Author: Helen Smallbone
Submitted: February 24, 2022
Tell us a little about yourself. I was born in Australia in the mid-50's, the youngest with three older brothers and my father being a Methodist minister. Even though I grew up in the church, my faith became real in my mid-teens when I committed my life to Christ at a Sydney Billy Graham Crusade.
Trained as an Occupational Therapist, my greatest desire was to serve God and be a wife and mother. These desires started to be realized when I married the love of my life, David Smallbone, at the young age of 20. The ensuing years were busy with 6 children being born during the next 14 years.
In 1991, when pregnant with our 7th child, our world was turned upside down by a personal financial crisis. The answer appeared to be relocating to Nashville, TN for David to pursue a job of managing a Christian music artist.
However, new adventures were experienced as our family homeschooled and were forced to live by faith for the ensuing few years. Our family, now comprised of 5 boys and 2 girls, has continued to remain close working together in Christian music.
My husband David and I continue to live just outside Nashville on a small farm. I still love my role of wife and mother but also have a new hobby that comprises a petting zoo/menagerie which has approximately 13 different varieties of animals. We have now become U.S. citizens and have been blessed with a growing family of 13.5 grandchildren.
What was your motivation behind this project? Part of the reason I wanted to write this book is to encourage and challenge other families to live differently to get out of their box. I want others to have courage to seek His will rather than their own and to let Him use them however He wants in His bigger plan. His plans don't look like the world's definition of success, but they always include lasting, eternal purpose and value. They also include His presence, leading and guiding us into adventures and valleys we wouldn't necessarily choose for ourselves.
Through them, I believe God wants more of us living counterculture to the world's ways. Sometimes it may even mean we go against a lot of the church's religious traditions. But in choosing His ways, we will live in the miraculous!
I look back on my family's journey, and I see God's hand everywhere. I see His phenomena. I see His faithfulness in taking our simple Australian family and leading us to the other side of the world and doing things with us we would never have thought possible. Our lives are a living testimony of believing God's promises and trusting His timing and His ways even when circumstances didn't make sense and were not easy. He was always there.
Our journey has been an amazing one we never would have planned for ourselves. There has been a lot of loss at one point we lost everything, yet God has redeemed every one of those losses beyond what we could have hoped for or imagined, which is why Ephesians 3:20 is one of my favorite verses: "Now all glory to God, who is able, through his mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think."
What do you hope folks will gain from this project? This book is a look back from this mum's viewpoint of my own family's transformation from living more in the world's way into God's way. It's filled with life lessons that, hopefully, you can apply to your own life and to your own journey.
David and the kids would have their own perspectives, perhaps slightly different from mine, but I can only speak from what my experiences have been and the memories they bring, some good and some not so good. In some small ways, I wish I could go back and do some things differently, which I'll touch on.
But in most ways, I wouldn't change a thing. What we've been through is what makes us who we are today and molds us into the instruments God has wanted us to be for bringing Him the glory in our lives that He deserves.
What is exciting to me is I know and fully believe that the faithfulness and favor God has shown me, shown all of us, is the same faithfulness He shows to anyone who fully commits their life to Him.
It is my hope that from our story, you will be inspired to step outside of your box and embrace God's plans for you without fear or hesitation. When you do, His peace will carry you no matter what you face, the same way it has carried me.
