The Unravelling That Made Room

Yesterday, twelve years ago, at forty-four, we said farewell to everything we knew.

We packed up lives, relationships, the familiar corners of a world that had shaped us, and we stepped — with more faith than certainty — toward a country we barely knew, called by something we couldn't fully name. New Zealand. A new beginning. That's what we told ourselves, anyway.

What I didn't know then — what I couldn't have known — was that new doesn't always arrive as a gift wrapped neatly at the door. Sometimes it arrives as an undoing.

By the time I landed on New Zealand soil, I had moved forty times. Forty. Four moves before the age of five in Germany, then South Africa, then move after move after move — thirty-four of them before I turned eighteen. I hadn't just changed addresses. I'd learned, bone-deep, that nowhere was permanent, that roots were a luxury other people had, that the wisest thing you could do was hold every place loosely, because the uprooting was always coming. Displacement had become my default. I wasn't just homeless in the practical sense — I was homeless in my soul.

So when we arrived in New Zealand, I did what I had always done. I waited. I kept one foot ready. I braced for the next goodbye before the current hello had barely settled.

Life didn't open up the moment we landed. It unravelled. Slowly at first, then all at once — the way things do when God is serious about transformation. The strands I'd been clinging to: identity, belonging, the person I thought I was, the life I thought I was building — they came loose, one by one, until I was standing in the middle of something I didn't recognise, wondering if this was really what obedience was supposed to feel like.

It was.

The truth is, I hadn't left a good life behind. I'd left one marked by loneliness and chaos — a loneliness that had roots going all the way back to a little girl in Germany who never got to finish unpacking before it was time to pack again. Three countries. Forty moves. A lifetime of never quite arriving.

Not because God is unkind. You can't fill a vessel that's already full of the wrong things. The unravelling wasn't punishment — it was preparation. The falling apart was the beginning of the rebuilding. I just couldn't see that from where I was standing.

Twelve years on, I can.

It took seven years in New Zealand before something shifted — seven years, and two of them spent in the tender, painstaking work of heart healing — before I could finally say it and mean it: I have a country. I have a community. I have a home. For a woman who had moved more than forty times, who had spent decades waiting for the next uprooting, those words were nothing short of a miracle.

God didn't leave me in the chaos. He brought community where there had been isolation, healing where there had been wounds too old to name, and order — quiet, steady, merciful order — where confusion had reigned for so long it had felt like home. He took the ashes of three lifetimes of brokenness across three countries and exchanged them for something beautiful. Not instantly. Not painlessly. But faithfully — the way He always does.

I look back at that woman in the photograph — taken the day before the flight, suspended between one life and the next, not yet knowing what was ahead, not yet knowing how much would have to fall before anything could truly be built. Brave. Terrified. Hopeful in that fragile way you are before life tests your hope. I want to tell her: hold on. Not because it won't hurt. It will. More than you know. On the other side of all that unravelling is a woman you haven't yet become, and she is more whole, more rooted, more truly herself than you've ever been.

She has a home.

She finally, finally has a home.

📖 "To console those who mourn in Zion, to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness." — Isaiah 61:3 (NKJV)