Unsettled: Living on the edge

A forced landing

When we landed back on the shores of England, into a home-based quarantine in March 2021, we had no idea what the rest of our lives were going to look like. Our European adventure had been geographically limited by the Covid pandemic which, in combination with Brexit, had forced us to return to Sussex.

Having given up our jobs and sold our home to live the adventure of our dreams, now it was over. ‘What next?’ we asked ourselves; we didn’t even have a place to call home. Thankfully, some amazing friends and family gave up space in their home (or all of their home) to give us somewhere to live, while another, extremely generous couple, offered us a place to stay on a temporary basis.

Un-settling - setting off again

It turns out that temporary can be quite a long time, and is helped when accompanied by the gifts of graciousness and patience. While the world was coming out of the pandemic and we were allowed to leave our houses again, we were not feeling settled in the land we’d returned to. Sussex had been our home for many years. However, we didn’t feel rooted there, especially after we’d travelled through Europe in our motorhome, taking each day as it came, meeting new obstacles and experiencing new levels of trust in God as we sought to overcome them. It wasn’t so much that we had ‘itchy feet’ but that we needed to move forward in our lives, not return to the life we’d left behind.

And so we went exploring again, this time to Scotland, driven by a desire to show our children where we’d married, a place where we’d taken not one but two significant commitments in our life. One, permanently committing to one another and two, committing ourselves to God, whom we didn’t know well but who had made Himself evident in our lives.

Having sold our motorhome, ‘Faith’, we purchased a new exploration vehicle, and christened her ‘Liberty’, to signify the freedom of this new season of our lives. So we embarked on a wee tour of Scotland, primarily to take our girls to see Barcaldine Castle, where we were married in 2007. Staying in the nearby town of Oban, a somewhat circuitous chain of events led us to an organisation that had piqued our curiosity….

We love hosting people; sharing our lives, home and food with them, and enjoying experiences together. Over time it has become a dream of ours to provide hospitality, more than that, a place of belonging, to people who need it for a time. One of the simplest ways we’ve found to do that is by eating together - and so, as we considered what our family’s future looked like, since arriving back from Europe, we had been investigating ways in which others were creating places of community hospitality.

A place of belonging?

To this day, Rachel doesn’t remember quite how she came across Hope Kitchen as she was searching for accommodation in Oban for that September trip, but it looked so interesting that we wondered if we could pay them a visit whilst we were visiting the town, and find out what they were all about. We were given a warm welcome and left our meeting with them with the conviction that we had to come back… so we did. Six weeks later (in November 2021) we spent a month living in Oban and volunteering with Hope Kitchen; they found ways that we could each (our girls included) get involved, using our unique gifts and experience.

Perhaps we put down roots in that month, I don’t know, but so many aspects of life here that we’d experienced drew us in. It was a place where we felt we belonged, a community and location that we identified with, that offered us opportunities we’d not found in our years in Sussex. Before the long drive back to our life in England, both Rachel and I felt convinced that we needed to settle here.

Living on the edge

I think it was from this point that we were living on the edge, our presence in Sussex but our hearts in Oban. We’d reconnected with our families, our church and the many amazing friends who we’d missed so much on our European travels. Thanks to the support of others, we’d established ourselves in a new part of the town we’d called home for so many years, We’d found places to serve in our church and community again and were enjoying new experiences with our friends. But it always felt temporary. We had no vision to remain where we were and find a permanent home in Burgess Hill or its local area. My work was remote and the girls were homeschooled, so we were ‘free’ to move but finding accommodation in Oban proved impossible, a fact known well to anyone who has ever tried to move here.

Image Credit: Google Maps & www.walkhighlands.co.uk

So we lived on the edge of our seats, looking, researching, prayerfully anticipating hopefully that something would change. But it didn’t. And time passed. Thankfully, our landlords were incredibly supportive of our position and patiently walked this journey with us, as temporary proved not to be short! As time passed, while our hopes, dreams and belief in God’s plan for us to move to Oban didn’t diminish, we had to make decisions about work and the girls’ education, decisions that felt increasingly like settling - in a place where we continued to feel unsettled.

Teetering on the edge

Living on the edge isn’t a comfortable place. There’s simply not enough room, and you’re half-sitting, half-standing, always ready to move. It’s a place of tension, ‘muscles’ poised, ready to shift position at a moment’s notice. It’s a place of constant alert, senses primed, ready to respond to the change that you hope will come. You become neither one thing nor another, watching others around you embed, grow and develop in ways that seem more fruitful. It is tiring, always being aware that at some point you’ll need to move, yet never knowing when, and fighting the tide of modern life that wants to pull you into situations that you just know you’re not supposed to be part of. In the last 18 months or so, we explored whether or not we were supposed to stay, approaching certain organisations and projects to see whether we were to become involved but repeatedly doors closed in our faces.

