How our New Zealand Holiday Began






No wonder our New Zealand holiday sparkled with little miracles. It seems it was God’s idea in the first place.

It had been a hard year. I was a young Christian in my late twenties, very dependent on God because of ongoing health problems. It was October and I was exhausted. 

I’d been living at my mother’s house, half way up Burleigh hill, while I taught at a school nearby. We never tired of our wonderful view out over the ocean, up the coast and out west to the mountains.

But by the end of the year I was weary and a bit depressed. I felt bored with everything I was doing. In fact, I didn’t feel like doing anything at all. Not even the view brought me joy as I gazed out to the horizon over the aching blue of the ocean. The future looked bleak.






Mum was on holidays with friends in New Zealand. She arrived home refreshed and in love with the beauty of the New Zealand countryside.

“You MUST see my slides,” she told me.

So, partly to humour her, one night we set up the old projector.  Mum showed me photos of our friends with their home nestling in the mountain side, photos of mirror-surfaced lakes beside pine forests, and snow glistening on mountain tops.

It was beautiful. As I watched, excitement replaced the heaviness in the pit of my stomach. I wanted to go there too!

This thought dominated my thinking for a week or so. It sat in my mental peripheral vision like paradise. It was, at last, something I longed to do.

 I dreamed of snow-capped mountains





 and crystal clear lakes



 – crisp, clean images, unsmudged by the tears of my Difficult Year.

At last I’d found something I definitely wanted to do – but who would I go with? How? When? I had no desire to travel alone.

On Friday evening my friend Peter, then at Bible College in Brisbane, arrived for one of his weekend visits. He sat down and began to sip a cup of tea. His face shone with excitement.

“Jeanette,” he said, “how would you like to go for a long holiday with a little group of us? To New Zealand? We’d wait till after Christmas, then go at the beginning of January for five weeks.”

I nearly jumped out of my skin with excitement.

“Yes!” I squeaked. So it was God who had whispered that desire into my heart!

We began to plan the holiday.

Photos by Pixabay

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