Looking back as we prepare to move forward...

It has been an amazing almost 7 years here in the USA! August 30 will be exactly 7 years - we could never have foreseen what God had prepared for us here. We knew He was asking us to get equipped, trained, prepared to Pastor a church, but we had no idea what that would look like!

Here is a little recap on our journey so far - as I look back over these 7 years...

We left New Zealand August 27, 2003 to embark on a journey in response to feeling challenged in what God had for us. He wants more from each of us than just warming a pew on a Sunday morning and we said "yes" to that challenge. There is so much to do, people to love, people to serve all around us, we knew He had more for us. So... Mark applied for a nursing job in the USA, we felt that we were somehow supposed to be in the North Eastern States, but all doors stayed firmly shut but one; we touched down in Miami on August 30th, 2003.

Mark worked at Baptist Hospital in Kendall, Miami for almost 2 years - no night shift after 13 years of nursing was a welcome blessing! This was a wonderful place for Mark to enter nursing in the US and was a great hospital to work for, making his transition very smooth.

We visited a few local churches and attended one regularly quite close to where we lived, but also knew this was not where we were supposed to be long term. I wrestled regularly with knowing we were there on purpose but not seeing what that was, itching to get started with "something" and yet seeing nothing on the horizon. In September of 2004 I heard the Lord tell me that this had been a year of rest, of enjoying Him, just sitting. If you know me at all you will know that I do not like to just sit! It was a frustrating time, but through it I recognized how tired and bruised I was , even a little jaded about stepping further into this arena of church leadership and that the Lord was wanting us to have some bench time before embarking on more equipping and training.

All that changed in a matter of months....!

October 2004 I decided to take the girls to the Fall Festival at the Miami Vineyard... the girls had so much fun and I met a wonderful couple - Jorge and Marily Respeto... they were the Worship Pastors at the church and were so welcoming and friendly that I knew we needed to visit again on Sunday. As we stepped into the church that following Sunday it was as if the Lord through back the curtains and opened the windows... a refreshing breeze blowed through our spirits and our vision of why we had come was revived and breathed on by the Lord. We knew that moment that this was the tribe He was calling us to be a part of. The heartbeat of the church seemed to be the same as ours... We had found our spiritual family!

Over the next few months we got to know different ones there and began learning the ways of the Vineyard... we discovered there was a Leadership Institute that we could gain the theological training we were looking for. We felt so welcomed embraced and were ready to jump in...

January 2005... my parents were involved in a terrible accident... their Seawind Plane crashed as they were taking off from Lake Taupo in New Zealand. My stepfather was killed, my mum was badly injured and we had to get back to New Zealand fast...

We spent three weeks back helping to settle things for my mum and spending time with the family, knowing that we were called to go back and continue this journey in the USA...

Amidst the grief and turmoil of what had just happened we came back to Miami, happy to have a place at the Vineyard to soak up God's grace and healing. It was almost as soon as we arrived back that we began to feel that tug again to go north. We were very happy at the Vineyard and were looking into studying with VLI there but there was a strong sense that this wasn't where we were supposed to train. We began looking for Vineyards in the North East. Churches that were in a smaller city, with a large regional hospital for Mark to work, a place that had 4 seasons, (we decided that if we were going north we wanted to experience the whole thing... white Christmas and all!). We also wanted the church to have a school for our girls, as these two years in Miami schools had been very hard on them. The church also needed to be running the VLI program. We found a few churches in Maine, Portland and Lewiston - we narrowed it down to Lewiston because of the school and VLI. So... we called... We spoke with Allen Austin and shared what we had felt and that we would like to come up for a visit to see if this was where we were supposed to be.

A few weeks later we visited the Vineyard in Lewiston, Maine... as we were driving around the city we were a little disappointed to find it was not one of those beautiful New England cities that you see on the postcards... as we were pondering and asking God if we had made a mistake, I clearly heard Him say, "do not look with your natural eyes on this place, look with your spirit... I am moving here." Needless to say, that was enough for us! We bought a house that weekend and moved to Lewiston 8 weeks later!

A few weeks before moving Pastor Kevin Fischer from the Miami Vineyard showed us a Cutting Edge Magazine (the church planting magazine of the Vineyard). He had discovered who the pastor of the Lewiston Vineyard was and wanted to encourage us that we were heading to a great place for equipping and mentoring... There was that month, an article in there about the pastor of the Lewiston Vineyard, Phil Strout.

