We’ve just spent 11 days in chilly New Zealand. For those who don’t know much about the country, it’s only a 3 hour flight from Sydney, and our homeland. We left there 10 years ago, tired of being broke youth pastors, started our lives all over again and now we’re off to Kenya for the next 20 years, how crazy is that!

Our time in NZ was primarily to say goodbye to Pete’s parents (mine have passed on) so we thought we might as well fit in as many people as possible. We quite literally ate our way through the week, with everyone saying ‘Let’s have a cup of tea and a meal’. I think we rolled off the plane last night!

The coolest thing was that we met up with lots of people who had a significant impact on our lives while we lived there. The downside was that there were also lots of people who we missed out on visiting simply because of a lack of time.

It was great to be able to be prayed for, sent off by our old church and blessed by so many people. It certainly wasn’t a holiday though, one day we had 5 back to back meetings. We could’ve been there for 20 days, but I still think we wouldn’t have seen everyone. We traveled 1600km’s just in the central North Island.

It makes you realise that you don’t do life by ourselves, that was never God’s intention. Just as it takes a village to raise a child, so it takes a whole community to raise an adult. Our destiny is wrapped up in the lives of people we actually do life with.

So while we consider ourselves honorary Aussies, we thank all the Kiwis who put up with us, loved us, disciplined us, and helped us along the way.

To us people matter the most and we’ve had the privilege of spending some time with just a few of our Kiwi family. See you all in about 3 years.