Alone (but not alone)

What Ben Grieger  Learned from 40 Days in the Tasmanian Wilderness

What happens when you strip life back to its bare essentials?

No phone. No schedule. No staff meetings. No family dinners. No warm bed. No certainty about where your next meal will come from.

Staff from Lobethal Lutheran School, St Mark’s Lutheran School (Mount Barker), St Michael’s Lutheran School (Hahndorf) and Cornerstone College came together for a shared HILS Fellowship Retreat, a day dedicated to connection, encouragement, reflection and faith. A highlight of the retreat was hearing from Ben Grieger, teacher, father, man of faith and contestant on Alone Australia Season 3, who shared his remarkable story of surviving 40 days alone in the Tasmanian wilderness and the lessons it taught him about faith, resilience, purpose and what it truly means to never be alone.

Following a Desire That Wouldn’t Go Away

Long before appearing on television screens around Australia, Ben was a young boy captivated by survival stories.

A gifted survival handbook sparked something deep within him – a fascination with adventure, wilderness and self reliance. That desire never quite left. Over the years, he watched survival shows, dreamed of testing himself in the wild and eventually applied for Alone not once, but four times.

Most people would have given up after repeated rejections, Ben didn’t.

“I just thought, I reckon I could do it. Perhaps.”

That simple willingness to follow a dream became one of the first lessons of his story. The desires that make us come alive are often worth pursuing, even when the outcome is uncertain.

A Wilderness of More Than Hunger

When Ben stepped off the boat onto a remote shore in Tasmania, excitement quickly gave way to reality. The challenge wasn’t just survival – it was cold, hunger and loneliness. Within days, the confident footballer and teacher found himself questioning whether he could continue.

For three weeks he caught no fish, every night he lay shivering despite layers of clothing and sleeping gear. Hunger became a constant companion. The temptation to pick up the satellite phone and call for extraction hovered in the background.

But perhaps the greatest challenge wasn’t physical at all, it was what happened in the silence.

When Everything Falls Away

Out in the wilderness there were no distractions – no work, no emails, no busyness. Just Ben, his thoughts and God.

As the days passed and his body weakened, he found himself confronting emotions he had spent much of his life avoiding.

“I treated negative emotions as problems to be solved rather than feelings to be felt.”

For a self-described optimist who preferred action over reflection, this was unsettling. There were days of grief, homesickness and tears. Moments when memories of his wife Lauren and their three children overwhelmed him. Moments when he realised that strength wasn’t about pushing emotions down but allowing himself to experience them fully.

It was, in his words, the beginning of “letting things crumble that needed to crumble.”

Finding God in the Silence

Among the cold, hunger and loneliness, Ben discovered something unexpected – peace. Not because circumstances improved, or because survival became easier – but because he experienced God’s presence in a deeper way than ever before. In the darkest moments, hymns from his childhood rose unbidden in his mind, prayers whispered in the middle of freezing nights calmed rising panic, scripture became more than words. It became reality.

When hunger wore him down and fear threatened to overwhelm him, he found himself returning again and again to a simple truth: God was enough. The experience transformed his understanding of faith from intellectual belief into lived experience.

“I found that I had God, and it was enough.”

The Lesson of Surrender

One of the most profound discoveries came near the end of his journey. By Day 35, Ben was physically deteriorating. He had lost a significant amount of weight and had little strength remaining. Yet he described this period as one of the most beautiful of his life. While carving a traditional friction-fire set for his father, he finished a song he had started writing more than twenty years earlier. He spent hours worshipping, reflecting, forgiving old hurts and experiencing what he describes as a deep and overwhelming peace. A fish large enough to potentially extend his time in the competition escaped that very night.Surprisingly, he wasn’t upset, instead, he thanked God. The moment reminded him that there are gifts more valuable than success, achievement or even winning.

Your Best Might Not Be Enough – And That’s Okay

In a world that constantly tells us to strive harder, achieve more and be the best, one of Ben’s most refreshing insights was this:

Sometimes your best isn’t enough – and that’s okay. His best wasn’t enough to win Alone Australia. His body eventually reached its limit, and on Day 40 medical staff extracted him from the competition. Yet he doesn’t view the experience as failure, far from it. The lessons learned, the growth experienced and the deeper connection with God were worth far more than any prize money.

Success, he discovered, isn’t always measured by finishing first, sometimes it’s measured by who you become along the way.

Lessons for Educators

Throughout his presentation, Ben repeatedly returned to the role educators play in shaping young lives.

He challenged teachers to look beyond academic outcomes and ask deeper questions:

*What makes our students come alive?

*How can we nurture their God-given passions?

*Are we teaching them resilience?

*Are we helping them see that every choice matters?

*Are we modelling lives grounded in purpose rather than performance?

His story is a powerful reminder that education is about much more than content delivery. It is about character formation.

It is about helping young people discover who they are and whose they are.

Not Alone

The theme of Ben’s presentation was simple: Not Alone.

Despite forty days in one of the most isolated environments imaginable, he was never truly alone, God’s presence met him in the hunger, in the cold, fear and silence. And when he returned home to the embrace of his family, he carried more than survival stories.

He carried a deeper understanding of grace, surrender and the goodness of God.

As Ben reflected on his experience, one thought stood out above all others:

“All my life You have been faithful. All my life You have been so, so good.”

For those fortunate enough to hear his story, it was a powerful reminder that life’s greatest lessons are often found not on the mountaintops, but in the wilderness valleys where God patiently teaches us that we were never alone to begin with.