Day 12

When I arrived at ”Auntie Margaret’s” I had just spent a week at Lake Waikarimoana. A wonderfully magnificent wilderness where my solitude echoed throughout the eons of time and space, and my questions darted into the cosmic void. There eternity no longer whispered at me, it screamed. My divine appointment had been set and God was about to change the direction of my heading.

Auntie Margaret booked me in for two weeks while the manager arrived on his bond from England. I was to fill in until he arrived. I had only been there a week when this fellow phoned from England asking for another month because his wife was to have a baby. Margaret asked me to stay. I wasn’t so fussed about the idea because I had the wandering spirit and didn’t want to stay anywhere, but I did. What was four weeks out of a lifetime?

On the first weekend I came in from the cow shed for breakfast. Aunty Margaret was all dressed up and I said “Going to town are you?” and she replied “No I’m going to church.” Here was a lady whose candles cost more than the cake! But she had a faith & I was out sifting the world’s faiths. I had rejected Christianity as a teenager because to me it had seemed hypocritical and shallow, and it had not been able to answer the questions that I was asking. God found me struggling on a side road and he was about to say “have a closer look!”

The next weekend the same thing happened, except that I had decided that if I was going around the world investigating religions I might as well check out this one that I had just tripped over. So when I come inside from the cow shed and say “Going to church again?” she replies “Yes” and I say “well can I come too?” She nearly fell off her breakfast chair. But we went, together. These were my changing fortunes of life. We hold the pieces but He holds the picture.

I can still remember the uncomfortable feeling of going off to church with an old lady, but that was it, God had steered me a course and was now drawing me along it. It wasn’t that I was unwilling, but where it was going to take me was to be a huge conundrum.