So... all was set... we packed our few belongings and again stepped out into the unknown as we headed to Maine. Confirmations were amazing as we turned our eyes to the north. Just as we needed to close on our house (having left everything in New Zealand we were starting again financially and did not have very much money), an English couple came to me wanting to buy a house in a new development and close in a week! (I was a Realtor in Miami for a little over a year.) We were blessed with the money we needed to close on our house loan!

We arrived in Lewiston to a very dirty, trashed house that had been sitting unlived in for almost a month in 90 F (32C) weather! We had to take about 800 lbs (363kg) of rubbish to the dump out of the house. The people had partied and hard and walked out! There was food left out, and the power had been shut off. It was so filthy we couldn't stay there for a week... we stayed with a wonderful couple not far from our house as we cleaned... both physically and spiritually every part of this house. Even as we walked up the stairs in those early days looking at the rundown, neglected state of this house I felt a prompting that God was saying something in even this... We found out that this was also the local crack house, the couple had divorced and were being forced to sell by the bank due to not paying their mortgage. The phone company made us jump through fraud hoops just to get the phone line on as they'd been defrauded by them a number of times using false names at this address. The police arrived a few weeks after we moved in looking to arrest me, thinking I was the previous person... I informed them that they were gone and once i realized the mix up, told them that they had moved on and we know owned this house... welcome to Maine.... right?!

As i climbed the stairs in the early days of being here I felt the Lord say that even this was a spiritual parallel of what He was wanting to do in this city. No one is beyond His redemption, no one so far removed that He cannot heal and restore, He is wanting to break he cycle of brokenness, poverty & addiction over this city, to release His grace and power to recover, as we have restored this house to it's former glory God is wanting to do the same in the lives of the people of Central Maine!

Our time in Maine has been beyond what we could ever ask or imagine... Ephesians 3:20. We had been placed in the midst of a people passionate about their God, their people, their city and their state! People who are on an assignment - a church that loves, that serves, a welcoming place for all kinds of people, lovers of the broken, poor and marginalized - even at times against the "popular" opinion of other well-meaning churches. These are a people that are willing to go where Jesus went, to love those that Jesus loved, to see His Kingdom come and His will be done today... impacting the redemptive history of the State of Maine.

To have spent 5 years in the midst of this has been an experience that will forever change the trajectory of our lives. We have been equipped in more ways than we ever knew we needed... we have been loved on, invested in, inspired, challenged, trained & equipped - all the while knowing that God was asking us to learn "with one hand on the plough". We were not hear just to receive, but He had work for us to do...

There have been some dark days that we have walked through as God stepped in to prevent imminent destruction of His work here. We pulled together with a team of people that I am honored to have worked with for a season - very different people, from different places, with different giftings that pulled together to get the ship back in shape. To watch, as God turned a dark hour (of deceit and betrayal) into blessing, readiness and favour to move forward has been amazing. We have learned things that will be invaluable to our role in the future in New Zealand. Despite those few dark years as an attempt was made to silence and destroy, our church here has grown almost 300% in the last 5 years as God has poured out His favour on this community of faith.

 I will always remember the pray that Pastor Phil prayed before this time.... Lord, bless us to the measure you can trust us and put your finger on anything that impedes that trust. This was not prayed lightly before - and as it is still prayed, it now carries a sober awareness of the reality of what this prayer might cost...everything...

We have been surrounded by veterans of faith, people who have pastored for decades and still burn with the passion to do this... an incredible inspiration, if this work for God's Kingdom is worth anything, it is worth everything! We have felt so intentionally invested in by God - He has put us in the midst of amazing local, national and international leaders. To have had the opportunity to have served people like this has been a blessing and an honour for me personally. To have sat at the feet of great leaders and learned from those "doing the stuff" are things that we will be eternally grateful for.

As we embark on this next leg of our journey back to New Zealand to plant a Vineyard Church, I am mindful of the fact that there is much hard work to be done, there will be many challenges ahead, that the road is not clear, the path not certain... but I do know that our God is faithful! He promises to complete what He has begun. He has a love for all people and for His church and is committed to seeing it grow. We will step out of the boat once again and say yes and just see where He takes us...