Hi all, welcome to Week 42! Mark and Rosalie share on their recent move back to the UK from Guatemala and the call that brought them back. I love that their story shows so many different ways that God works. He puts long time dreams on our heart, nudges us when it is time to act, and confirms retrospectively through revelation. I got to experience Mark and Rosalie's care first hand in Guatemala and I am excited to see all that they do in this next chapter too.
In Mark and Rosalie's words...
Last November we were living in Guatemala and planning on staying there for the foreseeable future. We were mission partners with the Church Mission Society and working with Street Kids Direct to provide pastoral care for projects they support in Guatemala and Honduras. Our older son and daughter-in-law and our three grandsons were moving to Australia so our emotional ties to the UK had become that much fewer. At the same time, we were seeing the fruit of having been in Guatemala for six and a half years: we were enjoying our work, had made lots of good friends and were looking forward to our work developing in new and challenging ways.
Then, out of the blue, Mark saw a post on Facebook linking to a job as Rector of a Church of England parish in Cornwall. We had felt a call to Cornwall from Jesus for over 20 years but it had never been the right time to go. To be honest, occasionally when things were tough in Guatemala Mark did sometimes look at jobs in Cornwall – but we knew that applying then would be disobedient to Jesus and an escape attempt rather than a call onwards. This time, however, we both experienced a nudge – well, more of a shove really – from the Holy Spirit and so Mark applied.
After the application was in, Rosalie had another look at the job profile which included a description of the parish and local area. It mentioned a large Tesco’s - Rosalie googled it and was surprised by the result. Just over a year previously during one of our visits back to the UK we had spent a week camping in Cornwall. A cousin of Rosalie’s had invited us to lunch at Heartlands – a Cornish heritage site and cultural centre which has sadly since closed - and we had driven on from there to a Tesco’s to buy some food for the evening. We both remember on that drive seeing some of the housing in the area and, aware of significant social issues Cornwall is facing, we had had a brief conversation wondering what engaging in mission in Cornwall would look like. One of those fleeting conversations which only last a minute or so but we now realised that we had been in the parish to which we were applying when that conversation in the car took place.
Mark was asked to interview and so we landed in the UK in January in the freezing cold. We loved meeting the church, as sure as we could be of Jesus’s call to go there, and Mark was offered the job. So here we are, excited and encouraged – and sometimes feeling a little overwhelmed – by the challenges that we now face here in Illogan in West Cornwall. It’s hard to believe that a year ago we were in Guatemala intending to be there for a long time yet, and we miss hugely our friends in Central America. But we are grateful to Jesus for this surprising move and trust him for all that lies ahead.
Thank you all so much for reading this story about God connecting with his people. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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Until next time,
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