2010 – A year in review

faithWhen Mrs H and I both felt God saying to us that 2010 would be a year of change, and where we would be shaken up, we never fully anticipated what that would come to mean or how that would change us but looking back now it’s fair to say that we’ve both changed quite a bit this year and that we’ve grown as a result of all that’s happened.

The year started out with me being ill on New Years Eve, so not the best start – but I was in a job I loved, working with people who were more friends that colleagues, and with plans for the company that had the potential to take us on to big things. We were looking forward to our first family holiday for 3 years and also the celebration of 10 years of wedded bliss. Church life was good, with me especially getting quite heavily involved in some areas and we were planning on pushing that forward more and more as God opened doors for us.

It was not far into the new year that we both felt God saying to us, individually, that I needed to move jobs and that we needed to prepare to move. Not just moving jobs, but moving away from Stamford and Peterborough to wherever God was calling us. It was a huge test of obedience especially for me as I really loved the work I was doing and it was one of those few jobs that you actually knew was making a difference to peoples lives.

We weren’t going to argue though! So I started to put feelers out there and we decided that we had to let the kids know what we felt God was telling us to do. That was one of the toughest decisions, and the hardest discussions, that we had to take as we knew it would upset the kids but we knew it was right to do.

Life moved on with not much happening to be honest. We plodded along with things and just kept our eyes open and ears to the ground.

The May spring bank holiday weekend allowed us to kick off a great fun week for us all with the Big Church Day Out. This is a Christian music festival which features a wide variety of musicians and musical styles and was in the East Midlands for the first (and last) time this year so was a quick drive away for us. We took my brother and all the kids with us to enjoy all sorts of artists from Tim Hughes and Brenton Brown, to Switchfoot and Hillsongs United. My personal highlight was getting to see the totally awesome TobyMac who rocked the place completely and had me completely hoarse by the end of his set.

Following this our daughter headed off to the annual KingsGate Youth Camp and my parents (and bro) had the boys for a week whilst I whisked away my gorgeous wife for a mystery romantic getaway.

After a drive of several hours we ended up at the gorgeous fishing town of Kirkcudbright in Dumfries and Galloway. You can read about the week in the blog post here but it was a memorable week and we both really enjoyed ourselves in a beautiful part of Scotland. We would happily go back again and can definitely recommend it.

The week ended with us getting our kids back and life returning to normal… but with only 6 weeks or so until we had our family holiday together – this time with all the kids and my mum, dad and brother.

Work settled down, still no sign of that new job and no real indicator of where God wanted us. We had already come to the unassailable truth that we needed to be obedient, it was all a case of when and where.

Our holiday came and we were all excited about a week away. All helped by a nice budget for our time away, and some careful saving of Tesco Clubcard vouchers galore. Loads of fun ensued with visits to Wookey Hole, Longleat and more. We also had some great fun in the evenings with the folks having a caravan just across from ours so there was plenty of card games and laughs.

Thursday saw us hit with a shock we weren’t expecting, but didn’t really surprise us. I got a call on my personal phone from work – never a good sign – and was told that our investors had backed out and that I was redundant. You can read all about our feelings in the blog posts here and here.

At the time both Mrs H and I were strangely calm, and that feeling followed us through the remainder of the year. We knew God was in control and He had spoken so clearly to both of us that we had no doubt about how life was going to pan out. We knew it would be a longer redundancy, I would get my neck operation, I would recover and then I would get a new job. It can be hard being out of work for a prolonged period, and it can be especially hard when you’ve previously been blessed with jobs very quickly, but we were at complete peace through it all. I wrote about it here and it really sums up how we felt through the whole time.

I’ve now got a new job and it looks like it’s going to provide me with plenty of challenges, as well as great opportunities –  but I’ll discuss the next year in my next blog post.

To sum up 2010 is not actually difficult – it’s been a year of faith, pure and simple. God spoke, we obeyed and He proved faithful throughout. It’s been a good year in soooo many ways, the only “downer” was the redundancy and that was purely from a friendship perspective. It’s been a year of family, friends, celebration, dreams, hope, faith and more – we’ve grown a lot as a result, and know there’s more to come.

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