Impossible

Really?!! Is it kind of fun to do the impossible? Before this whole London thing came along, I would have agreed. I would have said that I am naturally a risk taker, quite impulsive, someone who makes decisions very quickly. I would have said that Tim is cautious by nature, takes his time to come to a conclusion and not particularly impulsive...

However, these last 12 months have seen a bit of a reversal of our natural personalities and that has been a little weird, frustrating at times and quite comical!

So where have we got up to in our story? Well, we're up to May 2016, with Tim and I both feeling that God has spoken to us about the same thing, completely independently of each other. Tim was beyond excited, I mean in a totally out of character way and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't shake the 'impossibleness' of the situation.

It was a couple of months of conversations! We spoke to our close friends, James and Penny and started to pray together with them about the way forward. (James is also my boss and I wanted the reassurance that I could transfer my job, which I can...hurrah!).

We also got in touch with Maurice (remember, the guy from the ferry?) and his wife, Rachel and it was really helpful to be able to chat things through with them. Maurice gently 'prodded' us to test how strongly we felt God had spoken to us and gave us a couple of pieces of advice;

1. Start to drip feed the idea of going on an adventure with God to Esther, Eli and Jemimah

2. Gather some prophetic data - with such a long run up to 2018, there was time to ask God to speak to us through other people, etc to add weight to our feelings.

We went to London for a couple of days for Tim's 40th birthday in July and met up with Stef (remember the guy from the ENOUGH video?) and his wife, Davina for lunch. It was good - we shared where we were up to and they shared the story of Revelation Church so far. Then Stef got out a map of London. He unfolded it on the table and said, 'well here's the area - you can live anywhere' motioning to the North London area...

Again, Tim was 'Mr Excited' and I just felt rubbish. In my head all I was thinking was 'this is impossible' and 'why are you calling us here, God?' I looked at the map on the table and imagined us living out in one of the postcodes somewhere, feeling lonely (*sobs!), etc. I think the reality of moving to a new place hit me quite hard in that moment. We all have a desire to know and be known and the thought of starting again in a place where I would have neither of those things freaked me out slightly, (ok, maybe a lot). Tim and I bid farewell to Stef and Davina and prayer walked around some streets in North London. Prayer walking is basically as it sounds, you walk and pray at the same time!

We got back to our hotel room and I sat on the bed and cried. (I seem to have shed a lot of tears over this - I'm not normally a 'cry-er' but there does seem to be a pattern emerging here!)

I was crying because everything about moving was impossible and then crying because I felt I was ruining Tim's birthday by crying. So Tim, possibly without thinking before he spoke(!), said; 'I don't know why you're crying, this is as exciting as when we got married and when we had Jemimah...' And what do you think my response was to that? Yep. I cried.

You may think that I'm not painting a very good picture of when God calls you to something. But the reality is that it's not all 'moonlight and roses' - sometimes it is very very hard and very very costly. My next blog post will explore this a little more...

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