Our Leap of Faith: Moving from Kuala Lumpur to Melbourne

So recently, my wife and I uprooted our lives from the beautiful city of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and moved to Melbourne, Australia. We sold everything we had in our beautiful first home that we have built many fond memories of during lockdown. We sold our cars, businesses, and bid a bit feral to our family and friends.

We took a step of faith and flew into Melbourne with just the travel visa, with our lives packed into just five bags in hopes that we would get the longer-term visa that we would need once we got there. It’s been a good three months now that we’ve been here, and I just really wanted to reflect, process, and share what we have learned in this roller coaster of a journey.

The Beginning of Our Journey

It all started six years ago when I took a gap year from my studies in uni. I was doing psychology and I worked for a video production house called The Core Studios for a year. It was the first surreal dream moment of my adulthood. They were the people behind the YouTube channel The Wing Thing that pioneered the Malaysian YouTube scene. The fact that I managed to join the team with zero background in media while studying a psychology degree is beyond me. I applied purely because I was a huge fan of them and I really looked up to what they were doing. I never really did anything creative growing up until that point.

That one year changed my life. The creative side that I never knew existed in me was unlocked. I learned how to make videos, take photos, design graphics, edit them, and make them into something good, something that entertains, educates, and inspires. I got to travel the most I’ve ever been in my life in that one year through work opportunities. Being able to experience different cities in the world really expanded my perspective of life and it inspired my curiosity to want to know more. It was then that I started having the desire to travel the world and maybe one day live in a different country.

Meeting My Wife

Then I met my wife about four years ago. Some of our mutual friends had set us up. Honestly, I just found it hilarious that I was getting set up to date a stranger. Oh, spoiler alert, it actually worked out. Even though we were both initially in different countries, my wife came back from Melbourne after being there for five years and we ended up getting married during the pandemic. We had an incredible first year of marriage building our first home together during lockdown. But deep down inside, we knew we weren’t going to stay there for very long. We felt like our season in Malaysia was coming to an end and that God was calling us to a different country.

The Challenges of Moving

Initially, we wanted to go to Singapore, but we both applied for more than 20 to 30 jobs but didn’t get any offers, which is quite unusual because my wife does finance and we were hearing many of our friends getting offers. Then later on, a potential opportunity in Melbourne came up for my wife. We waited for weeks and months but never got any confirmation. They pulled out of their offer in the end. On my end, I was waiting to quit my job because of a company transition, but quitting too early may mean that I won’t have an income for an unknown amount of time. And because we weren’t certain on how long more we’d be around for, I couldn’t really look for a new job either.

Amidst all the obstacles, we were still very convicted to move to Melbourne. We were forced to explore the route of me doing a diploma course in Planetshakers College as that would give us a student visa to enter the country for at least a year. It was also something I felt called to do for quite a good few years now. It was a really tough decision for us because it would mean me going back to being a student again in my late 20s and we’ll be risking being really tight financially as we might only be able to work part-time with a student visa. There was a safer option to wait for all the approvals we need and have more certainty before we make the official jump to go over to Melbourne. But with God asking us not to wait and to just go, we knew we just had to do it.

Taking the Leap

So in less than a month, we packed our bags, bought a plane ticket, left our home, and arrived in Melbourne. We lived out of a suitcase, bunking at our friends’ places for a month and a half, not knowing whether we would be able to stay here longer than three months because we were still waiting for our student visa. We were living on our Malaysian salary and savings and also struggling to secure a lease for a home because of our situation.

Then three weeks into it, it was my first day of college. It was a leadership intensive six-hour lecture with Pastor Tim Hall. He’s a renowned evangelist and a powerful minister that’s seen over a million people get saved. He was teaching about the power and glory of God, and at one point, he asked us to lift up our hands if we wanted to learn and experience the power and glory of God. So we lifted our hands, and people started getting slain in the spirit and started falling on their knees, encountering God. This is the crazy part: right after lunch break, I received an email from immigration, which I was a little bit surprised by because the only time I get an email from them is when I log into my account, and they will send an email notification about it. But I wasn’t logging into my account. I opened up the email, and lo and behold, in the middle of the lecture, I could not believe my eyes. The email with the attachment said, “Visa granted.”

It was as if God was waiting till the very moment to show me his glory. We are now officially not getting kicked out of the country. We are here to stay.

Settling In

Not long after that, after checking out at least 10 to 15 apartment listings with property demand and prices skyrocketing, we got a nice two-bedroom apartment under market rate. My wife also got her conversion of her employment contract and started getting paid in Australian dollars, which is significantly three times more because of the currency differences. She also could work full-time now because the government had a COVID recovery plan that allowed student visa holders to work unlimited hours.

So here we are in a new chapter of our lives. We couldn’t be more grateful to God for leading us, paving the way, providing for every single need and beyond. Being here, being in the community and church that we are a part of, has honestly been life-changing and life-restoring for us. It was exactly what we needed and even more. We don’t know what the future holds, but we know that it will be good because God is the one that brought us here.

Conclusion

If you’re watching to this point, thank you for listening to our story. We hope that it encourages you to take your own steps of faith, whatever that looks like for you. If God has placed something in your heart to do, you can be rest assured that everything will be sorted out. Just take the steps right in front of you and let God blow your mind every step of the way.

Honestly, I’ve been spending the past few months just trying to find a shorter way and the right words to share this, but there really isn’t any other way that I could think of but to just share it as it is. So I hope you found some value from this, and let me know if this spoke to you in any way. I’d love to hear your stories. Do drop a like, comment, subscribe, and I hope to see you guys in the next one. Peace.