As we write this, three clocks are counting down in the back of our minds: the first says 4 months, the second 5 months, and the third 6 months. Alex’s employment contract finishes in 4 months, our baby is due in 5 months, and our lease will finish in 6 months. We can’t stay in Singapore without Alex having a job and a visa, and when our baby is born he or she will be ‘stateless’ until we organise citizenship by descent and a passport for travel.
This all feels like a math problem we can’t solve. It is easy to get caught up in ‘what ifs’… What if Alex doesn’t find a new job before the baby arrives? What if we can’t sign a new rental agreement? What if we have to move to another country with a new baby? And yet, this is exactly the kind of life we signed up for and keep signing up for — a life dependent on God and not on our own sense of regularity and comfort. We wanted, and continue to want, adventures in faith. And this current sojourn into semi-regular living in Singapore hasn’t changed that. We still feel that God has put South East Asia on our hearts and we are keen to keep developing the relationships we have established and encouraging those we have met in this region in their faith.
Alex has been applying for lots of jobs, not just in Singapore but across the region. And it’s funny how ‘relying on God’ feels better when you’re on the back of a motorcycle heading towards a rural village, compared with scouring LinkedIn for jobs that you might be able to apply for. But both are part of a life of faith, and the fact that one feels more challenging than the other isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
There is a picture that sums up our current situation in a lovely way — that of a boat which has oars and a tiller. We’d like to be the ones at the tiller, deciding where the boat is going, and have God putting in the effort to get us there. But it’s supposed to be the other way around. God is the one steering and we are the ones making the daily choices, rowing and rowing despite not knowing where things are going. The temptation is always there to get up and wrest back control from God, and He doesn’t prevent us from doing so — He respects us so much that He will not impinge on our free will. So it’s up to us if we will remain at the oars, content to gaze back at our Father’s face as he steers the ship into waters unknown.
In many ways where we are at now is more difficult than anything we’ve been through before. Maybe because the stakes feel higher with a baby on the way, with the material possessions we now have in Singapore rather than just two suitcases, and with financial commitments like our lease. Or maybe because God knows there’s still deeper to go in our reliance on Him instead of material comfort and security. And we don’t want to disregard the miracles that God has performed to date: bringing us to Singapore in the first place, giving us this baby, providing for us financially, sending us so many friends and family to visit, allowing us to be in Australia for a month for Alex’s brother’s wedding. When we look at all that God has done so far, it’s almost embarrassing that we still have to actively choose to believe that God will have what’s best for us next.
As this year has begun, it’s brought us to a new understanding of how we can be grateful for the challenge of living in reliance on God. Why are we grateful? Because the things we find challenging are the only opportunity we get to make our stated intentions about living a life of faith into reality.
We are filled with good intentions for how we want to live our lives, how we want to love each other and honour God with our faith. So the chance to actually live out these intentions is an opportunity not a threat. Instead of viewing life with God as a kind of peaceful equilibrium that occasionally gets tested before reverting to a new status quo, we’re starting to see it as more like a long and glorious climb along a mountain range. We can either complain about the challenge of new mountains which feel steeper and scarier than the last, or we can relish the opportunity to spend our lives doing the very thing we want most: to move closer and closer to God, giving Him our trust and faith and belief.
These next few months will be an opportunity for us to trust God as never before, and respond to whatever He has next for us, as real, tangible expressions of our faith in Him.