Hi there, my name is Jenny, a number of years ago, my husband and I felt God calling us to return to the UK from Guatemala, where I had been serving as a missionary for 6 years (my husband is Guatemalan).
We returned to the UK at the end of 2008, I was pregnant, and I’m a Chartered Accountant so would be looking for work in finance. If you remember in 2008, there was a huge financial crash! We’d felt God speak to us but had returned to a really challenging time, because there was just no work around!
Thankfully we now know that this had God’s handprint, footprints, everything, just his hand over it all. It turns out that within a couple of years all of the visa requirements for returning to the UK would change and we actually wouldn’t have been able to come back.
So, at the time neither of us had jobs, my parents were guarantors, we wouldn’t have been able to do that two years later, so it was clearly God’s timing. We knew it was His timing, but we came back to no work! I remember talking to an accountancy firm and saying "my husband is a bookkeeper, I’m an accountant". The person I was talking to said “A year ago, I would have been able to give you both jobs, but right now there’s just nothing”.
There was just that period of thinking, “well, gosh, what do we do now?”. I think we knew we’d heard God clearly, but that doesn’t make it any easier when there are no jobs, particularly as the months go by and the baby is coming and there is just no paid work.
At the time, I’d taken a sabbatical from the church which had been supporting me, so there was a bit of money coming in, though it costs a lot more to live in the UK than it does in Guatemala! So, it was a little bit tight but really God stepped in, in such an incredible way for us!
Our son Jonathan was born and we still had no work, we were still in this difficult situation and then all of a sudden I got a phone call three weeks later from someone who went to a different church (not the church we were going to), a different church in York saying I’ve seen this notice saying they’re looking for a part-time bookkeeper for a new charity.
So, I made contact and the person I spoke to said they didn’t know why their name was on the advert, you actually need to speak to the Archbishop of York, so that was a bit crazy! Anyway, I spoke to his wife and said I’m a chartered accountant, but I need a job, and my background is in charities, and she came to our house. I remember at the time my husband was upstairs trying to keep our little three-week old baby settled. It turns out that I was the only one who responded to that advert, and it led to, well, basically at least the last decade of my career. It enabled us to stay in York, because this new charity was ACT435 and behind it was the entrepreneur Julian Richer who has since set up other charities that he’s got me involved in and there’s this verse in the Psalms that talks about the boundaries falling in pleasant places and that has been so true for us. Our testimony is that God showed up in such an incredible way for us!
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