Why Weta and Wellington?

Hello world. We finally have internet!!! We have been in NZ for 54 days. We have been in our house for the past 38 days and that whole while we have been waiting, waiting, and more waiting for them to install our internet. It finally happened. Horary! Now I can get back to blogging.

The Windy Welly Sign. This is pretty close to Stephen's office. 

I wanted to share why we choose to leave CA for NZ. It all started on January 2, 2018 as we were driving back to CA from our annual Christmas pilgrimage to UT. As we were driving the looooong drive home I was looking out over the barren NV landscape and asking myself "How many times have we done this drive? Too many to count." I then started thinking about our life in the Bay Area. We had a nice home that we just finished renovating. Stephen had a good job. The girls were all in good schools. We had great friends and a nice church community. I was feeling like our life was pretty good.

Then the next moment a very clear impression came to my mind which said, "You should think about Stephen working for Weta." Well, that was out of the blue I thought back. I knew that Weta was the movie company that did 'Lord of the Rings' all those years ago and I knew that Weta was in NZ. So, I quickly answered back to that prompting. "Sure, maybe in 4 years."

Stephen and I had never seriously talked about moving to NZ. I remember after him finishing grad school he looked into Weta once but they can only hire people outside NZ with 4+ years of industry experience. So, at that time it wasn't an option.

I didn't think too much about this impression. I didn't mention it to Stephen, except for a few nights later while we were brushing our teeth I said to him, "What if in 4 or 5 years you try to get a job at Weta and we try living abroad." To which he said "Sure." Just like I knew he would. And I thought that was the end of that for a while.

By the last week of January Stephen told me that his boss was leaving their group and he should maybe start trying to find a new job. No, I thought. That is so stressful. So Stephen started to see if there were other job opportunities with other groups at Apple. While I started thinking that Stephen was just fine where he was. It was his boss that was leaving. Stephen could just keep his job and life could go on as usual. Then after a few days passed Stephen called me from work to tell me that he saw that Weta had some openings in his field and he was asking for my permission to apply for them. I can remember throwing my hand in the air and saying, "I already know what is going to happen and I guess I better start learning about NZ."

And sure enough he applied, interviewed and got the job. Though, it did take about 2 months for everything to be settled.

I am so glad that I received that prompting. It made the whole decision and process moving here so much more comforting. I truly believed that God invited us to come and live in this amazing place. I feel so secure knowing that God loves and takes care of us.


On my next post I plan on showing pictures of our house here. We really lucked out and got a great house. The views are amazing and seeing them makes me happy all day long.