I’d love to take a little time and share some of our hearts for where we live, and what we feel the Lord might be inviting us into here as our next step in theonehundredyearsproject. I wonder if a little context, and a beautiful moment of realisation for me (Janet) might be a helpful place to start.

I feel like I have always loved Coleraine. When I was 10/11 years old, I lived, with my family, about an hour and a half’s drive away from where we live now, in Coleraine. We all loved the North Coast, and we ended up getting a wee holiday home up here that we came to pretty much every weekend. We got involved in a great church and made some incredible friends, and basically just loved life up here ❤️ I have so many wonderful memories from that time in my childhood, I’m so grateful! And I remember the feeling of packing up on a Sunday night after church (or sometimes on a Monday morning before school, just so we could eke out as much time up here as possible 😃) and beginning the long drive back home in time for school. Honestly I can still feel how I felt each time we made the trip back down the road, and there’s a certain roundabout on the outskirts of Coleraine that I associated as the moment that we had really left. (I know that’s very dramatic – please give 11 year old me a little grace in this 😂) Every week I was so sad as we approached this roundabout, and as we drove through it I made a point of turning and looking back for my last wee glimpse of the North Coast for another week.

Well, we made this trip every weekend for about 3 years, and each time we were here we fell even more in love with this place. Over the course of our trips up and down the road, God did some stunning things in our lives as a family, and the long story short is that we were able to move up here permanently when I was 14 🥳 I want to honour my parents here for how they bravely listened to the Lord speaking to them back then, and took the risk to move, 4 kids in tow, to a brand new life – I cannot express how thankful I still am, 33 years later, for their obedience to God’s voice – Thank you Mum & Dad, you are amazing ❤️😭🙌

So that’s the context, and here’s the realisation…As I said, my emotional turn around in the car on a Sunday night happened in the exact same place each week. And obviously now we live here on the North Coast, I have married a gorgeous man from up here, and we have an incredible teenage son (all of this you already know, I know) BUT – I had completely forgotten about my little 11 year old self’s tradition until just a few months ago when I was out for a wee walk near our house, and I suddenly remembered so vividly the moments from all those years ago – and then I realised again how incredibly kind God is, because, where we live now is directly off that roundabout, and we walk past that road sign every day on the way to and from Caleb’s bus stop 😭🙌❤️

When I put it all together I couldn’t believe that even though I hadn’t asked for it, and hadn’t even thought about it for so long, God hadn’t just moved me up to this general area – He has actually taken me to the exact spot that was so special for me as a child and made it my home 😭❤️😭 Isn’t that incredible?! How amazing is the Lord!!!!!! And now that I have put all the pieces together, I think about it loads and every time I’m completely blown away ❤️ That is what love looks like ❤️

So now that you know how special this place is to me, it may make more sense of this next step we’re taking in theonehundredyearsproject. About 3 years ago the Lord spoke to me about His heart for Coleraine (I have written about it before on this blog ❤️) And He invited me – I honestly can’t remember if it was last summer or the year before?? – along with my friend Amanda, to start prayer walking around our town and praying His dreams over it. Honestly it’s been a bit hit or miss for us for how often we’ve actually been able to make the prayer walks happen, but we’ve done it a few times since then.

Anyway, about a month ago I felt God speaking again about prayer walking and releasing His dreams over Coleraine, but this time it felt like we needed to get serious and make it a regular thing! So, we have opened it up to a couple of different groups of people and just this week 3 of us met and started a very early (6am 😴) morning prayer walk that we are planning to keep doing one morning a week if we can, until we begin to see some of the things that God has spoken about, or until He asks us to stop 😃🙌👍 I’m so excited to see what happens next 🥳❤️ I don’t know what it’s exactly going to look like, but what I know for sure is that the atmosphere in places changes when people pray and have faith to believe for God’s dreams to be released on the earth 🙌❤️

Also a really cool thing happened when we were walking back to our cars when we were finished. We bumped into a guy who we know from another church in the town and stopped for a quick chat. He asked us what we were doing so we said we’d been praying for the town, at which point he told us he was just waiting for his friends to come because they had planned to do the same thing that morning ❤️🙌 It was like a prayer relay 😂 I love it!!