I (Neil) returned from my trip to Spain on Thursday and came back to the most glorious weather at home – there’s not often that I come home to better weather than I had on holidays! The break was good for my head and I came back excited to get to whatever God had for us over the next month. On Friday, Janet and I went to visit family and then stole some date time over lunch to catch up after the week apart. It was great to hear all that God had been speaking to her about. Saturday was a full day with football training in the morning, followed by a community event that our church was holding. It’s probably the first event like this we’ve been involved in since we left our last jobs so it was lovely to get to hang out with some great people in our community and enjoy a sunny Saturday with some good food. I think God is going to open up so much more in this community as we lean in to all that He has in store there.

Then I headed down to Belfast to an event called The Send which is a part of a movement seeking to live out the Great Commission and activate a generation into mission. There were thousands of young people gathered at the event and there were lots of speakers, worship times etc. I had actually travelled down to meet a friend of mine who was speaking at the event and it was great to catch up with him. Just like the community event before it I realised as I drove up to Belfast that this was the first ‘church leader’ type gathering I’d been at in a year and a half. It also meant that I had a lot of conversations with people I haven’t seen in a long time which was a mixture of really good and really tough. Overall I left the event encouraged at what was happening in the wider church when it comes to mission and I hope we will see that multiply in the next generation moving forward.

We had a full Sunday too with church, a church BBQ, and then youth on Sunday night so we arrived at Monday a little tired. I’ll let Janet take you through the last two days

On Monday I (Janet) went for a prayer walk in our local forest, it was so beautiful! We have been thinking that God might be inviting us to explore different ways to pray in the community and so I wanted to spend a little time asking Him about that. Also a wee while ago Neil had felt the Lord speaking to him about setting up spaces in local communities to offer prayer to the people living there. My prayer walking was all about this idea, and I asked God to confirm it in our hearts over the next day or 2 if He’d like us to peruse it now as another step in theonehundredyearsproject ❤️😃

Tuesday was a sunny start in the garden 😃 We are loving how sunny it’s been these last couple of weeks ☀️❤️ After we spent some time reading our Bibles and praying, Neil did a bit of blog writing. He’s writing about transition and our personal experience of where we feel we’re at in that process right now. I’ve found it super helpful as we’ve chatted this through! Neil’s learning and writing have really helped give language to how I’ve been feeling recently. The truth is it’s been a bit of a harder time emotionally for us. There has been some external stuff going on with family health etc. but we think God is starting to show us that we’re actually in this place of being lifted out of the old thing but not quite placed in the new just yet even though we’ve started stepping into the new. When we finished up our last season of leadership I felt God give me a picture of what was happening. (I tend to think in pictures by the way👍) The way I saw it was like when you order something online and it’s getting delivered to you. First it has to be picked up from the place of posting, then it’s in the lorry en-route to its destination, and then after a journey it gets delivered to its destination. Right now we feel like we’re in the lorry, it’s like we can see our destination, but we’re just not quite there yet! So we’re trying to learn in this season, and God is teaching us a lot!! This morning I am reminded that we need to be patient with ourselves at the minute. My tendency is to rush through these kinds of moments. I am a happy person most of the time and even when things are painful, I don’t love spending a lot of time dwelling on sad feelings. Some of that is healthy and helpful as it stops me becoming negative as a person, but sometimes I rush through too quickly and end up breaking things because I wasn’t ready to step into the new just yet! So I am trying to learn that it’s ok to take our time and journey this season well.

I also know that throughout my life I have struggled with trying to please people or win them over. Part of that is my own insecurity and wanting to be liked, and the other part of it is a want for others to feel comfortable around me, and so if I can be someone they want me to be that will be easier for them! Either way it’s pretty unhealthy and it’s something I’ve been working on with God for a long time. Some days I do great and others I still fail miserably 🤦🏻‍♀️ I’m a work in progress, but I’m committed to the journey 😂💪 Anyway, the reason I share that is because I would love to be able to tell people how well we’re doing all the time! I’d love them to think I don’t have any more stuff to journey in this transition time, that there’s no more healing to do, or that we aren’t struggling with anything anymore, because really I want to impress them I guess. That’s pretty embarrassing to admit, but I think that’s probably the underlying root of it. So I feel like God’s reminder to be patient with ourselves right now is a gentle reminder to keep letting Him strip away the worry of what other people might think of us, to not worry about trying to win anyone over, and to just keep surrendering ourselves to Him every step of the way ❤️