Since 1978, I spent most of my career literally standing in the gap between the spiritual and practical dimensions of people's lives. As Army Chaplain both in the South African and Australian Defence Forces during times of military conflict, I served for extensive periods on the front-lines of battle. I personally experienced the horrors of bloody traumatic incidents, death, loss, brokenness, anger and the reality of excessive aggression behind retaliation on the front-line. I had to counsel wounded and maimed young soldiers and bury their mates while empathising with the pain of their loved ones.

As Executive Director of three charities rendering care-services to the poorest of the poor in the streets of cities where the unemployment figure was more than 40%, I gained extensive experience in counselling excessively distressed people and families. Literally in the gutters of these streets late at night, early hours of the morning and even at midday I found myself feeding, clothing and counselling prostitutes, druggies, alcoholics, hobos, homeless refugees from war torn countries, street children, disillusioned and broken soldiers, sexually abused teenagers, violent gang members, drug pushers and more - those who had nothing left to fall back on.

In 2003 God called me to Australia with my wife and three children. For the last seventeen years I have been counselling those who have it all, right here in Australia. Those who maybe have too much of it and chronically stressed, overloaded, exhausted, redundant, anxious, separated, divorced, hopeless, purposeless, meaningless, depressed, self-medicated, suicidal.Touched by the distress of those around me, I realised that we have to be proactive and therefore intentionally develop sustainable resilience, preferably even before facing extremely traumatic circumstances. And this is why I decided to establish the Australian Institute for Narrative Care.