It has been over twenty years since I first had the vision for Joshua’s Tree and we have sought to make it work wherever we have been living but we always knew we wanted a permanent home. I had always envisioned that Joshua’s Tree would be some rambling place out of the way in the countryside. Twenty years ago God though gave me the lines of a poem by George MacDonald that spoke not of the countryside but of the city.
“I said, Let me walk in the fields.
He said, No, walk in the town.
I said, There are no flowers there.
He said, No flowers but a crown.“
I have wrestled with those lines because they didn’t sit with my idea of Joshua’s Tree. I have wrestled with the limitations my own health put on living in a rambling house in the countryside and been frustrated that my body was going to make that harder and add a burden to Mark and my family. The countryside vision was going to restrict not help us as a family but it was how I pictured it. I have felt a failure for being restricted by my body. I have lived out in my head how Joshua’s Tree would be, forgetting that it was a vision given to me by God in answer to my prayers as I sought to answer the question a pastor friend had put to me ‘who cares for the pastors?’ That question has shaped so much of how I and since marriage, Mark and I have sought to live life and engage with church.
During lockdown Mark got a job with Langham Publishing and we moved as a family to Cumbria in September 2021, initially to a rented house in a hamlet just outside Carlisle. We could cycle to town, though Cambrian winters meant that some cycles were more than a little damp. There was no public transport and no shop of any description. It was apparent to Mark and I, however reluctantly I was to accepting it, that the reality was that if we were going to buy a home it was going to have to be in Carlisle itself. I tried to console myself with the sensibility of such a move, to list all the benefits and practical wisdom such a move would be for our family in this season, and quietly continued to beat myself up for having a body that would not do what I wanted it to do and that as doctors had said the damage done was irreversible, nothing was going to change on that front. So I tried to dress up in theological language in my head the notion of laying aside my vision of Joshua’s Tree for Mark and for the family, because maybe that would make it easier to lay aside. That somehow all those years of dreaming were all that God was actually calling me to with Joshua’s Tree, that it wasn’t about a real place with a real table and space.
Rightmove became my hobby and a house I had seen before came up again due to an earlier sale chain falling through. I went to see it, thinking that on all the practical levels it ticked the boxes so I should do so as part of my laying aside my vision and do what was right for the family. As I walked down to view the house having locked my bike at church God brought back to mind the words of the poem above. We ended up putting an offer in the afternoon which was accepted. Mark hadn’t seen it as he was isolating with covid. I had been given the all clear to see it by the owners as I was testing negative. Then began the summer of can we get a mortgage or not. Thanks to others helping with our deposit we eventually got over that hurdle and once searches and surveys were all sorted we exchanged and completed in September.
So instead of crystal gifts to symbolise our 15th anniversary we picked up keys to the first house we had bought together and God placed a rainbow over the house and continued to do so over the next few days as we went between the two houses moving everything. This is the home God has provided for us and from where He is calling us to live out the vision of Joshua’s Tree. I have been reminded He is calling us to be co workers with Him, He has the master plan and He knows what He is doing with us and this home and our desire to love and care for church leaders. It was with a full heart we had our first person to stay overnight at the weekend and I have started to meet with another to pray and encourage regularly. We may still have boxes,hence no house pictures yet, we may not be sorted but that doesn’t mean the door isn’t open. The kettle is on and I’m learning to walk in the town knowing that the lakes are not so very far away.
Joshua's Tree Rooted 