Moving on....

Most of our mates know of our plans to move to New Zealand in the near future. We have been waffling on about it since before we got married. We have now actually reached the stage of submitting all our forms with a view to getting a permanent residency Visa. We started the process back at the end of October last year. In january they invited us to apply. Since then we have had medicals and police checks and gathered together proof of our qualifications and Ian's work experience. It's got to be in by the beginning of April (or we will fall foul of changes to the medical tests and have to redo them).

The big question is, do we still want to go? Even more important, does God want us to go?

God has been speaking to me a lot recently about not choosing the easy option. My default position is to pursue an easy life. It would be very easy to continue living here in our lovely home with our well-paid jobs. That doesn't excite me. I am excited about what God is doing in Bristol Vineyard at the moment and I would love to be a part of that. But I think God has been preparing my heart to move on for a while. I can't really give a particularly spiritual sounding reasoning for doing so. I think it as simple as me having to get out of my comfort zone and perhaps view it as an extended ministry trip giving away what we have learned here. I also believe that truly being aliens in a foreign land will be instructive in understanding more about how that is true for all of God's children. We are just passing through this world. Why not choose a particularly beautiful corner of it which is less crowded and an all-round nice place to live!

I have had some prayer and prophecy about a change of direction and God encouraging me to press on so that I am doing more than treading water in my spiritual life. I like the idea of giving everything here up and having to trust God for jobs, a home, cars and future finances to come home when we want or need to. NZ could be a huge risk. I think my life needs more risks in it rather than less. We have had lots of gentle encouragement down this path. I guess if the Lord isn't with us we need to hear a fairly resounding NO pretty soon.

It is still a fairly protracted time-frame. Once we get the Visa we will have 12 months to act on it - so would have to move by May/June next year. We may stay here for most of that time. We certainly don't expect to be going anywhere before October this year.