Festival Season

- February 11, 2020

Hi all!

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We have had a busy few weeks, but we are starting to slow down and get our heads around what our future is looking like and what we need to get done to make it all happen.

This week the kids started school and kindy for what will probably be the last time in a while. We are so grateful to have perfectly allocated teachers that both Josh and Gabby love. Caleb also has such an amazing kindy with awesome teachers, so I have my last chance of some alone time to prepare for our next step.

Over Wellington Anniversary weekend we were able to go to the ‘New Wine’ festival, fortunately for us only 20 minutes from home. This festival was attended by 1600 people from 170 different churches around New Zealand, but for our church (St Lukes, Waikanae) it's like our annual family camp. It was a great to live in community and have real conversations with so many that we don’t get to do this with on a weekly basis. There was some great teaching on relevant topics, with a good time of worship and ministry. There was heaps going on for the kids that they really loved. We really hope and pray we can continue to get to New Wine in the future.

After New Wine, Roy had to squeeze 3 days of working in Khandallah before heading to Pirongia after work on the Thursday evening… famous last words, “the kids with sleep in the car on the way up" #yeahright

We then were lucky enough to go to Festival One, a Christian music festival with 5000 others, to help man the MMM stall. It was great to be able to represent MMM and have conversations with all sorts of people about what MMM does and how they can be a part of it. This was a good chance to be able to catch up with so many friends from the other end of the country… hopefully we have convinced some of them to come visit us in Fiji with a team of friends!

Festival One was completely different to New Wine, but still awesome. It was cool seeing Josh get into some of the music acts as well as really enjoying hanging out with one of our good friends son. Gabby really enjoyed all the little arty spaces to create things and Caleb just loves being around so many people! They all LOVED the water tunnel… I think we need to take one of these to Fiji.

The week after Festival One we were into Orientation at the MMM Centre in Pirongia. We spent the mornings learning about the inner workings of the organisation, which helped answer a lot of questions and developed an even better understanding of how the organisation works and how that will affect us. This was great to help get our head around what the next few years will actually look like for us.

In the afternoons we took the opportunity to visit as many friends in the Waikato as we could, but still more on the list for next time! The hard part about having lived in so many areas of NZ is that you have good friends everywhere to fit in a catch up with. But we were grateful to see as many as we did.

We finished off the 10 days away with a weekend in Paeroa catching up with Roy’s family before the trip home the day before ‘meet the teachers’ at school… and now we are back into the norm, or at least for this term.

We are now deep in the support raising/partnership development/fundraising! We are stuck somewhere between completely humbled and encouraged by the amount of people already keen to back us and get behind us in this, being amazed at how God is knitting it all together so perfectly and taking a deep breath and leaning into God to work out all the rest of the things left to do before we can leave Waikanae to work full time for MMM.

We still have jobs to do on the house before renting it and getting the kids schooling sorted (I am currently looking into correspondence for the first bit, while I get my head around everything else)

But we are definitely all go with some exciting times ahead! Watch this space