It’s easy to read that last paragraph as a wholly negative experience but it wasn't, well, not entirely. It was more affirming than anything else, reinforcing the conviction that we were going to move - but that only an act of God was going to make this sea change happen. Of course, our lives were changing incrementally throughout this time. We were blessed with the time to undergo new training around health, catering, food safety, safeguarding and well-being. We took up new volunteering opportunities and established some groups to encounter Jesus in new ways, but ironically, while strengthening relationships with friends old and new, they moved us further away from the wider communities we’d been part of for many years. As this took place, we discovered how marginalised we felt in some areas of our lives, not alone, but separated, or, more accurately, separating.

Clearing the way

Finally, (and, cutting this long story short - for this blog post at least), something did change. Somewhat out of the blue, Rachel got a job with Hope Kitchen. Living on the edge took on yet another new meaning for us… the anticipation, being increasingly on the edge of our seats again as a deadline loomed… While Rachel was appointed to the role in March, her in-person start date wasn’t until early August. Surely now we’d find somewhere to live?

But no. And the excitement of anticipation changed, on some days to the concern of ‘where will we live’. Confident that God was making a way where there seemed to be no way, we had given notice to our landlords and committed to the path we fully believed was in front of us. Faith had got us this far, and faith, we believed would get across the line - whatever that line looked like! Months became weeks and the weeks looked like they would become days… days where we would have to do. What? Give up the job? Find a place in Sussex?

Someone had commented to us, ‘God isn’t an estate agent, you know’. No, He’s so much more than that, and he’s never left us or forsaken us as a family. He’s always provided for our needs, including somewhere to live in all of our strange circumstances, so why would we believe that this time would be any different? Yes, some days we worried and some days we didn’t but, out of the blue again, a miracle (by my definition at least) took place. A generous individual offered to move out of their Oban home to give us four weeks of accommodation to get us started They knew that, once we were here and part of the community, we’d find it much easier to find somewhere more permanent to live.

From edge to edge

So we packed up our belongings into storage once again, and with as much as our car could hold, every nook and under-seat cranny stuffed with our essentials (yes, including Lego!) we said farewell to family, friends and our season of life in Sussex, trusting God, and recognising that this was, once again, a journey that He would reveal to us one step at a time.

We arrived tired, and on edge, all of us. We were now on a different shoreline, so to speak, having crossed over the border into a new land, not completely unfamiliar, but where we are very much strangers. We were no longer insiders looking out but outsiders looking in, all of us unsettled and uncomfortable, as we faced the unknowns of our accommodation, work, school, geography, community and relationships.

Edges are sharp, they can cut you easily. Sadly, our first few weeks here have been a real struggle in places. We could not have been more welcomed; by our generous host, by members of the church we’ve joined, Rachel’s workplace and colleagues, the schools, local clubs and others in the community - even the local council. And yet, we’ve all been ‘en garde’, tense, uncertain of the future in front of us; what school would be like? Where we will live in a few week's time? We each defaulted to a self-protective state. It was like each one of us was hanging on to a cliff face with no room to manoeuvre, trying hard just to hang on to the few things that were recognisable and felt safe. Yet, as each one of us tried to steady ourselves, we’d collide with one another, unsettling the other more and sometimes the sharp edges cutting. Was it so hard to trust God that all would be well? Would that each one of us had the faith of Noah (and that ship built in the desert!), or Abraham (and the promise of a child when he and Sarah were so old), or of Paul (who learned to be content in all things)?

Rounding the edge

If we didn’t have faith we’d be in a much worse place, it has been a struggle, yes but by no means all bad, in fact, in many ways it’s been a gift. We’ve moved from merely surviving on the edge, to understanding how to live on it without succumbing to its painful environmental conditions - rather than fight the elements, we’ve learned to harness them. So what changed?

Living on the edge has given me a perspective on living that I’d not had before; the constant tension, the marginalisation, the separation, the fear and worry, the mental and physical struggle that it can be, whatever circumstances that create the edge itself. Plenty of people live on sharper, narrower edges than me and my family. What I - and we all to some extent - have learned is this - to love on the edge.

Loving on the edge means recognising and grasping those opportunities to see from the other person’s perspective; where they might be building a wall of self-protection or clinging on by a thread onto the hope of something better. These are opportunities not just to see, but to act - to trust that, even on the edge of something, there is still room to stand firm, to hold on, to reach out or into, a situation and give up of yourself to love someone else in more need. Rachel and I have prayerfully clung to our faith in Jesus and the promises He has made about following Him, and the provision that He will make for us, and from this, let go of our fears and worries to set aside that we are on an edge, to focus on helping steady our girls on theirs.

Instead of being squeezed out, as if there was no room in this narrow space, we’ve found room again for patience, grace, compassion, kindness, gentleness and self-control. We’ve made room for them to share their feelings, letting the emotions wash over us instead of cutting one another, helping them find their sure footing in this new place, with all its uncertainties. And as we’ve done this, we’ve found something else - we are no longer living ‘on edge’. Rather than changing our circumstances, God’s changed us.