A week ago today we had just arrived back into the UK, a little dishevelled and bleary eyed from travel following the end of Global Gathering, an event organised by the US based charity Amor. Global Gathering was part hands-on mission trip, and part Christian conference. It was fairly small, under 150 people I would guess, and the theme was ‘Who am I?’, with some added fun and visuals inspired by the film The Greatest Showman. As we arrived a day early, we watched the meeting tent come into being, tarpaulins ingeniously rigged up across ropes in the hotel car park, all hands on deck. Clever!

Perhaps unlike most of the other delegates, our main purpose for attending Global Gathering was to get to know Amor a little better, to meet key people from the organisation in the flesh, and to try and get a sense of whether our future should join paths with Amor.

It was a treat to stay in a beautiful beach hotel and have food and activities provided for us, clearly a lot of work had gone into making Global Gathering happen. Truthfully though, it was also quite challenging at times juggling family life within the conference timetable, especially at the beginning of the week while we tried to work out how we could fit in with the expectations on us with the kids in tow, as well as getting what we came for. That improved greatly in the second half of the week after a few releasing conversations with understanding people. Simply meeting our children’s needs in a different environment took a lot of our energy (nothing new there!), but we were very keen to participate as much as we could and not miss out on this amazing opportunity that other peoples’ generosity had paid for. We tried not to argue about who should go to the meeting each night, and who should stay back and put the children to bed! The children loved being around so many friendly people and having the run of the hotel with their new friends, and other kind adults regularly told us how enchanting our children are, but all the unfamiliarity and over-socialising also took its toll at times and there were one or two fairly major behavioural battles in the hotel room behind closed doors! Just keeping it real!

As Matt and I took it in turns to watch the kids we both participated in roughly half of the meetings and workshops, so we got the gist but not the detail, and we took a tag-team approach to wrestle with Ben who seemed to be having a particularly feral spell, especially at mealtimes. But none of these predictable struggles obstructed our aims for attending the conference, so with those in mind, it was a roaring success.

We met some really wonderful people, some of them long-time Amor staff and volunteers, others new to the Amor family, people from all around the globe. We were especially grateful to those at the Gathering who are part of the Puerto Morelos team, permanently based there – April and Jordan Congdon and delicious baby Judah, Rose and Diego Sosa and their 5 gorgeous children, Michael and Ayla Thomas and their two beautiful blonde little ones, and of course our Newcastleton forerunners Paul and Elaine Little, who were our link to Amor in the first place, and have now moved permanently to Puerto Morelos. The more we see of Paul and Elaine the more we love them :-). We also enjoyed meeting Andy Schamerloh who will be moving to Puerto Morelos with his wife Jen and their three children around August 2019.

All these people were warm, honest, friendly, real and very open to friendship and our many many questions, plus clearly devoted to God and the work they do in Puerto Morelos in tough conditions, wonderful people indeed. We are really grateful to them for the way they welcomed us, and opened up to us and our children. The kids were best friends immediately of course!

There were inspiring speakers at the Gathering too, I especially appreciated the material from the Global Immersion Project, challenging us to make uncommon friendships, reaching out to people in need with genuine two-way friendship in mind, overcoming our blind spots and treating people as equals not as charity projects. Powerful stuff. The worship was led by Steph and Mike Dickinson, and Joel Dickinson from the UK, (with our very own Scottish Doug supporting on the bass) and what they brought so blessed me. Beautiful music, wonderful voices and musical talent, a delight to listen to – but more than that – humble, Jesus-adoring worship, Spirit led and real. Water to a thirsty soul.

One of the main thrusts of Amor’s work is building houses for homeless families, but Amor doesn’t hog all the fun; those who do the building work are people who pay to come from all around the world to volunteer for a few days and be part of something amazing. They get a life changing experience, knowing they were part of creating significant good, and their money helps pay for the house materials. Win win.

It was so good to be part of the house building, to see how it all works – how it is possible that a bunch of mostly clueless western volunteers can produce something in only a few days that someone might actually want to live in! But it is possible indeed. The experienced Amor workers and volunteers oversee the process and check for quality, and it really is simple – even the kids had a go! Such an ingenious design.

The Amor houses in this area are made from panels of polystyrene – yes, polystyrene! – covered in wire. They are trimmed to the right size and shape and then wired together into a house, firmly tied onto metal rods cemented into the foundations of the house, before being reinforced with more wire and then covered in several layers of thick concrete (also known as stucco) inside and out. This then dries hard to form a very hard, durable supporting structure – an exoskeleton – and leaves a house strong enough to be a hurricane shelter. The polystyrene within acts as insulation, keeping the houses cool in the hotter months, and warm when it’s cooler – although it was so very hot working on this house it’s hard to imagine that this is ever necessary!

