My New Zealand adventure
Scared, unsure, excited to learn, and expectant of good—those were the various feelings I had while packing for a trip to New Zealand with my mom in December of 2011. It would be my first time going abroad and my mother’s second. I was coming off a very busy fall semester at college and a hectic week visiting all our relatives for Christmas celebrations, so the days before the trip had crept up on me without my noticing. Neither of us had come up with an itinerary—we had plane tickets, and that was it. Confronting the unknown of New Zealand looked pretty daunting from our cozy living room. It felt as if we were jumping off a cliff with no rope, no parachute.
I desperately began researching transportation in New Zealand and writing e-mails to potential farm hosts (an organization in New Zealand facilitates connecting visitors with farmers who will exchange room and board for working on their farms). But I felt a rush of negative ideas pour into my head: “You’re exhausted from school. You don’t have any place to go. What if you get there and don’t know what to do? How are we going to afford this?”
When I started voicing a few of those ideas out loud, my mom reminded me that God is not only in control in the place we call “home” but everywhere, including halfway around the world. Our needs would be supplied by divine Love, and we would express the peace and harmony of divine Mind wherever we went. Mom and I had concluded, after much praying and listening to God over the previous six months, that this trip was a good and right idea, and we weren’t going to let any fearful suggestions cause us to falter.
Over the last few days before our plane took off, several things fell right into place. We found an affordable bus system that would get us everywhere we wanted to go, a farm host e-mailed us, telling us we were welcome to stay, and we discovered hostels, which turned out to be not-so-expensive places to sleep and meet other travelers. We saw God’s plan unfolding as we increasingly relied on Him. Our “cliff” didn’t look so high now!
We should have known that God was the best planner. We saw this demonstrated in many instances on the trip, the first of which was on a short layover in Los Angeles, where we technically didn’t have enough time to get to our connecting flight to Sydney, Australia. Suppressing panic, we quietly knew that we would be led to where we needed to go, and sure enough, we were literally led by flight attendants out a back door in order to catch the bus to the international terminal, where we arrived just in time to board the plane. Like lost sheep, our Shepherd had led us to the right place, keeping us right where we needed to be.
After an enjoyable stopover in Sydney, we arrived in Auckland, New Zealand, in the early morning hours, where we were able to sleep at a hostel despite having made a reservation for the wrong night. We hadn’t slept for about two days, so this lodging provision made us feel so welcomed, comforted, and taken care of. We also felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude and love—on yet another step of the trip, God had cared for us, His (very tired!) children.
God is not only in control where we call “home” but everywhere.
Over the course of three weeks, we stayed at four farms and five hostels in the cities of Auckland, Hamilton, Te Puke, Herbertville, Wellington, Nelson, Christchurch, Te Anau, and Riverton. We saw God’s care and guidance demonstrated over and over again. This included getting back lost luggage just in time for a departure to another city, being led to the right place to find my lost passport, having loving, safe, and comfortable farm stays on both islands, meeting Christian Science church members in Wellington who helped us around in the pouring rain, and returning safely home over a three-day, six-airport trip.
Severe stomach and head pain, along with a mentally painful longing for home, vanished after reading a few pages of the Bible and Mary Baker Eddy’s writings. The healing truths in those books reminded me of the good that God constantly provides us with and the gratitude I must naturally have as a result. A healing of sea sickness on a ferry ride was one more evidence of God’s love.
The bumps and twists and turns that my mom and I sometimes came across during our trip kept us constantly reaffirming our oneness with God and the goodness that comes from Him. Our trip had numerous proofs of one of my favorite lines by Mrs. Eddy: “Trials are proofs of God’s care” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 66 ). Each challenge we faced compelled us to grow in our understanding of God’s love for us.
By the end of our trip, it was clear that the experience shouldn’t be compared to a cliff dive with no bottom in sight. Instead, it could be likened to hopping from one stone to another, moving forward with increasing spiritual understanding, with God as our support, our guide, and our rock-solid foundation. We had made a giant leap in our knowledge of the meaning of home. Though it is usually an idea I associate with a familiar building in a familiar place with familiar people, I came to realize the spiritual reality of what home really is. It is the constant awareness of God—Love—and Love’s attributes of comfort, familiarity, and safety. Since all of God’s children constantly reflect Him and God is always pouring forth His goodness, we are surrounded by this sense of home in all places and at all times. Home is not apart from us or in only one place. As Christ Jesus said of the “kingdom of God” in Luke 17:21 , the idea of home is “within you.”