That’s the time as I write this post. Let’s make it short. I’m turning 30 in two hours. 

Where was I a decade ago? March 2014. I began my twenties in South Africa. I was doing a Christian Gap Year in Jeffrey’s Bay. I was not who I wanted to be at all. I did not look in the mirror and see someone I was proud of. I was a different person in every room and conversation I was in. I had zero idea of who I was. 

I was a boy. I was frightened of the world and who I was supposed to be in it. I was funny though, I was entertaining. At least I believe that would be some peoples account of me that knew me then and now.

I was not kind, I was not thoughtful. I was selfish. I felt very ashamed of who I was and I was one of those unpleasant characters who made myself feel bigger by attempting to make others feel small.

It’s strange trying to put my mind back into that time. Trying to think about what mattered to me then, what I was thinking about. I think I lived a very outward-in life at that time. My life was all oriented by external stimuli. It was in South Africa that I gave my life to Jesus. Though I can never say it felt like I weighed the options and chose. Rather I felt my life that had been under the legal ownership of one transferred wholly to another. There’s a verse in the Bible in the letter to a group of people called the ‘Colossians’, from ‘Colosse’ I suppose. It’s in the first chapter, 13th and 14th verses:

“He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”

I knew and acknowledged that transfer of ownership when I was 21. In my room on Azalea Street in Jeffrey’s Bay where I shared a room with one of the best men I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. He’s called Armand. I was reading the first three chapters of a book in the Bible called Hosea. I knew the Jesus story well from my upbringing, but reading Hosea made my life come into perfect clarity. 

I had lived my life like an adulterous wife. Hosea had been instructed to marry a prostitute, still living in prostitution to act as a prophetic message of the Lord God with his chosen people. 

The first chapter and a half are harrowing, seriously harrowing. Go read it. It’s about how our nature drives a wedge between us and God. It doesn’t read as a punitive set of punishments from a cruel God. It reads as a set of realities described by a God who knows what life feels like without him. Read it. But then in verse 14 of the second chapter it begins like this:

“Therefore I am now going to allure her.”

Outrage! Stop the presses all you who think God is cruel. All you who think God would seek only to destroy and condemn. All you who think God wants you to just try harder. NO! The promise of Jesus is that he answer to our unfaithfulness is deeper commitment. A letter in the New Testament in 2 Timothy says that “even when we are faithless, He remains faithful for He cannot deny himself”.

That’s the truth demonstrated in Hosea, my biggest mistakes in the last ten years have all stemmed from stepping out from the reality of Jesus’ desire to allure me with the pure beauty of who He is and me trying to work. See Hebrews 4:11.

The remainder of this set of beautiful verses in Hosea that led me into a relationship with Jesus were as follows:

“Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her. There I will give her back her vineyards, and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. There she will respond as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt. “In that day,” declares the Lord, “you will call me ‘my husband’; you will no longer call me ‘my master.’ I will remove the names of the Baals from her lips; no longer will their names be invoked. In that day I will make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field, the birds in the sky and the creatures that move along the ground. Bow and sword and battle I will abolish from the land, so that all may lie down in safety. I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion. I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will acknowledge the Lord.”
‭‭How perfect is that.

The initiatory nature of the love of God. I read ‘The Furious Longing of God” by Brennan Manning a few times around this time of my life also. I also read a sort of mod-retelling of the Hosea story in a book called ‘Redeeming Love’ by Francine Rivers. That couple weeks fundamentally transformed everything about me. Everything good in my life stems from the kindness of God to reveal Himself to me in that way at that time.

Thank you.

I lived with Rachel in a shared house at this time. Our story might go in another blog post another day, but she is amazing. We married the next year. First date as a couple on October 29th 2015 and we were married in Mallorca on July 4th 2016.

We lived out the remainder of the year in Jeffrey’s Bay but by the end of 2016 we knew our chapter there was closing. My time there caused me to reframe my entire life and redeemed all that were once regrets.

Note: I genuinely have no regrets. Do I have things I wish I didn’t do? Sure. But regrets? No. 

That’s a stupid joke from some movie or TV show. Maybe Friends. Sounds like Joey.

Moving on. No I can really say I don’t have any regrets. Me and Rach like another verse that says “all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” 

Me and Rachel moved to the UK after a brief three months in Canada in the winter of 2016. We lived with my Mum and Dad for a year and a half. They are amazing people and we love them so deeply, but it was a challenging time. Just navigating a new city, Rachel working full-time voluntarily and just generally feeling quite directionless and like our lives were quite closely hemmed in. We moved to a house in South Manchester with a nice park out the back, lovely trees and green space. 

In and around this time I got something called a pilonidal sinus (do not Google it if you want to ever sleep again). It meant I had to have surgery that led to me having nurses home visits for months before needing to visit the local nurses clinic every day for many more months. I couldn’t work at the office job I was in and spent my time watching TV and reading books like ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman who passed away yesterday – my gratitude to you Mr Kahneman for inspiring me and helping me reorient my life and purpose.

I decided I wanted to study Economics because of that book. Universities were starting the following week from when I had that realisation and so I called up;

The University of Manchester – no thank you Mr Delaney.

Manchester Metropolitan University – no thank you Mr Delaney.

The University of Salford, Manchester – welcome!

The staff at the Uni of Salford were incredible. My course leader, Dr Maria Paola Rana. An amazing woman. I felt that she really loved us. She was that rare teacher – her greatest success would always be measured by us. I have huge gratitude and admiration for her.

I loved that course, but I did not like the application of behavioural economics that I saw beyond university. All opportunities to explore there had a gearing towards marketing, not something I felt passionate about. I wanted to know how economics could be understood in terms of how people make better decisions and how it’s lessons can be applied to make the world better. It sounds trite now at 23:17 but I don’t mean it to.

I applied at the end of my course to go to the University of Manchester to study Development Economics and Policy. The previous blog post tells you a little about that experience. By this time I had had three surgeries in the same place for pilonidal sinus and one in my armpit. Not fun, but I would not have studied at the time I did without that, and I would to have written my masters dissertation on “An Analysis of Country Participation in Projects under the Kyoto Protocols ‘Clean Development Mechanism’ between 2000 and 2020”or in other words “What makes renewable energy projects in developing countries actually happen?” The only point of mentioning that was that in a 5 minute conversation explaining that paper to a man named Josh Cutting – I was introduced to MOPO, the company I currently commit my best efforts to for the distinct aim of fundamentally executing the redefinition, redesign and provision of a revolutionary type of energy access for all types of customers across Africa. You’ll hear a lot about MOPO in this blog so I’ll leave that for now.

This is just to note that as I enter my thirties, a lot can happen in 10 years. I wonder what I’ll be writing when I hit 40.