AwareofAware

Happy Christmas and a story

Happy Christmas to all who visit and contribute here!

I am sorry I have been somewhat absent of late, but I moved from the UK to New Zealand in August and started a new job in September. We bought a new house in October and then had to unpack a 40 foot container recently. Been chaos, but there is a story I want to share with you around this…it relates to my faith, so stop reading now if you get wound up by such things, but it is Christmas, so I get to be a Christian here today! It’s long, you might want to make a cup of tea first.

A year ago, I was sitting outside in my backyard on a cold winter’s night by a campfire having a cigar and a Bailey’s when I heard a scream coming from inside our house.

I jumped up, ran inside, and up the stairs worried something had happened to my wife. I found her on the floor curled up in a ball crying. She was surprised to see me as she didn’t think I would have heard her because it was on the other side of the house from the garden. I sat down next to her and asked her what the matter was.

She eventually told me she was screaming at God! She had been desperate to move back to NZ for years, but opportunities in my field are very rare over here, and corporations won’t even look at someone outside of the country normally, as evidenced by the lack of response to the applications I had made.

Anyway, I went straight on LinkedIn (again) and there was a job I was perfectly qualified for based in Auckland, so I applied, mainly just because I wanted to at least feel like I was trying. I didn’t really have any hope.

This was the beginning of December last year. A week later I was offered an interview which was a complete shock. Maybe, just maybe…

We prayed and prayed into it, asking only for God’s will…not just what we wanted, because the situation was complex.

By the end of January, I had a job offer, we had buyers for our house and a number of other things had happened that gave us a certainty that God was “behind the move.” Things seemed to align supernaturally; the house buyers were even from our church. We booked our flights for mid March and began the process of moving.

Now, for those who live in the UK, you may be aware that house sales are not legally binding until the very last minute. Our buyers, despite being Christian, started messing us about in mid February, then the company who offered me the job started to move the goalposts, expanding the role to East Asia, something I was very unhappy about…and yet we had felt so certain that God was behind this because some of the crazy coincidences and our continual prayer for his will.

About 3 weeks before we were due to move I had a bit of a breakdown because of the whole situation with our house, and the thought of spending the remainder of my career at airports. Also, I was feeling bad about leaving my Mum in the UK (the “complexity”). My wife said “let’s pull out”. We did. Neither of us was happy about it as we had felt certain “God was behind the move”, and we had both on balance felt it was the right thing to do, but going ahead no longer felt right either. We decided to still go to NZ for a holiday as by this stage neither of us had jobs in the UK (we’d both quit our existing positions), and the flights and AirBnBs were booked.

A few days before we went I got a message from another company. Quick rewind – in the period between starting to feel nervous about the move, and cancelling, I had applied for another job in NZ that had come up and I told them I would be moving to NZ in March (which was true at the time), but I’d forgotten all about it when we pulled out of the move. Anyway, they wanted to interview me.

We discussed it and decided “why not?” We are going anyway, and maybe “God really does want us to move.” (This is how we think as Christians!).

We went to NZ for a month, and I had a series of interviews. It was our last weekend in the country, I was down to the last two in the process, and I got a call from the company saying they had chosen the other person. We were absolutely gutted. Our hopes had been ripped from us, yet both of us had felt so strongly that “God was behind the move.”

As people who put every step of our lives into God’s hands, we declared that God does not disappoint, he had not just allowed us to believe we would be moving to NZ but had actively encouraged us to believe it would happen. At the airport we were miserable but kept saying…this is not how God works, we will be coming back to live, and soon…it is one thing us praying for stuff and not getting it, but quite another putting it in God’s hands, circumstances coming together miraculously to point one way, then having them ripped away. We kept lifting ourselves with this statement of faith “God does not disappoint.”

Just over two weeks after getting back to the UK, my wife had been able to get her old job back and I was at home alone, and I ended up having a row with God. I said I could no longer say to my wife that God is not a God who disappoints as I have been disappointed for over 20 years with the outcome of my writing. There were many similarities between the situations. I had given my writing to God many years ago, I had even said I wanted to walk away from it because it was a massive ball-ache and perennially thankless, but he kept on producing signs, sometimes absurdly miraculous immediate answers to prayer, that kept me going. Then I had started to resign myself to the idea that my writing had achieved its potential and his purposes, but at the same time I had felt that he had led me to believe that I would be much more successful, so much so that I would be able to make a good living out of it. As a result, I have been disappointed with the outcome.

This was why I said to God that I could no longer say to my wife that he didn’t disappoint…he had allowed me to believe that my writing would really come to something more than it had. I said to Him that I would tell Kirsty that night that I no longer believe this and we had to accept we weren’t going to NZ any time soon.

Then I felt this familiar internal voice, gently say to me…  “hold fire, give it a few days.” “End of the week, no more!” I replied to that voice…I know – bonkers.

The next morning, I got up early, as I do, shuffled down to make myself breakfast, started eating my cereal, then opened my emails on my phone.

“Dear Orson, the candidate we offered the position to is no longer going to take it, would you…”

Here we are in New Zealand 6 months later finding new buyers for our UK home, 4 months into a great job, now living in a house we fell in love with on the internet 2 years ago, a dream house that we could not have afforded then, but due to property prices going down in NZ and up in the UK and the pound doing well, we were able to buy now.

We were right to declare “God does not disappoint.” But here’s the kicker.

What do you think I thought after what happened? I spent a whole afternoon “contending” with God that I was disappointed with my writing, that I was certain he had allowed me to believe more was going to happen than has happened, so how could I say any longer that he doesn’t disappoint? How do you think I would react to the fact that the very next morning he reopened the door to NZ?

Of course I’m bloody well going to link the two! Of course I am going to connect things and therefore believe he was saying “you will not be disappointed with the writing” and of course I am going to believe that massive things are yet to come, and sooner rather than later. Moreover, I know that God knows I would make that connection, thereby reinforcing the sense that it is his will for me to believe this…and he will not disappoint.

So, if you got this far, and have read this, I am going to declare that God will not disappoint me when it comes to my writing – that big things, maybe massive things, are coming. I am not writing any new books at the moment, so it will be with one of the ones already out there…maybe one of the novels…that would be my dream, but it just has to be one of them. You will be witnesses to the outcome of this. Some might argue that I am testing God, but that is not what is happening here. I am so confident that something big is about to happen after this sequence of events, and my experience of walking with God, that I want the people here who have who eyes to see and ears to hear, to witness him working and come to faith if they haven’t already.

God does not disappoint…a you will see.