the grass. The whole oval was a cacophony of cries and chatter. Then he walked up into grandstand and stared out at us. It was like someone flicked switch. The place went as still and silent as the grave. Seriously, even the birds. People had come to listen. Really listen. I had come to scoff. I thought I’d have plenty of ammunition, or at least that how it seemed when he appeared. Young bloke, like mum had said. Maybe younger than me. Hard to say then. And a bit rough around the edges, like he’d been on the road a bit too long. Looked like a bit of a hick really. Until he spoke. It wasn’t as if his voice was ‘cultured’ or anything like that. It was kind of normal, but it cut through. And it only took a couple of minutes before you weren’t thinking about the voice, but about what the voice was saying. I just sat there listening and thinking that he was just speaking to me, to my situation. All around me, as I discovered later, hundreds of people were feeling exactly the same thing. He talked about God for sure, but in a way that made crazy sense, and offered me a new way of being alive – and a complete departure from what I’d been living. I listened for an hour, maybe more. I think that was longer than I’d ever listened to anything in my life before that. ADHD, that was me. Or just restless. But not that day. That day he moved me and scared me and excited me and worried me. He talked about God as if he knew God personally, in a way that made God more normal than I’d ever imagined, more real. He talked about forgiveness and justice and peacemaking and loving your enemies and how God’s vision for the world would turn everything upside down. In a good way. About how those of us who were struggling would be blessed and the world would turn towards goodness if we believed. About how we mattered. About how I mattered. There was a part of me that was still willing to laugh at these ideas. We lived in a brutally occupied land, and we had brutally occupied it long before the latest invasion. Nothing about my life spoke to me of hope. I had the money to chemically induce sleep every night, but I had nothing 116
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