When God closes one door.....

Well, it's been a while since my last blog post!
I've been in a different difficult season of my life, adjusting to the loss of my dear friend and moving onto a new season.
When God closes one door, He sure does open another!

My friend (whom I saw weekly, even twice weekly sometimes) passing away left a big hole in our lives.
But God has been so good to us!

You know, I'm just so excited about this new season.

It all came about so quickly! I didn't have much to do with it except facilitate a night of discussion on homeschooling at a friend's home.

It started off a few months ago. A family in our church had just moved here from another country where they homeschooled their kids. I met up with the mum a few times in the last few months to befriend her and be an encouragement to her (whether or not they decided to continue homeschooling) and besides she has a daughter just a few months younger than Rebekah and they get on really well! I then found that there was another family in our church who had begun home schooling one of their kids.
Besides them, I also have two other friends with younger kids interested in home schooling that have talked to me on and off over the years about homeschooling and how it all works etc.

A couple of weekends ago, our church went away on a camp and while we were there I had an indepth conversation with a man from our church who is here studying, who also successfully homeschooled his 4 children all the way to university! When I was chatting to him, I realised he was such a wealth of wisdom and knowledge. I wondered what it would be like to get him to come chat to these group of women I mentioned earlier (and their husbands)! Well, a thought turned to reality and we met together last Sunday night over dinner, all 5 families, kids and this dad.

Well, it seems this was a divine connection because the family that are homeschooling one child have now decided to pull their other two kids out of school and homeschool all three of them next year! Another family with younger children who were deciding whether to send their child to 'big school' next year have decided to homeschool as well! So, now we have a whole new community (albeit small at the moment) of homeschoolers in our church! How exciting! Rebekah has always wanted to have other friends in church that also were homeschooled and now her years of desiring this have come to pass! You can tell I'm excited by all my exclamation marks!!! :)

We've decided to meet weekly and do some fun things together with the kids....I'm not sure how all of this will eventually play out but we are excited about the prospect of having other families to meet up with weekly.

Rebekah and I will continue to maintain some (not all) of the activities/ park days with other homeschool groups we belong to as we've got great friends all over Sydney that attend these groups, but we are just so excited about the group starting up within our church! God is good! In our season of pain, He has created something good. I'm not sure where this will lead but I do know that we will go where He leads.