End of 2021, who could've known
Well, usually at this time of the year I would be heading to my family’s fav beach town for holiday. What with Covid, lockdown etc, we’re not… that’s what I thought, till I looked back on my blog at the beginning of 2021 and saw the picture the Lord gave me for 2021, with the question – will you put your hand in mine, child-like?
Well, then it struck me, once again the Lord knew at the end of 2020 what I would only find out at the end of 2021. Let me put it this way, I thought us moving here was God’s plan for us, Him fulfilling His life-long plan for us. I didn’t see He had revealed it to me at the end of last year already… he he…
Last year when I made the picture with the little boy and his father running along the beach I had no idea at the end of this year we would be living at the coast.
It all started with the lockdowns and the shear frustration my husband was feeling that the government can keep changing and moving the goal posts of daily life, when, where and how we can go to school, work, shop, eat… it seems everything is under their lock and key suddenly… this happening all the while our children needing to move on with school… my husband decided, that’s it, we’re moving to Cape Town. Now for me that was all too dramatic, I couldn’t cope with the thought of suddenly up and over with our whole lives, after all I was just making in-roads, I was deeply involved with church, making some wonderful friends and now, what, I must up and toss all this out the window to go to Cape Town to accomplish what…
then… without warning, at the insistence of my husband we said if within 3 weeks we find a home to rent in Durbanville, Western Cape, for the 1st of December, 2021, we will take it as the sign from the Lord that we are to go, bearing in mind it was early September (there shouldn’t be any rentals for 1 December yet). Even after asking the Lord this, even after He showed us a property the very next day, I was still skeptical… me the evangelical, full-out, faith-filled believer, was still questioning God… ahem… say no more…
Then, again, out of the blue the Lord reminded me of the words He had told me 10 years earlier when I had been loathe to leave Cape Town to move (to what we thought would be Johannesburg) ended up the Lord was right (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) we moved to Pretoria. At that time I hadn’t wanted to move and my hubby said we had to, it was best for us. The Lord said, ‘You will move to Pretoria, be equipped, moved back to Cape Town and then onto the nations.’ So, now, it was my husbands insistence, it was the Lord’s reminder, then my latest prayer partner called me and left a message to say that the Lord has equipped me for my new adventure, I mustn’t question it, He has opened up a path for me and I will move swiftly through and into it. Now, he had no knowledge of my intentions to move or that we were even considering it huh, huh, joke on me! God, what are you doing here.
That’s it, I decided, OK God, if you want us to move to Cape Town my kids have to go to a decent school, I’m not moving if they can’t get space in the school I’m hoping for. We haven’t spent all this time educating them to loose ground now. I, without telling anyone, picked up the phone and contacted the school. I asked all the usual questions regarding admissions and then said do you have space for a Gr 3 and a Gr 8, and the admissions lady said yes, in fact we have one for each. I said something to the effect of, Oh what a relief, because if you didn’t have space we were not coming. Wow, what a blessing that turned out to be, this lady and I, we worked hand in hand, team to team to make this a reality for my kids – turns out the Lord knew what He was doing there… you’d think I’d start seeing the pattern?
Then it came to quotes from movers, oh my word, have you ever looked at the cost of moving houses, it’s insanity, what a business! I said, Lord, if we don’t get this cost halved, we can’t go! Now we’ve booked schools, we’re looking for houses and we’re needing to transport our goods – you would think I would know by now what would happen next, the very last person we got in to quote came in at almost exactly half the price of the first 6, I actually wondered about calling him a second time, I thought since all the others are nearly the same, surely his quote won’t make a difference? Well, as I said, his quote was almost exactly half the cost, which is what I’d asked the Lord.
When it came to the house, we had a rental, fully furnished, contract signed, everything good to go, about a month in advance the advertiser started giving my husband trouble. Something about you are in breach of contract, long story short, my hubby had to fly to the Cape to sign a rental with an agent, where we found our own home, beautiful property in a poetically named street. I was starting to see, God wants us to move, I think I only started realising that we had done it when we reached our halfway point on the 1st December, when in Colesburg, the halfway stop of the 1 271 km. It only took me 3 months, 684 km’s to realise that we had rearranged our whole lives.
