April for us

Change is good! Our backyard has changed, our jobs & location will be changing in July & we know that our lives are changing. Although we haven’t found change all that easy…we know that without change we become boring & predictable and are in danger of ‘just cranking it out one more time!’

Work

Well it is official… we have 88 days until we finish with school here in the UK, which is about 12 weeks of teaching. We have accepted jobs at the British International School in Kiev, Ukraine for the new academic year starting in September. We are really looking forward to it, but also conscious of doing good here & finishing well. I start fulltime at school next week & am looking forward to being with the same class each day!

Church

We are still enjoying our time at Watford Community Church, and the input we get there. We have also been reading & exploring lately some sermons & articles on the web about the emerging church. We enjoyed & were challenged by Michael Frost’s series (http://www.christianityworks.com/pages/teachers.asp?pid=150) about worldview…where the quote at the top comes from.

Home

We have been transforming our backyard so it will be useable for summer. It is already looking heaps better (it was rather neglected) & we have planted some herbs, tomatoes, lettuce & sunflowers! We have also bought a BBQ & outside fire. It hasn’t rained for 3 weeks & we have had beautiful weather, so we are enjoying the long evenings outside.

Sport

Alongside tidying our backyard, Jon & Matt have made a putting green, & have a net they chip the golf ball into as well. They seem to enjoy themselves most evenings out there. Our touch season starts next week, & also my cricket training starts for real now every Tuesday. We were also cheering on the Black Caps!

Trips

Well we had a 2 week holiday over Easter, & for 1 week of that we hired a car & explored Chester, Newcastle upon Tyne, Hadrian’s Wall, then into Scotland & Edinburgh, then west to Wigtown (where an ancestor of mine was martyred) & then back into England & to the Lake District where we stayed at Lake Windermere for a couple of days, then the last night we visited Blackpool. It was a great trip & we enjoyed meeting some of my relatives & experiencing real English culture. We even spent a day at a traditional English point to point horse race! It was also good to get behind the wheel of a car again, & with the good English roads, it hardly seemed like we traveled 1200 miles!

Future

We have lots of dreams & thoughts about what this will look like. We know this past year that as we have traveled we have learnt things about ourselves & how we function that inside our culture & comfort zone we wouldn’t have noticed. We have learnt that working with passion & where we are gifted brings fulfillment. It has been good to understand more where our strengths lie & that we have missed having an open home. Where this next year will lead we don’t know…but we do know that this story is still being written.

We do plan to use this coming year in Kiev to also learn the language & see what happens after that. A holiday back to NZ maybe on the cards near the end of 2008…but who knows!