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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.
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About the author
Elodie Reed is a senior at Amherst College.
