Hi friends!
It’s been a while since I’ve posted, and for good reason. We have been navigating some big life changes (don’t worry – they’re all good!) and giving ourselves the space and grace to find a new rhythm and routine with each new change. This blog post will focus on a really big life change that took place over the winter – we moved to Auckland for two months!
This change was rather sudden and unexpected. Matt typically works locally to Palmy – his farthest job being maybe an hour away at the very most. Well, he’s been making all kinds of valuable connections over the course of his New Zealand Electrical career, and one of those connections recognised Matt’s talent for management and oversight and valued his niche expertise. He really enjoyed working with Matt at a local airport job, and they hit it off as friends as well.
Unbeknownst to us, Matt’s connection (originally from Australia) was in Auckland, working on a large hangar (the largest wooden hangar in the world at the moment!) at the Auckland Airport. He suggested the idea that Matt could temporarily relocate to Auckland to help him manage a small local crew doing a specialist installation, as well as bring his expertise to the table. We loved the idea, but usually outlandish ideas get vetoed, so as much as this sounded exciting, we didn’t want to get our hopes up. After all, B&M would have to approve Matt leaving for two months, amidst the start of a brand-new job that Matt was managing with stringent deadlines.
Keep in mind: we were presented with this opportunity just weeks before the start date, and we thought Matt would go alone, leaving me to manage the house and kids, which at this point also included homeschooling. That thought made me nervous, but I knew that if it was meant to be, God would help me through. I also knew that if this opportunity wasn’t meant to be, Matt wouldn’t be able to make it work out to go. Little did I know that God had something much different in mind: He planned for us all to go – something I hadn’t even considered or requested. In fact, Matt’s supervisor at B&M was the one who suggested it.
To our surprise, B&M was (apprehensively) willing to be without Matt for 2 months, so Martinus (the company that would contract Matt’s work from B&M) started drafting the details of the contract. All we had to do was wait and see if Martinus could come up with a contract that B&M agreed with.
We waited for an answer and found ourselves just a little over a week until the proposed job start date in Auckland, still waiting. We had big decisions to make – like whether we should pull Blaire and Louis from kindy and whether we should turn our house into an Airbnb. These were major decisions for us, and it would’ve been easier to make them had we only had an answer already.
I had been feeling in my spirit for a while that I was going to pull the babies from kindy, and I knew I just needed to do it, answer or not. I thought dropping them at kindy would help us focus better on homeschooling, but it had the opposite effect. Our babies brought life to our homeschooling, and sending them away made the day more dreary and dismal. The quiet was deafening, and we missed them too much. I knew in my heart that keeping the babies home was the right decision for our family. So I did it – I sent kindy notice that Blaire and Louis’s last day would be the Friday before the proposed Auckland start date. It was the perfect, most natural transition out.
Meanwhile, while I was reading aloud to Jack one day during homeschool, God started downloading the Airbnb idea in real-time. I was saying the words in the book, while simultaneously getting a steady stream of ideas for turning our house into an Airbnb. I called Matt as soon as I had finished reading to let him know what I received, and he was NOT about it! At least, not at first. It took a lot of convincing. After all, we only had a week to transform our house into an Airbnb, which entailed creating the listing on Airbnb’s site, decluttering, rearranging furniture, and staging. Not to mention, we still had to pack for our own trip. That was a LOT of work to try to accomplish in a week. But we knew that if God gave us the idea, we just had to follow it through.
I was inspired by the parable in Matthew 25:14-30 of the master and the talents. Just as the master entrusted his servants with the talents and rewarded those who multiplied their talents and rebuked the servant who buried his talent, God entrusted us with our house and the ability to use this asset to generate income. If things went ahead, I knew we needed to multiply our talents, and Airbnb was our God-given opportunity to do it. Otherwise, our perfectly good house would sit for a little over two months doing nothing. I felt particularly convicted about that. I knew we had to grin and bear the initial setup work so we could reap the benefit, which would way outweigh the elbow grease.
Finally, just as I thought I couldn’t possibly bear waiting a minute longer, the answer came. It was a resounding YES! Shortly after, Matt secured our Airbnb in Auckland, and it was now time for us to prepare our own Airbnb. For that entire week, I barely sat down. Room by room, I made piles for donation and rubbish. We culled a lot, and the kids were very willing to part with many of the toys they no longer played with. We made many trips to the Salvation Army and offloaded so much stuff. They were thankful, but so were we. They made it so easy to quickly minimise our household belongings.
Click for Part 2:
The Cullums Immigrate 