Making dreams become reality.........the sojourn begins.

Many moons ago as many of you will know (will I ever stop going on about it???) I served as a full-time volunteer missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, otherwise known as the Mormon Church. Back in my day when you were 19yrs old and if you felt passionate enough about your faith that you wanted to share it you could save up the required amount of money, ensure your life was in harmony with the morals and teachings of the Church and submit your request to go and serve as an ambassador for the Saviour Jesus Christ. At the time I had my brother out in Fiji serving a mission, one of my great mates serving in Brisbane, another two serving in the Sydney North area, and two cousins ready to go at the same time I was. I submitted my mission request fully expecting to serve in Australia somewhere and secretly harbouring an ambition to go to Fiji so that my brother and I could eventually have our own secret language and have similar stories to tell. 
The time came and I received my mission call to the Greece Athens Mission. Not only did I have no idea that there was even such a mission like this that the church could send you to, but my ability with foreign languages was ordinary at best, and I knew full well that my ability with Greek was even worse as we had to study it for half a year in Grade 7.
Soon enough I was off to Greece and also Cyprus, it was as difficult as anyone could imagine. Having to learn a foreign language from scratch was a challenge as was having the guts to speak to random people about something so very personal. After 2yrs of doing just that I came home, a whole lot more matured, with much better Greek and with a great love for the people I had just served for that time.
In time I would meet Kym, we would get married and I would bore her to tears with stories about way back when, and the good 'ol days in Greece. We fantasised that maybe one day when we had retired we would go there together and I would show her around all the places I lived and loved. In the meantime we had saved up for a trip to the USA together without the kids, moved to Tasmania, had 5 children, bought a home etc....
It was somewhere in mid 2013 I started to have these really amazing/weird dreams......in Greek. I imagined that I was back in Greece and that we were going to a fruit and veggie market, or that I was travelling on a bus with some of my old missionary friends, and we were all speaking Greek, and our Greek was amazing! The dreams at first were just here and there, nothing to think about much but just nice affordable reminders of the beautiful places I had left behind. It was once these types of dreams started becoming more frequent that they perked my interest. This was becoming highly unusual. In all the time I had been back from my mission I may have had only a handful of dreams about being in Greece let alone speaking Greek. Maybe there was no reason at all for it or maybe there was. 
Having learnt over the years that God can speak to us in a variety of ways I have always learnt to give significance to the times when something intangible grabs your attention. 
One Sunday after Church I was discussing with Kym the events of another crazy Greek dream, and telling her just how vivid it was, and just how amazing my Greek was,.... then it dawned on me, in a moment of utter clarity, with my long service leave just around the corner maybe there was the chance for us to go back to Greece, all of us, together, as a family. Maybe there was something significant for us to experience as a family over there? It certainly wasn't anything we had ever really had an ambition to do as a whole family, and most definitely not something we had EVER discussed when dreaming about what or where we might go as a family. Once this idea was voiced though t seemed to grow and grow and seem more and more urgent and real. As Kym and I discussed it, Kym also became increasingly enthused about this plan of ours.
We discussed the prospective plan with the principle at our primary school. Unsure of what reaction we would get we were amazed at just how supportive she was of this chance for us to provide this type of education to our children and encouraged us to pursue it with gusto, wishing that all of the students could experience something similar. She finished our conversation adding that was nothing they could do in the classroom that would replicate what we were planning to provide them. What a relief and what great support!
As we planned the time and potential of going we decided that April 2015 would be the ideal time with Charlotte in her final year of Primary School, her Grade 5/6 camp occurring later in the year and would also enable us to get to Greece for Greek Easter which was a must for us to experience if we were going to go to the trouble of going over. By the later half of 2014 we had decided that we could get enough leave from work to go for 4mths and so the plans begun. Over the past few years we had inadvertently been saving for a dog and for a cubby house, unwittingly these pockets of money became the start of our savings to get to Greece. 
Fast forward 2 years and Easter Monday morning the 6th of April 2015, the Rogers family, of Perth, Tasmania, all 7 of us hopped in our car at the crack of dawn and drove to Devonport and boarded the Spirit of Tasmania, heading towards Melbourne, the first leg of our journey to Cyprus and Greece. We were as nervous as nervous could be. Were we really ready? Would we leave anything valuable behind? Were the house and gardens in a state to leave for such a long time? 
Here goes nothing......... and all of this because of a dream!