hotbrettandval

this is also my 800th blog post altho that is completely irrelevant but a nice round number nonetheless…

so if you are reading this, then by now you know that myself and tbV are heading to Oakland, California to work with Common Change, and you also probably have some idea of what our specific roles with CC look like, and so the last thing i want to comment on is the support aspect.

Val and i have different opinions on the raising support aspect of the work we are about to do altho neither of us are particular fans and if there was another way of doing this particular next part of our life journey, then we would have probably jumped at it. But there wasn’t and so it quickly became a reality that if we were going to do this it would require that and so we breathed deeply and went ahead with it.

How it is going to work is that Common Change is going to be covering our accommodation costs and so we had to take care of our flights [done, thankx to an uberly generous gift from a good friend] and our month to month expenses which we have estimated [food, transport etc] as roughly $1000 per month [or close to R9000]. So that is the monthly support we have been seeking from friends to cover the 18 months we will be working with Common Change starting in March. The one aspect of the support raising that we were both happy with is that it is for a set time – so we have asked people to get involved for 18 months and then it is done.

At the point of this going to [word] press [yes, i did that!] we are sitting at about 50% of what we need and the idea was that we would wait til we hit 60% before i book my flight and trust for the rest to come in after that. We did have a proviso that if the 60% doesn’t come in before the 20 March that Val would fly home and we’d start looking at a plan B as neither of us were particularly amped about being on different continents for too much longer.

So the money side of things is a practical need, but the support part that Val and i are both super excited about is the idea of people journeying with us on this mission. So we are building up a support base ranging from people who want to receive the monthly newsletter we will be putting out, to those who are committing to keep us in prayer for this time and then those who are committing financially to the journey. At the moment we have over 50 people who have stuck their hands up and said “We want to be part of this with you!” And that feels like a really good thing.

The idea behind Relational Tithe and Common change feels like a really great one and we have seen it work really well in a number of peoples lives and so the connectedness with people from back home in South Africa also means that there is opportunity for the idea to take root in different wants here and start affecting our country more directly. I have already had one person who has expressed interest in starting something like that or being part of a group here and we are excited about the potential of a group of people trying it out in the South African context [there is a Caribbean cluster that meets in Cuba and has been a very successful part of RT so we believe it can work!]

So there you have it – a deeper glimpse into the journey that Brett and Val are about to start [officially in two days time, Val from Oakland and me from here til i get there!] and if you would like to be a part of that journey in any of the three ways mentioned then please drop me an email at brettfish@hotmail.com and i can add you to the newsletter list.