Leading With Excellence

As things stand at present, a week from today I will be touching-down at Heathrow Airport back home in the UK once more. (I have something fairly important to do in London the following week)

To round my three-month trip off then, I accepted an invitation from my church to join them on a retreat down to Gateway Church in Hamilton for a Christian teaching weekend entitled "Leading With Excellence".


I'm not sure how I wound-up pursuing a subject like Christian leadership skills, but my plan all along has been to just go through the doors that God opens, and to refuse the opportunity just seemed like turning away from that.

So after the drive down with Nev (during which we spotted a car with the numberplate EIEIO, which we both really hoped belonged to a farmer named McDonald) the motel he dropped me off at turned out to be a lesson in experience.

When I learnt that there were no padlockable lockers to stash my gear in, I sagely booked a private room. I knew I was going to be out most of the time, and leaving my stuff on display for anyone to pinch seemed a bit inviting.

Or was I – a novice backpacker - just being paranoid?

After I'd locked the door of my private room, I peeked into the much cheaper dorm that I'd turned-down, and quickly ascertained that no-one was staying there. Oh well, what else had I been going to spend my last remaining NZ dollars on anyway?



The course was inspiring. It was a good chance to get to know some of my new friends better, and I was genuinely pleased to find myself sitting down outside to eat sandwiches with my pastor, and chatting about something as trivial as football. (a subject I know little about) I also made one or two other new friends, and found myself delving quite a bit into 1 Samuel afterwards.

By coincidence, my co-pilot from my first trip down under also lives in Hamilton now, and I was aware that it might hurt their feelings if I went home without having offered to catch-up while in town. So having fulfilled the obligation to offer, and been charged by said amigo to keep in touch, I took the opportunity to re-explore the town centre alone. It was sloshing down with rain, but when you only have one night, you take what you've got and swim with it.

And Hamilton town centre is long. New Zealand's fifth largest city takes much longer to walk across than Auckland's CBD, but there were a heap of places that held prior meaning for me. As the raindrops splashed down, and I and my course-notes got soaked, I took some comfort in the knowledge that, since I returned to New Zealand three months ago, I have honestly given living in Auckland my best shot.