Much has happened since my last update but I haven’t written about it until this point because mostly we haven’t been here (although as Brent so accurately pointed out, that’s not a very good excuse because they do have internet in New Zealand). What can I say?
I’ll pick up where I left off, which was the week before exams, when we learned Brent’s Ma in South Africa was diagnosed with a critical illness and Rowan decided to leave Fulton and return to New Zealand permanently. So that was a bit to process while doing exam prep. Brent was meant to spend five weeks of the mid-year break on a practicum for his evangelism class that was held on Naviti Island, off the coast of Viti Levu, where we live, but he wanted to visit Ma so he asked the school if it was possible and they very generously granted him leave to go, contingent on his fulfilling the requirements for his practicum at another evangelistic campaign to be held in late July. So we booked our tickets for the day after Brent’s exam and returned to Auckland to complete the (rather convoluted) process of applying for a South African visa. The emergency visa actually ended up being issued within half a week, but unfortunately, CourierPost spent the next five days alternately telling Brent that his passport was locked in an unmanned warehouse or lost. After much prayer, it was finally delivered on Monday morning, and Brent flew out that night.
In the meantime, we’d spent the week of waiting catching up with Auckland friends and family, running errands we’d been saving up for NZ, and enjoying the cold weather (ha! I think that bit was only me…). Once Brent left, we went out a bit, but mostly we hung out at my parents’ place, doing lots of lego and Activity Books – Reggie’s latest preoccupation, where you trace letters and stick stickers and colour shapes – occasionally stirring ourselves for a walk down the road to visit Charlie the goat.
We basically spoke to Brent twice a day, every day, which is one advantage to being in an almost exactly opposite time zone.
He cherished the time he spent with Ma and his cousins and aunts and uncles and he said this time was certainly the hardest parting from them he’s ever had to make. Early on, he said to me, ‘This is going to sound strange because I’ve spent most of life away and hardly remember living in South Africa, but it feels like home.’ But I got it, because for the first time in my life living outside of Auckland and not having our own home there to come back to, coming back still felt like home. Conversely, I wasn’t really sure how I was going to feel about coming back to Fiji (especially since we got such a fright the first time around), but I was very pleasantly surprised to realise over the first couple of days we were back that this feels like home now. So I probably just sound completely confused, but I guess the point is that home is about people. And I often think of this if I find myself in danger of getting too attached to a place or idea of a place: actually, heaven is my home.
Reasons I Choose To Look Up 