Friends

We interrupt this blog post to remind you of where things are currently at...

Esther has a place at Parliament Hill High School in the Borough of Camden - hurrah! This was a HUGE answer to prayer for a couple of reasons;

1. We had been told that we couldn't get a school place until we had a London address. After we had looked round the school, the Admissions Officer said that she could offer Esther an immediate place and that if we moved tomorrow, the place would be hers. She said that we could just forward her proof of address once we had it. We had been praying that if we were looking in the wrong area, etc that God would 'shut the door' and make it clear. It's amazing that Esther was offered a place there and then without an address.

2. We have been praying as a family that the children would go to the same school as other children from Revelation Church. As there are not too many kids of their age at the church, this isn't that likely. However, a girl, who is a year younger than Esther will also be starting Parliament Hill High School in September and she is from Revelation Church. Wow!

The other news is that there is no news about a house...yet! Keep praying (and if you happen to have a spare house in London, let us know!).

So...on with this blog post...Friends.

Friends are important. We simply have the best friends here in Aylsham. Fact. They have walked with us through our joys and very deepest lows. And whilst there is sadness that we are moving away, they have been pivotal in each stage of the journey so far. You may have picked that up in some of my blog posts. They give great advice, cook nice meals, look after our kids and they pray. It was suggested that we should gather together our closest friends to pray regularly for our London Adventure and the first of these was at the end of the Easter Holidays.

If you have been following these posts, you will recall that we had received a random note through our letterbox asking us to sell our house, B&E had looked round and then Penny had shared her thoughts about changing the lens of moving in 2017 rather than 2018. We were faced with deciding whether or not to agree to sell our house now and bring the move forward or not. We went away on holiday for a week over Easter, knowing that we had arranged for our friends to come round and pray the following week.

The thought of agreeing to sell our house was quite frightening because we knew that we had nothing to go to and no way of making that happen. How do you explain that to a potential buyer?! And all the time we were away, it just bugged me, how can we be sure it's the right thing to do? So on the way home, I prayed. It was one of those short flippant prayers that you kinda don't think anything will come of;

'Lord, I really need to know if we should move in 2018 or 2017 - let there be something through our letterbox when we get home that pushes me towards either 2018 or 2017.'

And we arrived home, went through the door and....nothing out of the ordinary through the letterbox. I felt a pang of disappointment but then chided myself for praying such a silly prayer in the first place! So there I was, unpacking some things in the kitchen, when I heard our letterbox. I rushed through and sure enough there was an envelope on the mat. It was a card from a friend of ours, Ann. She wrote that she had felt God speak to her a few weeks earlier when I had first told her about B&E, but as it was a bit directional she hadn't shared it and wanted to wait on it a bit. She then said that as soon as I had told her about B&E, God had said to her to remind me of the word she had for me at Prayer & Equipping back in September...

'...It's sooner than you think.'

It may seem like a simple thing, but it was such a direct answer to my very little prayer, I was quite blown away and then utterly convinced that we should agree to sell out house to B&E and move in 2017.

As an aside, the funny thing is that when I spoke to Ann about this afterwards, she said that she was going to text it to me - something she would regularly do, but she really felt she needed to post it through our letterbox. She then went to the shop to get a card but it was busy so she came home again and went to text me again, but again felt she needed to post something, so she sent her husband out to get a card, which she then wrote and posted through our letterbox!!

And then our friends came round to pray, maybe 9 or 10 of us. We spent some time in sung worship, then started to pray and prophesy about the move to London. It was an amazing time together and so much came out of it - too much to note down here. But there were two prophetic images that were of particular significance.

1. Jenn had shared a sense of momentum and us being carried along in the story so far, we hadn't engineered any of it, it was happening and we were caught up in it. Ann then shared a picture of a canal with a lock.

A canal boat goes through a series of locks. When it goes up a hill, it goes through a lock and from the boat when you enter the lock you can’t see the river ahead, it looks like a dead end and I remember going into a lock and feeling quite fearful but you just have to do it. I just felt, following on from what Jenn was saying, that the process is happening and once you get in the lock there’s no dithering, you just have to get on with it and the boat rises. Just the sense that you can’t plan this, it’s just happening, you can’t see the river ahead, but it’s there.

Jenn then continued;

On the back of that, the key with that is that you manoeuvre yourself into the lock, but you have no control of the water rising to the next level, that’s God and what He’s doing is meeting you in the next part. Actually, all you’ve got to do is position yourself in there, you can’t go anywhere else and then he’ll do the rest.

2. Peter then shared a prophetic word, an extract of which is below;

It says that this fertile land was given to the wilderness and what’s the result? The desert shall rejoice and blossom like the crocus, it says it shall blossom abundantly. So you’ve got what was a wilderness and a desert and is now an abundant blossom of crocus – what use is that?! It’s very useful because you get saffron from crocus – as we were worshipping I just felt God say ‘saffron’ to me – the most expensive spice, now suddenly that wilderness, that desert of crocus – how useful is that? God’s taken something from somewhere else and made it fertile and now it says it will blossom abundantly...

These words are helpful and encouraging in what they are saying, but there's more to it than that. Remember where we are looking to move to? Camden.

Ann had no idea that Camden is famous for it's canal and lock, but it is! And none of us had any idea until Penny researched it a few days later that Camden used to be famous for growing saffron. Who knew?! We had been wondering whether to be centrally located (in Camden) or in a postcode area further out and through the imagery of these words, God was really focusing us on Camden very specifically. He really is a great, creative and kind Father.

Next blog post: Our family prayer day for London