Well, God is good as always, which is why I now sit, writing my year end blog post a few days earlier than usual… still surprised, when the Lord told me to place a picture of a dad walking hand in hand with his boy on the beach, I remember the uneasy feeling I had about it, doesn’t look quite right, doesn’t look professional for a front page pic, but man, I’m a slow learner, every year, without fail, that pic ends up being what the Lord has for the next year… I can’t wait to see 2022’s vision from the Lord…
God bless, Merry Christmas and Shalom for the New Year. We’ll chat then
P.S. until then I’ll share some of the things the Lord spoke to me in this time, perhaps it will resonate with you, let me know?
Uniquely on purpose
Lord this morning as I sit at my children’s school I am reminded of You and all You do and the significance of the big and the small…
Lord as I look out on this purple array of flowers I study each one…. no face alike, some with spots some with lines, some brown flecks some more grey others more black and so the finest details change…
I stare a little longer and the hues jump out at me…same plant, same stem and yet some are so pale they seem lilac and others so deep they look irredescent in the morning sun glow…
I wonder it doesn’t take me long to think of the fact that the Lord has made us all so very uniquely on purpose… it doesn’t take me long to think each flower serves a purpose for an insect the other wouldn’t achieve… it doesn’t take me long to conclude that and yet why when it comes to people who are not the same as me, does it take me so long… how long does it take you to realise this person’s life journey was so different to mine… does it make them right or wrong… no… they didn’t ask to be born into that body, to those parents in that time zone… but what have they done with their lives.
I work with some of the poorest poor working people. Not street people, people who work and work hard and achieve much with what they have and there are times I am ashamed of what effort I put into my life to accomplish what I do. These people don’t have cars to go out with, they have to take public transport… they don’t have a weekend… they are cleaning their homes… let alone taking a drive to the beach to sit there for a day… they are up at 4am to get cleaned up and go to work, come home at 6 because of transport, make supper clean house then go to church at 8, finish there at 10pm, take church transport home and up at 4 to start the cycle again…
Let’s consider others more highly than ourselves, next time you see someone running for a taxi, let them run, stop your car for 2 minutes… let’s stop our lives for 2 minutes every hour and consider how to help the person next to us… imagine a world where we considered others more highly than ourselves… one of the great theologians said, “humility is not thinking less of yourself; it’s thinking of yourself less.”
His ways
Lord today I felt You saying You want to speak to me. I pulled my car off to the school where there were less interruptions and started watching the children… the questions that ran through my head… should the teacher not be on the playground with them supervising their play… should the teacher let them solve their own issues thereby allowing them to problem solve and negotiate themselves… suddenly I thought when did this all become an issue, we used to send our kids out to play, no concern of what would be correct and socially acceptable, why and how have we allowed other people to dictate to us what we will and won’t allow with our own children?
The problem comes in when we allow more media than Jesus in our hearts, homes and beyond and then we question ourselves according to someone else’s standard. I was explaining to my children today that as Christians we hold ourselves to God’s standard which is higher than a worldly standard so we need to respect each other more than someone in the world would, we need to do all things in love, we need to seek God first in every situation and from there answers will flow… not only answers but supernaturally inspired solutions to worldly problems and God will get the glory. Let’s put God on the throne of our lives, throne of our time, throne of our thoughts… let’s go to God and allow Him to supercede all human thought and wisdom and permeate our thoughts will and desires… from there we can reign in this world which is trying to make a mess of the simple God, family, life structure God put out in His word for us to follow.
Calling leaders
But how are people to call upon Him Whom they have not believed [in Whom they have no faith, on Whom they have no reliance]? And how are they to believe in Him [adhere to, trust in, and rely upon Him] of Whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher? And how can men [be expected to] preach unless they are sent? As it is written, How beautiful are the feet of those who bring glad tidings! [How welcome is the coming of those who preach the good news of His good things!] [Isa. 52:7.]
Romans 10:14-15 AMPC
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