If you've been following to this point then you know that Jared and I, almost a year ago now, went on an exploratory trip to New Zealand. Exploratory meaning we were scoping it out as a potential place to land for church planting. To briefly overview the trip for you: New Zealand (NZ) is an incredible place with an incredible need that is not typical to most fields of work with church planting. We left feeling excited and optimistic about our calling to working among the people there. Once we were back home and really processing through everything that involved NZ we initially planned on doing the assessment and training with the organization we would be going with.
Not long after our initial decision to go forward with the NZ process life got busy: holidays, Jared off to Israel, a very busy birth season for doula stuff, and some pregnancy complications for myself. (Remember those darn kidney stones?!! GAH!) Towards the end of January and after a long prayer process, Jared and I realized a big halt sign in our overseas plans. Initially we were hoping to do the assessment/training for NZ by March (2017) and go into full time support raising with hopes of leaving to go to NZ by the end of this year. But it seemed as though God had different plans...and man, was I angry! Angry because NZ seemed like such an incredibly good fit for us, and us for it. It was the "fit" we had been looking for for so long! Angry because I thought that it was finally my time to shine. I would finally get to be the one to go onto school and study midwifery! Angry because, selfishly, I felt as though God owed it to us to finally be able to live out our dreams of living in a different culture and having our children experience life in a different capacity. But God did not see it that way. I cannot tell you just how many nights I fell asleep crying when we were hit with this glaring halt. As God had it, we ended up telling our NZ folks that we would be putting this journey on the shelf for the time being. Which proved to be quite the difficult, disappointing and even slightly embarrassing conversation to have because of our prior exciting commitment.
All I can say is this: the decision to "shelf", so to speak, New Zealand has been extremely disheartening for us, but even more so for me. Over the last 3-4 years we've pursued different avenues of opportunities...all of which have not panned out like I had hoped and progressively left me feeling as though I couldn't really trust any kind of opportunities presented to us. I've found myself having a tough time even trusting God with any kind of pursuits...even in my own faith journey. To put it bluntly: God and I are kind of on the rocks. And that realization alone was confirmation enough that we were not in a good position to be uprooting our family to a completely different part of the world just yet.
But it has also posed some good realizations for us as a family. The biggest realizations being our financial stability, our living situation and also the way in which we now parent 3 children. Now that both Jared and myself are both working full time, we are finally getting the chance to start gaining a bit in the financial aspect of our life. But at the same time, we've also had to take a serious look into our living situation. We have 3 children, two of whom are at ages where they want to be outside, enjoying all the seasons and just simply run around without their parents coming down on them to be quiet for the downstairs neighbors. Jared and I had started looking at getting out of the apartment living lifestyle and looking into renting a house. Little did we know just how much renting a 3/4 bedroom house would be in Omaha! That then lead us into poking around a bit into the whole idea of buying a house. YIKES!! If you were to ask Jared how his wife took that subject...he'd laugh and cry at the same time, I'm convinced! I was in COMPLETE emotional turmoil over the idea of buying a house! Why? Because it meant commitment. It meant we wouldn't be leaving Omaha anytime soon. It meant we wouldn't be renters anymore. I cried and then cried some more about all these realizations and poor Jared was the one who took the brunt of all my emotions. But he handled it like a trooper as we walked through the details and pros/cons of this house-buying thing.
Thus began the process of looking into houses to buy. TO BUY! What?! I'm quite certain we drove our realtor absolutely insane during our process since I had so many emotions about it all. On our first meeting with the realtor she asked us what kind of things we were looking for in a house. My answer was something like: "...I don't really know...Um, a roof? Maybe some grass for the kids to play on?" But thankfully Jared had us covered in the absolute necessities for what we'd be looking for.
To make a long story short: after looking at many houses we found one. We debated, talked at length about it and eventually put in an offer. And were accepted on that offer! So...we bought a house in Benson! And we are pretty excited about having a place of our own. A place we don't have to share walls with a neighbor. A place we can let our kids go outside and play and enjoy themselves freely. This is definitely a big step for Jared and I, and we're pretty pumped about it. We never realized how much we had been struggling mentally and emotionally from being cooped up in an apartment and never being able to host get togethers with friends. But we will finally be able to do that! We have always loved to host parties and hangouts in our home, but living in a tiny apartment has made that difficult for the last 3 years.
SO! Are you still with me? I know. It's a lot and some of it depressing...but what is life without some valley's between the mountain tops to really grow you as a person! Anyway, I do hope that God opens the door back up with a resounding "YES!" for New Zealand one day. And I'm pretty confident He will, I'm just unsure of when it will be. In the meantime, we're going to need all the help we can get in getting settled into our new home. When? Well, we close on September 29th and hope to start moving that day and on the 30th. If you're free, come on over and help out! Even if it's to play with the kiddos and keep them busy! Either way, we'd love to see you and hope to plan a fun house warming party very soon!
Love to you all,
Anna
