When you’re a New Zealander living in France, people regularly talk to you about rugby. I received calls before the match “wishing me luck”, a number of people slapped me on the back jokingly “offering their condolences” in advance. This is ironic because overall the feeling here prior to last night’s world cup game was that the French were bound to lose.
This is a case of déja vu for me because exactly the same thing happened in 1999 prior to that historic defeat of the All Blacks by the French that was so totally unexpected. This was the historic defeat that would supposedly “never be repeated”.
I think I’m starting to understand something which may be indicative of a difference between French and New Zealand mentality (prepare yourself for a sweeping generalisation on that notoriously inexact science of cultural psychology…) : the French seem to do best, and are at their most passionate, when there is no real hope other than being defeated honourably. Being told that they will probably fail, which is, by the way, a standard pedagogical technique used by large numbers of French schoolteachers, seems to have the opposite effect of goading them on to success.
On the other hand, New Zealanders seem to do really badly when they have not fully grasped the strength of their opposition. I’ve noticed many commentators have already suggested that the run of matches leading up to the quarter-final where the All Blacks just walked all over the other team was psychologically very poor preparation for facing the French. Nobody in France expected the All Blacks to lose - along with 4 million New Zealanders!
I’m wondering if this is applicable to areas other than sport…
One thing for sure, there will be an interminable post mortem about this in New Zealand; the nation will be in sackcloth and ashes for weeks (it’s already started here at the country’s largest newspaper). Meanwhile, dans la patrie des Bleus, the celebration goes on…
Bravo les bleus! C’était un super match! All Blacks - great job. You didn’t lose by much. Take a break, go fishing - it’s only a little oval ball, after all!
Something really odd happens to you when you return home after a few months travelling. There is a very short window of opportunity, where for a few brief days you have the objectivity of an outsider, which enables you to notice things in a fresh way, before familiarity obscures them again.
We just got back to France yesterday after over 4 months away (I might do a post about our eventful voyage home once the jet lag subsides and the memory of the anguish of missing not one but three of our connections becomes a little less raw)!
People often ask us “what are the differences between New Zealand and France”, and I never know what to say. So now that I still have a bit of that “just-flew-in” objectivity left before it fades into the familiar, I’ll record some of those things that have left us in no doubt that we really are back in France. Continue reading ‘You know you’re in France when …’
One thing about living on the other side of the world to a large number of friends and family members is that you tend to live in two parrallel universes which never intersect. This is why we so enjoy receiving NZ visitors in France. But until this weekend we had never had anyone from France visit us in New Zealand.
François is a young friend from Nantes, an engineering student who, instead of fulfilling his foreign work placement requirement somewhere sensible like England, he came all the way to NZ where he ended up working in a pulp and paper mill in the exotic (ahem!) little town of Tokoroa. If you read French you can find out here about his NZ adventure.
It was an ideal weekend as we had a dinner to get together with old friends, and gave a presentation in church on Sunday morning, part of which was an interview with François about his life in Nantes and what it’s like being a full-on Christian in such a secular educational environment. François is very active in Agape Campus - a student Christian movement in Nantes. It was great hearing his impressions of our homeland - seeing it through French eyes.
When you’re travelling there are so many things that can go wrong. In fact I had just been reflecting on the fact that our travel so far on this trip has been surprisingly uneventful and straightforward, when something happened. Sure enough - I didn’t really think we were going to get back to France without something exciting happening.
As we were travelling at 100kph along the motorway north of Auckland in our white diesel van on loan from OM New Zealand (yes, that great OM tradition of getting about in ageing but faithful vans has even made it to the bottom of the world!), when a big bang, a loud warning siren and a lot of smoke alerted us to the fact that something was not quite right. To make it even more exciting, the brakes failed, and my wife told me afterward that my face went even whiter than the van (which needs a good clean, actually - the van, not my face). At that speed bringing the van to a stop was a tricky manoeuvre, but a couple of hundred meters later I was able to safely pull off the road, as it turned out, right beside an emergency phone.
Little tip if you ever happen to break down on a New Zealand motorway: look for an emergency phone rather than using your cell phone. If you call from one of these, the motorway authority will have you towed free of charge to the nearest garage (something about keeping the motorway secure).
As it turned out, the nearest garage was in a town where we happen to have some good friends who were away overseas - such good friends that we actually know the door code to get into their appartment! We were able to camp there while the van was being fixed (broken fan belt and blown out radiator). It was a bit of a pain being delayed for two nights, but we made good use of the time.
It could have been so much worse. I know that just because God is looking after us it doesn’t mean that bad things can’t happen. But in this particular instance we were pretty impressed by his care for us, in the way that a potentially disastrous situation turned into a reason for thanksgiving (the prayers of a faithfully praying mother-in-law also probably had something to do with it!)
[posted with ecto]
We are safely back in Hamilton for the final two weeks of our New Zealand trip. Too much movement and not enough Internet over the last couple of weeks for regular posts, but overall the last 3 weeks in Auckland, Whangarei & Hamilton have left us marvelling at how many amazing people we know, and what a privilege it is to spend time tripping around the country visiting them all! We’ve spoken in three different churches - each very different from the other.
The first has the intriguingly descriptive title of His International Mission, a dynamic AG church in which we were the only white faces in a big group of brown. 
Great to see the passion for God and for mission amongst our Polynesian brothers and sistas. The second was Pakuranga Christian Fellowship, a church with a long contact with OM, and had the great bonus of being the church of our friends Greg & Joanne who were helping lead churches in the north of France for many years. As a kiwi family with four children, they were our “inspiration” - when we met them, we thought well if they can do it, maybe we could too! They’re still very active in ministry, currently church-planting amongst international students in south Auckland.
The third was West Hamilton Anglican, which we wrote about in another post on reinterpreting traditions. Our friends here have done such a marvellous job of facilitating our stay in New Zealand. As a teenager I left an Anglican church in which if you wanted to learn about Jesus you had to really dig deep, and it’s like I’ve gone full circle as our Hamilton church family is also an Anglican church, but one in which the gospel is preached loud and 
clear.
It was a relief to finish the message on Sunday morning, after 5 straight weeks of preaching, and now we begin to set our sights on the long trip home. Can’t believe it’s gone so quickly.
I am just beginning to emerge from a dial-up Internet-imposed blog fast - in case you were wondering whether this blog was ever going to get up and running again. We have been staying with my parents, and time was too precious to waste waiting for the Internet to do it’s thing. But in this case, no news is good news! Our New Zealand odyssey is well over halfway though, and we are beginning to set our sights on France again.
New Zealand is a fascinating country in that, although relatively small and geographically isolated (to some of our French friends, we might as well say we’re from Mars), it is like a microcosm of what is happening in the wider world, globalisation being what it is. This is particularly true in the church - wherever we go we meet with people who are at once passionate for the church, and extremely frustrated with it, longing for a simpler, more authentic expression of a church that is a visible reflection of God’s kingdom in society. That’s very vague, but I can’t very well catch you up on all the conversations of the last month.
This weekend we are with dear friends in Lower Hutt (”Lower” in the sense of being on the Hutt river downstream from “Upper Hutt” - named after one Mr Hutt I suppose - we are not staying in some kind of inferior cabin!), and we will be sharing at Lower Hutt Baptist tomorrow - the church where my journey in God started 22 years ago. I’ll be talking on Mary and Martha - again!! Can’t get away from that story. Will do a blog post on it one of these days.
Check out Flickr for some new photos. Now that my “blog fast” is broken, there should be some more regular offering from now on…
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