We also had the privilege of joining in on some of the outreach work, where teams of volunteers centred on a park area. Some prayed for any sick people passing by who wanted prayer, others played sport with local children, the health team had a stall with sanitary items and advice, and others ran a craft and story based children session. It was great to spend some time with local people, despite the embarrassing moments when one is called on to interpret and can’t remember any useful words!

So….?

Yes. The Big Question. I haven’t said much about that, I know. Was it a ‘yes’? Or a ‘no’? Will we be relocating to Puerto Morelos any time soon to join the Amor team?

The answer is a bit of an anti-climax, I’m afraid: We don’t know yet. I was rather hoping for instant sense one way or the other as we touched down in Mexico but that didn’t quite happen. Instead came a firm reminder that imagining being somewhere (and obsessively Googling local info perhaps) is significantly different to actually being there, so what followed was a two week series of reality checks. None of them deal breakers, nothing that made us think this could definitely never work, but certainly lots more things to think about, to take into account. It’s obvious, but being there in person really brought it home: life in Puerto Morelos would be so very different to life in Newcastleton!

It was a beautiful place. Blue sky, turquoise sea, warm sunshine and a hearty sea breeze. Pelicans soaring overhead and dive-bombing into the waves in search of fish with a spectacular splash. Palm trees, the wooden jetty stretching out into the sea. The main square, lit and populated by people relaxing, with little stalls selling snacks all around it of an evening.

Lovely, but also it was all a bit different to what we expected. I don’t totally know what I expected, but some of it must have been informed by what I knew of Mexico when I lived in the university city of Guadalajara as a student 19 years ago, and I didn’t find many of the things I remembered and expected to be reunited with. It’s a little hard to put my finger on, it just didn’t feel quite as Mexican as other parts of Mexico…not the same evidence of Mexican history and culture; the statues, plaques, old buildings, historic road names and other such reminders weren’t there like they are in other cities. We did eat some delicious things, but overall the food seemed more plain, less diverse, more fried stuff with cheese on, less flavours, less vegetables…possibly ‘dumbed down’ for tourist tastes? Or just different because a different part of the country? And we knew it was a touristy area, but as Puerto Morelos is billed as the more ‘authentic’ location alternative to Cancun, we didn’t expect quite so many foreigners everywhere, many permanent residents even in the ‘non touristy’ part of town. Living in Puerto Morelos would mean adjusting to two cultures for sure – Mexican, and American.

As I said above, none of these things are reasons not to move there. The people were wonderful, we loved what we have come to know of Amor and what it does. The answer definitely wasn’t a ‘no’. The question still hangs. It is not surprising on reflection that the real-life experience was different to what we were expecting – that is how real life works.

But the stakes are too high to take the decision lightly, and not just for our family and our future. We are deeply, closely connected to the people we love and work alongside here in Newcastleton, they rely on us as we rely on them. If we leave, it will definitely affect them, even if just temporarily. We have to be sure.

When we moved to Newcastleton over 5 years ago, we didn’t make the move just because we liked what we saw of the village. In truth we were a bit daunted by how different life in a small rural village would be to what we were used to. What convinced us was a sense in our hearts that this was God’s plan, this was the right place for us. We could get behind the work, the people and the vision for the future, and those things were such strong pull factors that feeling daunted about the details of daily living didn’t matter. And we learnt, soon enough, that we could change and adapt and come to love a new ‘normal’, that what once felt strange and new could become familiar and much-beloved.

So now, learning from our Newcastleton experience, we are seeking that same sense of assurance in our hearts. The outer wrappings of daily life are not nearly as important as the inner sense from above that we’re in the right place, for the right reason…we don’t want to move ahead without that sense any more than we want to stay if it has moved on. It has been a very positive start, but that certainty about Puerto Morelos is not yet quite in place.

Much as I would have liked an instant answer, my feeling is that it is going to take a bit more time, and a bit more waiting, mulling, listening before we’re really sure either way. I know, the suspense. But there have been so many years of waiting and seeking, feeling that call, that pull to the poor and some kind of work with them that it would be a shame to get the response wrong for want of a bit more patience. With words like ‘forever’ and ‘permanent’ riding on this decision, I suppose there’s really no need to be in a hurry.