Can I just say, I can’t believe it’s been a whole year since we arrived here in New Zealand. This year was almost unreal – we went through so many changes that time just sped up. When we arrived, we could barely understand the locals. Now, we speak their lingo. It’s amazing how fast one can adapt to their surroundings. When we first arrived, the Kiwi accent was so stark. Now, I don’t even notice it. Crazy what a year can do.
Backing up a little bit – shortly after we arrived, we quickly realised that the cost of living would make it impossible for me to remain a stay-at-home-mom. I was hesitant, but knew that the only way we could sustain ourselves was for me to go back to work. The original idea I had was to work at a church, part-time. After all, God called us to New Zealand for mission work, so surely a missions job would fall right into my lap, right? Wrong. What actually happened is I landed my full-time Office Administration Assistant job at Hunting & Fishing New Zealand. It was quite the transition for me, as not only did I have to acclimate to being in the workforce again, but I also had to put my kids in kindy (daycare). This was my first time away from Ellie, too. The beginning was rough, as I missed the kids more than anything and had to navigate learning an entire role in a week and a half. But I quickly got back into the swing of things, and my kids were loving kindy, which put me at ease.
Fast forward past COVID (because I think we’re all sick of this topic) and I’m accomplishing a lot in my role – so much that my boss started talking to me about becoming a Business Analyst. I even had a little bit of preliminary training to get a feel for what the role would be like. Honestly, I thought it was a great idea – I’d been wanting to pursue a Business Analyst career since I was at American Strategic Insurance. But deep down, something didn’t sit right with me; I never had a peace about it. Regardless, it was the career choice that was seemingly falling into my lap at that moment, so I was willing to let everything play out. I knew that if it wasn’t what God had for me, then it wouldn’t happen; so really, I had nothing to lose by going with the flow.
Everything was all set for someone to train me as a Business Analyst, but then the craziest thing happened. Out of nowhere, the guy just up and quit in the middle of a project. At that point, I acknowledged that God was probably closing that door, knowing well that He didn’t bring us all the way across the world just for me to work in corporate. I told my boss shortly after that I was no longer interested in pursing the Business Analyst position, but he was pretty adamant that I should give it a try. He even reassured me that he could outsource some training for me from the company that they were using to roll out their new POS system. At that point, I decided to go with the flow to see what would happen, again. Before the person training me left, he suggested that I attend a Business Analyst conference that was to happen in the coming months. Now that I was reassured I would have training, I decided that attending the conference would be the logical next step. I asked my boss if I could go (it would’ve required three days of my time away from work). He agreed that it’s something I should do, and that I should put the charge on his credit card.
I was all registered for the conference and was ready to pay, but for the first time since I started working at Hunting & Fishing, my boss’s credit card was declined. I had swiped it countless other times to make various purchases, yet this time I just could not get it to go through. The website accepted Visa, so there was no logical reason as to why the card would decline. Except for the fact that now, for a second time, God was making it really clear that this was not the path He had for me. I emailed someone else within the company to have a look into why the card was declining, and they told me that they couldn’t find a valid reason to explain why it happened. And the very next day, I made a separate purchase that went through with no issues – go figure.
At that point, my boss knew that the card had declined, but didn’t really follow up to see if I was still going. At this point, I decided not to try again because I finally got the message loud and clear that this was not what I was supposed to be doing. And at the same time, I wasn’t entirely sure where to go from there. There weren’t any other opportunities that I could see at the time, as the job market had pretty much crashed as a result of COVID and was taking its sweet time to bounce back. I just felt that I had to wait, so that’s exactly what I set out to do.
Click for Part 2:
The Cullums Immigrate 