Australia, The Great Adventure

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I had a dream recently…

We were holidaying in a large yacht - it was the first night and we were tied up at a jetty. The next morning I was looking through the porthole and watching other yachts and ships going past - then one was sailing past quite close, but moving really slowly, and I thought, “Hang on, I think we are moving too!”. And I went up on deck and noticed that we were drifting along backwards, along the shoreline. And the shore consisted of a lot of rock shelves - some semi-submerged. And somehow we weren’t crashing into the rocks, even though it looked like we should be at any moment.

I have decided to not do things that would be me working myself out of my situation by my own effort, so that I can rely on God rather than my own strength. I think that I did this subconsciously in the past - where I was simply unable to complete internet projects. I have mostly dealt with that through the frontier statements that I worked through with a counsellor, but I felt with the 20/20 Challenge that I needed to not struggle and strive to provide my own solution to our problem in this case. And I don’t know, maybe that was right. I do know that I couldn’t have done that as well as the regular employment that I have been doing - the regular work has pushed me to my limit between then and now anyway.

I was thinking about how I ask God for things, and I realised that it depended on how I expect to be able to provide them.

If I am asking for something that I have no idea how I am going to provide it, then I am asking God for the thing. “Oh God, can we please have XYZ. We’d really like it. But not my will, Your will be done.” (we add that bit at the end to convince ourselves that we are being really spiritual and praying just like Jesus did… )

I was asked recently what my basis of faith was for believing that God will provide for us during our journey. This is roughly what I said - I thought it was a pretty good summary, so I figured I’d put it on here!

We are in a bit of a bind. I won’t go into details here yet, because I don’t want this post to be fishing for a solution. But the point is by Monday night (today is Friday) we need God to have moved in a supernatural way in our lives, to solve a problem that we have NO WAY of solving by ourselves. (I will post details of how God has come through for us after Monday).

I figured that it would be a good idea to answer the question of “why are we going” all in one place. We have lots of reasons floating about in our heads, but sometimes it is a bit difficult to get it all out if someone asks us.

So here goes…

Always in our hearts to do
This has been something that has always been in our hearts to do, even since before we were married. And we always felt constrained, tied down by our responsibilities to church and job.

The daily email from Ransomed Heart today was talking about being resigned to life as we experience it, rather than the fullness of life that we have been designed for. “Resignation is the acceptance of the loss as final. … Evil is no longer suprising; it is normal.”

And it talked about how God takes us beyond that. Not “ever onward and upward” into raptures of ecstacy, but rather He leads us through the dark times of life. In fact He strips away all that we cling to, all the walls that we have built around ourselves to protect ourselves, all the cardboard heroes that we have aspired to, until all we have left is us and Him.

Here’s something that just came to me yesterday.

When the devil deceives us, it wounds us like a barbed hook. Firstly, when we listen to and agree with the deception itself, that means that we are living under a lie, and being less than what God has intented for us to be.

But the barb is that we don’t realise that it is a deception (that’s the very nature of deception), so we think it was our own idea. Therefore if it is pointed out to us, we feel that we are being personally attacked and so we defend ourselves. Yet in reality we are not actually defending ourselves - we are actually defending the deception!

To RV or to not RV, that is the question…

Since before we decided to bite the bullet and actually set a date for exploring the ‘wild blue yonder’ of Oz, we had pretty much decided that we were going to get a Bus RV, you know, a bus that has been converted into a ‘home on wheels’ that we could use for travelling around the country.

It was mentioned to us the other day that this travelling around Australia is just our way of running away. Hmmmm.

Last year I probably would have agreed with them - we were desperate to get out of our current life and all its hassles and strife - ‘Stop the world! We want to get off!!’ And we were running away (not that we would have agreed), if things had worked out, we would have run all the way to the Mornington Peninsula…and our hassles and strife would have followed us there too!