The Call (part 1)
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?" And I said, "Here am I. Send me!"
Isaiah 6:8
So we'd ended 2015 with this kind of Isaiah prayer, putting our cards on the table with God, so to speak (not sure how appropriate it is to use a gambling reference when referring to prayer...?!) and asking God to show us where He wanted us to be. We threw a few ideas around. Maybe Cambridge or Ipswich where we already had a degree of relationship with the Relational Mission church leaders in those places. Maybe Colchester, where there was a new church plant starting. Maybe.
And then came the call.
Ok, so I will get to that in just a moment but first I need to set the scene. As a family of churches, Relational Mission runs a prayer initiative called ENOUGH. It runs 2 or 3 times a year and is an extraordinary call to a Friday half night of prayer, where churches gather in hubs across the UK and mainland Europe to pray for the same things at the same time. (If you haven't gone to one yet and you're part of a Relational Mission church...you really really should!) Anyway, as part of our ENOUGH evenings, a few videos are shown of families or churches in pioneering situations so that we can pray for them. And because I work for Relational Mission I see a preview of these videos before the ENOUGH night takes place.
On 23rd February 2016, I was cooking tea in my kitchen. I have a feeling it was a stir fry. I was multi-tasking and checking my work email at the same time as cooking the tea. I saw that the new ENOUGH videos had been sent through with the invitation to make any final comments on them. So I figured I'd check them out.
I clicked on the one from Revelation Church, Camden and watched Stef Liston (one of the Elders of the church) talk about their vision as a church to plant an expression of Christianity postcode by postcode across North London. As I was watching I thought 'wow, I love that vision' but it was the last line that got me...
It's 'just' a line, right? But for me, in that instant, I was overcome with emotion. Suddenly, I was sobbing and sobbing in my kitchen (whilst stir-frying...obviously!) I knew that I knew that I knew that God was calling us to move to be part of this. In that moment, my conversation with Maurice came flooding back - when is our first natural gap to move? - 2018. When are Tim and I 40? 2017 and 2018 respectively. My conversations with Tim about what we feel passionately about came flooding back to me - Revelation Church is mostly made up of people under the age of 35! It was almost a tangible turning of my heart and I couldn't deny that God had spoken to me. As a Christian, you learn, as you grow, how God speaks to you and I had had a very similar experience when God called me to move to Norfolk 13 years ago (but that's another story!).
And my response to the creator of the universe, the almighty God, the most high God whom I have given my life to...?
I'm not doing it. It's impossible. Yep, that's what I said to God. I was so angry. And I listed all of the impossible things to God to make Him see what a ridiculous idea it was; we can't afford it, Tim will NEVER want to move to London (40 years in Aylsham, remember!), the kids will never be on board with this, my ex-husband will definitely not make it easy for us to move, we won't fit in there, and so on.
But God had spoken to me. I knew that He had and yet I had absolutely no faith that He would get us to London. Honestly, I felt that God hadn't answered any prayers in the previous two years so why would He start now? And that, my friends, is a very hard place to be at. I told God that He would need to speak to each member of my family if this was what He wanted us to do.
Later that evening (after we'd enjoyed a delicious stir fry!) I told Tim that I knew where God wanted us to move to but I wasn't going to tell him.
You might find that strange, but there was a bit of wisdom in it! So one of Tim's best qualities is that he would do anything for me and one of my worst qualities is that I am stubborn. I knew that if I wanted to 'push this through' then I could and that wouldn't be right. Imagine when we moved and things were tough, if Tim hadn't heard from God independently from me, then we would just be opening ourselves up for bitterness and resentment to creep into our marriage and that wouldn't be good.
I told Tim that we wouldn't talk about moving again until he felt he had heard from God...
Next Blog Post: The Call (part 2)
table with God, so to speak