The call that changed our lives

We were still in the hotel, far from where our journey had begun. By then, our faith was weak. We could remember the help we had received along the road, but we could no longer see how we were going to live safely together.

The fear of being found and forcibly separated had become overwhelming. We had left so much behind and travelled so far, yet we still felt trapped. In that despair, we had come to a frightening decision: we would end our lives.

It is painful to write those words now. Fear and exhaustion had narrowed our thinking until we could not imagine another way forward. We wanted to live together, to marry and have a home. At that moment, we could not see how those ordinary hopes could ever become possible.

During the journey, we had barely been eating properly. Moving from place to place, worrying about our safety and managing our small amount of money had worn us down. Alongside everything else, we were hungry.

We decided to have a proper meal before doing anything else.

We ordered one full meal and shared it between us. We were still in the same uncertain circumstances, with the same fears and very little strength left. After eating, we prayed together.

Our faith felt small, but we turned to God with what remained of it. We could not see what would happen next.

Then the phone rang.

The call was unexpected. A friend was calling to tell us that he had arranged train tickets for us to travel much farther north.

There was somewhere else we could go.

Only a short time before, we had been unable to imagine what we would do next. Now there was a journey we could make. Our friend had helped arrange something practical at the very moment we had lost the ability to see beyond that room.

The relief was overwhelming.

That call changed our lives. It interrupted the despair that had taken hold of us and gave us a reason to prepare for another day. We began thinking about leaving the hotel, taking the train and finding somewhere we might be able to settle.

Looking back, we believe God reached us through our friend’s kindness. We had prayed in weakness, and help had come through a familiar voice with news we had not expected.

We had already experienced moments of protection during our journey. A stranger had guided us through unfamiliar roads in the rain. Other people had given us shelter. We had received those things with gratitude, yet fear had repeatedly overtaken us. Each new departure had made it harder to believe that we would ever be safe.

In that hotel room, something began to change in how we understood our lives.

We realised that we were not the authors of the whole story. We could see only the part we were living through, and even that had become difficult to understand. God could see beyond the limits of our fear.

We had mistaken our inability to see a future for the absence of one.

The phone call gave us a next step. It also became the moment when we began entrusting the direction of our lives more fully to God. We wanted Him to lead us according to His plan, even when we could not understand where that plan would take us.

After so much travelling, the picture that made sense to us was a steering wheel. We had been trying desperately to work out every turn while feeling increasingly unable to keep going. Now we wanted to place the direction of our journey in God’s hands.

We still had decisions to make. We needed to travel, find accommodation and use our remaining money carefully. But we began to face those things with a different understanding: our future extended beyond what we could manage or predict.

We remember the relief of that realisation. For so long, every decision had carried the fear that one wrong turn might cost us the life we wanted together. Now we could take the next step while trusting God with what we could not see.

We gathered our few belongings and boarded the train.

The journey took us roughly two thousand kilometres farther north. Once again, we were leaving a temporary place behind. This time, we carried renewed hope that we might find somewhere to begin our life together.

The distance was considerable, but what mattered most to us was the possibility waiting at the other end. We wanted a place where we could stay, gather ourselves and begin making plans beyond the next departure.

We had no grand ambitions for that new beginning. We wanted to live together without constantly wondering when we would have to leave. We wanted the chance to build the ordinary life we had imagined before fear had become part of each day.

After arriving, we found a place to rent with a friend’s help. We paid the advance for three months and covered the rent ourselves, using the money we still had. No one was financing our journey. We remained deeply grateful to those who helped us make arrangements and find somewhere to stay.

Paying for that place meant committing some of our limited money to the hope that we could remain there. Until then, so many of our decisions had been about leaving. Now we were trying to settle.

For a while, it seemed possible that we could begin again.

Our circumstances were still uncertain, but we had come a long way from the despair of the hotel room. We had shared a meal, prayed, received an unexpected call and travelled onward. We were alive, together, and able to think about a future once more.

We believed God had preserved our lives and given us another step to take. His care had reached us when our faith was weak and our own strength had failed.

We arrived at that rented home ready to try again.

We did not yet understand how difficult it would be to begin.