BIG NEWS
We’re too cool for the USA.
Seriously though, we’re moving to NEW ZEALAND!
It’s a long, cool story.
Before I even met Matt, I knew that God had called me to Missions. Overseas. And we had “the talk” before we started dating: if he wanted to be with me, he’d have to be willing to move. Far. He said okay, and that was that. Fast forward to two years ago and I felt like God was asking me: what about New Zealand? And I just assumed I was hearing things. But in the event that I wasn’t, I answered, “Sorry, I’m not interested. I don’t know anything about that place”. So that was that.
Six months later, I felt God nudging me again: what about New Zealand? This time, I felt like I had to look into it. But this time was different. I started researching New Zealand and quickly became obsessed with it. It’s absolutely beautiful and has the work/life balance we’ve been looking for. It has beaches and snow-capped mountains within hours of each other. Not to mention Aurora Australis, its many hot springs, temperate weather, better healthcare, family orientation, etc. But the hard part: telling Matt. Because he was born and raised in Florida. I could never even convince this Florida boy to move to Connecticut to be with my family. How on earth am I going to convince him to move to New Zealand? But I knew that if this was really God’s plan, that he’d get us on the same page. Because there was no way I’d be able to convince him, nor did I really want to have to.
A quick detour: While God was revealing New Zealand to me, Matt was also being presented with the idea of New Zealand, just in a different way. Long story short, we had been unhappy with the health insurance marketplace for some time, so he Googled “Where is the best place to live?” and New Zealand was one of the places that came up.
The time came where I revealed to Matt what God had laid on my heart. Matt didn’t take it well at first, if I’m being completely honest. He said we would consider New Zealand in our 10+ year plan. All I could do at that point was pray. And show him pictures of New Zealand. And tell him fun facts. And watch him roll his eyes. At that point, I figured that maybe it wasn’t God’s plan for right now since Matt wasn’t budging. He wasn’t convinced. So I proposed a compromise: we make New Zealand part of our 5-10 year plan. In the meanwhile we’d sell our house, pay off a majority of our debt, and buy a small piece of property and a mobile home so we could live comfortably but be able to save while we anticipate our move to New Zealand. He agreed and grew to love the idea. We both got excited and spent hours driving with the kids looking at vacant land. Most of the land we looked at had been sitting on the market for 200+ days. We put in offer after offer, but we kept getting declined for weird reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with us. (Seriously, I could probably write a separate post with all the details, but I’ll spare you since this post has enough details of its own). After a while, we started getting tired of it and decided to take a different approach.
So I figured, okay, if there’s any piece of this puzzle that can go smoothly it has to be the purchase of the mobile home. After all, you just walk in, pick out the one you want, get financing, and that’s that. Or so I thought. So we did. We arranged for Matt’s parents to watch our kids for half the day so we could pick out our home. I scheduled the appointment with the mobile home salesman ahead of time and even told him our budget and the fact that we hadn’t successfully obtained land at that point. He said no problem, he has plenty of homes in our price range. And he claimed to be a star real estate agent, so he was willing to help us secure some land because he was the best in his business, blah blah blah (you know, sales chatter that no one buys at the end of the day, but we were desperate so we hoped some of it was true, at least true enough to get the job done).
Click for Part 2:
The Cullums Immigrate 