Why Sevilla? (Part 1)

Hi there!

Welcome to the Hafnor blog! My name is Rebeca. Together with my husband Preben, and our daughter Edel Sofia, we have embarked an adventure we consider worth writing about. 

We realise that there is probably not that many people interested in these posts, but we are mostly doing this for ourselves. We find writing very therapeutic, and we would like to look back and read about what God's been doing in our lives. We don't want to forget.

We decided to tittle this post "Why Sevilla?" because we know that many people around us are still asking themselves that exact same question. After all, it is no secret that we love nature, mountain sports, snow, and THE COLD. We really enjoyed our lives in Oslo, Norway. Why then move to Sevilla of all places? 

Well, around New Years, we started asking God where He wanted us to move. We wanted to move out of the city center, have a bit more room and be closer to nature. We wanted to include God in this decision, and make sure we didn't just jump into whatever. We were thinking maybe He'll give us the green light for Nittedal, in the suburbs of Oslo, or even Vegårshei, a city near Kristiansand, where we have some friends with whom we share a lot of values (how to raise children, church, etc.)

We then sat a part 10 days in the beginning of the year, to seek God, and ask him for direction. There was a lot of skiing and praying involved. But the days kept passing by and we still had no clue as to where we were going to end up. 

We started getting a bit frustrated because we felt like we really wanted to do something together as a family, and that the only way to do so would be by going where God wanted us to go. 

In the middle of a frustrating conversation, we got beginning of the answer we were looking for. Definitely NOT the answer we expected, but definitely the answer we needed.

I mentioned the names of my friends Tristan and Jackie to Preben in this conversation. Preben had only met them once, and I always referred to them as The Crosses, so he wasn't familiar with their first names. When I said the name "Tristan" he stopped me asked me to repeat his name. I did, and then his eyes opened wide. "A couple of days ago I felt God told me that I was going to go to some city and work together with someone named Tristan and someone named something else I couldn't pronounce. I didn't know how to pronounce Tristan either, but when you said it, I suddenly realised that was the name I got."

I was kind of in shock and wondering what all this was. I knew The Crosses had recently moved to Sevilla, but I couldn't even fathom that that's where God wanted us to move. I didn't think much of it, but Preben was sure there was something behind the word he got.

He then sent a messages to the Elders in our church, and asked them to pray for us, because he felt like God had spoken to us, but we needed confirmation. 

And that was it. We continued praying and skiing for a couple of days, and wondering what we should do with the revelation we felt we got. And then something crazy happened. One of the Elders in our church messaged Preben and said "I asked my wife to pray for you, and she got a picture of a thermometer that was showing a very high temperature, and she is wondering, are you guys moving to Spain?" 

Our jaws dropped. We hadn't mention anything about Spain or what we were praying about to them, and suddenly we got our first confirmation. God definitely had something for us in Spain. I also knew that Sevilla is the hottest city in Spain. Did this mean that we were going to move to Spain? No way! 

We went home in a state of shock, and wondering how in the world we were going to respond to this. We decided we were going to ask our church group to pray for us, but also not mentioning anything other than we thought God had spoken to us and we needed confirmation about a couple of things. 

When the group prayed for us, someone got a picture of a carousel. Me knowing a bit about Sevilla, I immediately thought about "La feria de Abril". It's a world renowned Fair, that lasts for a week in April in Sevilla. There are all kinds of attractions and rides for kids and adults. One of them is a carousel. 

Someone else got a picture of Arab-looking arches,  with a strong light shining through them. This reminded me of the architecture and history of Sevilla. The entire "old town" is covered with churches and buildings with that kind of architecture. The Arabs where in Spain for over 800 years, their architecture had a big influence, specially in the south.

Many would say this is all comfirmation bias. But I have to say, I didn't want any of this to be true. I was excited to hear from God, but the idea of going back to Spain, and to SEVILLA of all places, terrified me. 

After a few days, we started praying asking other people to pray for us, for more confirmation, but it was getting clearer and clearer in our spirits that this was the right way to go. How do we respond to God without being in constant doubt to the point that all this fizzles away and we forget what God showed us? We asked ourselves. We need to make a decision. In that moment we knew, we were moving to Spain.

My friend Birgitte sent me a sermon from Bethel church called “Disruptive faith”, which really inspired us as to how to approach this whole journey. We were going to ask God about every detail in this whole process.

A few days later, we started looking through prophecies and words we've received over the years. Just a month before we started praying about this, Karina, Preben's sister shared a picture she felt God gave her for us: she saw Edel Sofia crawling in the forest, and following a light, and we were being behind her. She said she felt God was saying “Follow me blindly like a child, and I will take you further than you ever thought”. 

We didn't know how to symbolically show that we were surrendering to what we thought God was telling us to do. So we started small: Preben started selling his books and I started asking God to change my heart about Spain. 

As we prayed during those weeks, we asked God more specific questions:

• When should we move God? I get a date right away, but don't dare to say it out loud. Instead I approached Preben and asked “can we pray and ask God which date we should move?”. After we prayed, Preben says, "all I got was the number 21”. I then jump out of the sofa, because the date I had in in heart was “21st of March”. Crazy, at this point there is only a little over a month til that date. WHAT?! On top of that, we check the clock in that instant and it was 21:21!!!!
• We are aware that we can be bias and seeing things everywhere because we are in this bubble, so we keep asking God and friends for confirmation, specially after I get a “vision” where I saw ourselves driving from Norway to Sevilla in a big van, and when we arrived to Sevilla, we started knocking on different people’s doors and asking if they were renting or selling a place for us to live in.

We needed confirmation for that last part. We couldn't just drop everything with a baby without knowing for sure that was a word from God. That's when we wrote a list of Bible stories to confirm different words we got: 

(to be continued...)