the people in that room.