New Day Dawning

Well it doesn’t seem to long ago that I was sitting in Wollongong writing about 2005, and we have now welcomed in 2007.

2006 was a very memorable year. I started settling in to St Barnabas on Broadway. I have enjoyed working on the Network team (ministering to workers). During May last year Barneys burnt down, and since then we have been meeting in the lecture halls of Moore College. It has been a change for us all, but we are slowly adjusting. The church held a conference to look into options for rebuilding. It has been since decided that we are going to redevelop the site. It will be a great opportunity for us.

The highlight of the year is a little bit of a no-brainer. On December 2^nd this year Fiona and I were married. The eight months of our engagement disappeared quickly. We got married at St Matthias Paddington, and spent three weeks honeymooning in New Zealand.

During the first two weeks, we spent three days in Christchurch, before heading to Aoraki (Mount Cook) and Queenstown. A few highlights of the trip were our time in Aoraki (Cloud-piercer in Maori); our visit to Doubtful Sound (The Maori name Patea means Shadowlands (if you look at our pictures you will know why), jetboating on the Dart River, and a meal we had in Wellington (at Kai in the City – who served what Lonely Planet calls Maori Fusion. Loosely translated the meat was cooked traditionally and made into European styled meals.

The last week in NZ we spent catching up with my extended family; in Dunedin, Wellington and Auckland. It has been quite a busy year for our family – three of my cousins also got married, while we were in NZ we were able to attend Sharyn’s wedding.

Since being back in Australia, we spent one night in our home before having Christmas in Canberra, and we celebrated New Years in Wollongong (before returning to the nasty reality called w—k).

Postscript: Since we have been back, we (read Fiona) has spent a lot of time putting up photos that our family and friends took at our wedding. They can be found here.