Bournagain

One of the most striking things about our return to France is what a different place we are in compared to August 2004 when we last came back from New Zealand. Last time we landed in the middle of a visit from the ship Doulos to Saint Nazaire (near Nantes), new interns joining us in our project to assist a church in the north of Nantes, various projects with Christian youth, and a whole bunch of meetings and conferences in the diary. We hit the ground running and didn’t stop to draw breath for several months.

This time we have arrived in a more typical French August: eerily quiet. If you didn’t know that everyone has head for the beach or the mountains, you would wonder whether you’d stumbled onto the set of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.

But even so, many of the people we have most wanted to catch up with have been around, and the most meaningful things that have happened since our return 2 weeks ago has been renewing contact with friends. We’ve had a more or less constant stream of visitors, which has been both surprising and encouraging, and has really helped in dealing with the odd coup de blues* over leaving New Zealand.

We have not come back with a stack of new projects to launch into, but already we see the few ideas we have beginning to take shape. Some of them are not quite cooked enough to talk about them here, but we are really enjoying having the space to step off the ministry “roundabout”, and actually ask the question, “Lord, what do you have for us to do?”, and sensing the freedom to wait for him to answer before forging ahead.

Not sure that we’ve ever been in this place before.

*coup de blues – you can probably guess: a time of feeling down.