Woooooooooo Hooooooooo!!!!! We are 1 year old today 🥳🥳🥳

It’s hard to believe that it was this date last year when we took our first steps into discovering what theonehundredyearsproject actually is! What a first year this has been! We are beyond thankful to the Lord for all He has shown us, taught us, and revealed to us, and for all the ways He has blown us away with His love ❤️

We had an overall dream of what things could look like in the generations to come through this, and we knew the underlying purpose of theonehundredyearsproject, but we had very little idea about what our day-to-day lives were going to look like! We’ve journaled the whole journey up to this point, so I won’t write it all again, but the main practical things that God has invited us to do so far have been – recording podcasts, writing blog posts, prayer walking, gathering a prayer team, starting the first Miracle Halls, and Neil writing his book ❤️🥳🙌 We’ve been having a lot of fun so far 😃😃

I think the main things we’ve been learning and hopefully growing in this year can be boiled down into 4 main areas.

• Firstly, we have been learning on a whole new level that true success can only be measured in obedience to the Lord’s voice! We have believed this for a long time, but it feels like the reality of this last year has taken us to a new level in how we believe this to be true! I guess it felt easier for us to say when we were in employed positions, leading something that people could put a name to, with a staff and volunteer team around us. We did believe it, but in this last year, it has felt much more like a ‘rubber hitting the road’ moment where we’ve grown into not just believing this definition of success in theory, but having the privilege of showing the Lord that we truly know it and believe it enough to live it in a new way!
• Secondly, we’ve been learning that who we are is never defined by what we do! Again, this is something the Lord, in His kindness, has been leading us into over a long number of years. But this last year has been an opportunity for us to discover more and more who we are when we don’t have a job title to rely on to describe ourselves! It’s been a journey of growing in dependence on the Lord and relying on Him to tell us who we are, not by what we can do for Him, but simply by living as His!
• We’ve also been rediscovering the truth that hope in our lives is something worth fighting for! Hope doesn’t always come naturally, and our circumstances can often try to lead us away from hope rather than towards it! There have been other significant times in our lives when we had to fight for hope, and throughout this last season, we were so thankful that we had exercised those muscles, because we needed them so many times! We had moments of checking and checking again that we had definitely heard the Lord properly about what we were doing! And we walked through some painful moments in our wider family with health issues, and Neil’s dad passing away. In those moments, and others like them, we needed to choose to fight for hope and not let our circumstances dictate to us the direction of travel!
• The final big thing that we’ve been exploring and learning is in the area of trust, especially with finance! Right at the beginning of the one hundred years project we felt the Lord speak to us about how He wanted to provide financially for us. He asked us not to get other jobs to finance what we’d been doing, but instead trust Him to be our sole provider! For me that felt super exciting and a little scary! For Neil, it felt super scary and a little exciting! We both had a lot of growing to do in this area! And we still do! Although, we have now seen the provision of the Lord in so many bonkers ways and we have pushed into faith, truly taking Him at His word over this last year, and so we thankfully have grown a lot in trusting Him and getting to know Him at new levels in this way!

What an amazing adventure this has been for our whole family! Caleb has got to experience firsthand while he’s a teenager how God not only provides what you need, but when He says to trust Him, He really means it! He also is more extravagantly generous than we could ever imagine!! God doesn’t just give you what you need – He spoils us rotten 😭❤️🙌 His faithfulness and generosity reveal again His extravagant nature of love for us! We have been blown away time and time again as at the end of every single month our bills have been paid, we have been blessed with holidays and trips, we’ve been taken care of with heating oil for our home, surprise phone calls and texts have come through from people wanting to give us one-off gifts, getting letters to say an expected bill is smaller than we thought etc., etc.…the list goes on and on of the ways God has provided for us in the most wonderful ways!

We will always be growing in all of these things – but we are blown away by the Lord as we look back and see how much we’ve grown in getting to know God in new and deeper ways over this last year! Thankful doesn’t even begin to describe how we feel toward Jesus in all of this – He is more wonderful than we could ever fully know ❤️

And we are beyond excited to step into year 2 of the onehundredyearsproject with our hearts and eyes set on King Jesus! We can’t wait to embrace all the adventures He has in His heart for this community over this next year!! And I can’t wait to be writing this blog this time next year, looking back again to share stories of His goodness, faithfulness, power, and love that He has poured out throughout 2026 ❤️🥳🙌

Here are some photos from this first year ❤️😃 Thanks so much for journeying with us!