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Troubled Nigel blessed by love and a new life

Salvation Army captains Nigel and Sandy MacDonald... “We want to help children at a young age to make healthy choices that will set them up for life,” says Nigel. Photo by Andrew Finch
Salvation Army captains Nigel and Sandy MacDonald. Photo by Andrew Finch
GOING off the rails with drugs and alcohol as a teenager left Nigel MacDonald in desperate need of help.

Twenty years ago as a troubled 22-year-old, Nigel joined the Bridge Program (Addiction Recovery) run by the Salvation Army in Canberra, where he says he was given a chance at life – and found love with his now wife and Salvos colleague, Sandy.

“It took a while for me to feel I needed to be in rehab, but I wanted to see it through, as up until that point I had never finished anything before,” says the Salvation Army captain.

Having grown up with a single mum in Sydney, Nigel said his life was “pretty good” until high school, when he found he wasn’t coping well with his parents’ separation.

“They split when I was two, and although my dad was around, he wasn’t there as he should be, which affected me a lot as a teenager,” he says.

“I was longing to be accepted, but I found it in the wrong places and with the wrong people.”

Nigel says that from 15 to 17 he was on a downward spiral.

“I fell apart, basically,” he says. “I was taking a lot of party drugs like cocaine, LSD and ecstasy, and the addiction was so time-consuming – I was out of it most of the time. When I left school, it was hard to hold down a job and at one point I stole money from my employer.”

To escape the “turmoil”, Nigel says he moved around the country for a few years.

“Of course, nothing changed; the turmoil was in me, and I realised I had to deal with it in order to be fixed and helped,” he says.

“The crunch came when I had been couch surfing for a while. One night I had nowhere to go, and I slept behind an apartment block. The fact that I had nothing and no one, and was sleeping in the street, rocked my world.”

After this, Nigel says he moved to Jindabyne to live with his mum, who has since passed away.

“She called the Salvos and there was a bed available on the Bridge Program, a year-long residential rehab program in Canberra, and I took the opportunity,” he says.

“It was a real struggle, day to day. I was truly facing my demons, but every day I faced them, I released them.”

After the year was up, Nigel says he had a period of reconnecting with family and friends and making up for past transgressions, but most significantly, it was who he met while in rehab that shaped his future.

“Sandy is a Salvation Army girl, and we met through organised events with her church,” he says.

“We felt connected to each other and a friendship blossomed. We got engaged a year after the program finished.”

The couple entered college together as a married couple in Sydney, entering the Officer Training Program, and have now been officers for 13 years, with eight years in Youth and Children’s work. Nigel currently serves in Canberra as the youth secretary.

“Youth is a passion of ours and we wanted to work in it together as a team,” says Sandy. “We have individual skills and experiences but together we want to reach out to the wider community.

“Family is so important, to give time to each other. We have a nine-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl and, of course, raising our own family is trial and error, but we try to create balance and make time for them in a family context.”

Nigel says: “We want to help children at a young age to make healthy choices that will set them up for life. It’s the same when we see kids getting themselves into trouble with drugs.

“I see myself when I see them, and I want to help.”

The Salvation Army’s annual Red Shield Appeal doorknock will be held on the weekend of May 30-31.

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Kathryn Vukovljak

Kathryn Vukovljak

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One Response to Troubled Nigel blessed by love and a new life

Russell Hung says: 19 May 2015 at 4:46 pm

So, was Jesus involved in there at all? Or is this just about meeting human need like the Red Cross and Smith Family do?

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