then there's love.

It's the classic, perhaps over quoted verse.
John 3:!6. You all know.

"For God so loved the world... ..."

It's Advent season now. Most likely this verse will be heard more than once in the coming weeks. And that's okay. It is good to stop. To pause. To reflect. Because then there's love! There's love. It's crazy. God LOVES!

It's not just little love. Not simple love. Not random love. But LOVING LOVE.

This may not be making sense. In my mind it doesn't either, so that's why I'm just trying to write it down, make sense of it as best as possible. It's through these times that I can't make sense of things, that I feel most frazzled. It's not that I can't think, but because of all the thoughts that are flying through my head, zooming in my mind, blurring the clarity I sometimes have, it is exactly then that I need to write. I feel the urge to let my fingers rattle on the keyboard. I can't stop them. I can't write other things. I just need to let my thoughts be my thoughts. Let them ramble on, and be words. Let them 'be' on paper, let them appear on the screen. And think for themselves.
I am learning to love these times during which I need to write. It's difficult when there are thoughts that just need to get out, and I'm not allowing it. Really, if I'd just allow myself to write my thoughts that are stopping me from doing other things.... When I don't write down what's really on my mind, I can't seem to think about what should be on my mind (like school stuff)
This probably doesn't make sense, but in my head it does. And for now, that's all I need.



ANYWAY.

Read a passage. and let it sink in. Scripture is incredible, if you didn't know, I'll tell you again - it's seriously incredible. There are passages for every situation; God can lift you up! He will lift you up. He can encourage you! He will! He can teach you! More so, He will not only teach you but also stretch you and stimulate thought, He will make you think and help you understand, He will help you discern and figure things out, He will help you learn to understand who you are through revealing himself - who He is! - to us.

Let's read it then.

Look at just verse 7.  let's love one another. Let us love. Love. Dude. Just love.
But what if I don't like the person?
Just love.
What if I don't know the person?
Just love.
what if I don't know how to love?
Just love.

Because Christ, who loves, will love through you. He loves you and through that love by which you live, through which you love you will be able to love. And no it won't always be easy. and it won't always be 'just love' because it will be super difficult. You can't just love. I can't just love. No one can just love. But love is from God.

God is love! God is love and he shows it to us.
When Christ is baptized, God say something along the lines of ...this is my beloved Son, I am very pleased with Him. God showed His love through His Son in many ways. One way was by giving His Son, Christ, for the world. Because He loves the world and all the people He so beautifully created so very much He sent His Son. Not just so that I could live, and that my sin could be forgiven. But so that I can experience His love. So that you can experience that love.

So we're addressed by BELOVED... (in other versions it may say something different, like 'dear friends', but beloved is so much more loving!) Beloved.

Be-loved beloved. GOD LOVES YOU. And because of His love, as you have seen and heard, experienced and are learning to understand, you are called to love each other, for love is from God. And since He through the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, loves us and abides in us, we can also love others because His love is made perfect!! :D

So let's love.

God Is Love

⁷ Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.⁸ Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. ⁹ In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. ¹⁰ In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. ¹¹ Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. ¹² No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

¹³ By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.

words part 1.

One of my nephews is learning to read this year. It is fun to see videos of him reading to his little brothers. When the littles were first born I gave them a book and have every birthday since. Perhaps it’s the teacher in me. Perhaps it’s my love of reading. Perhaps it’s the example I had in family members who gave me books for my childhood birthdays. In the homes where my niece and nephews live, many books are read. It makes me happy. Happy because books are essential and instrumental in forming one’s vocabulary, one’s understanding of language both written and spoken, one’s comprehension of underlying messages, and one’s imagination.

Reading didn’t come easy for me. I remember my teacher in grade 1. She had fun posters on the chalkboard to help us remember letters and sounds. She loved to read stories to us and I loved writing. From the first days I was meticulous and a perfectionist - my letters needed to be formed just so. Several years ago I went through my school notebooks and found how neat my cursive was almost right from the start. My teachers were my heroes, and I wanted to be just like them… I tried to copy their cursive and to imitate their loops and angles. I loved hearing stories and I loved writing letters but I had such a difficult time reading. I hardly moved up to new levels and couldn’t form the words that were on paper with my mouth. A lot of insecurity arose during those early years, especially when my family moved during the summer after grade 2. From then on I was reading in a small group with a reading mom, while peers were allowed to read together - because they were able to read.

It wasn’t until I was in grade 5 that I was allowed to read with a younger reader; she was in grade 1 at the time. Suddenly I started enjoying reading. Why? Well, because finally I was the better reader, I could finally read with expression (or pretend to do so), and was able to help the little girl. (I remember who she is and I found out through a friend that this little girl is now a teacher as well!)

Receiving Christmas books from church and school and parents was always such a wonderful time. Two weeks of Christmas break with three new books! Wow! My parents used to read to me, I think, and then I started reading them on my own. Words became stories and stories became films in my head with wonderful images according to the author’s descriptions. A new world opened for me and I started reading more and more.

When we moved across the world I hit a wall, or perhaps you’d call it a ravine. My reading level plummeted. Not because I couldn’t do it anymore. No, it was because I had to learn a new language. What a terrible feeling it was when my sister and I had to go and check books out from the primary library at our school. ‘Run, dog run. The dog ran fast.’ Oh my, I was 13 years old and had to read such pathetic material - because I couldn’t speak this dumb language called English which was spoken in this dumb country called Canada where we lived.

Words.

Words printed on pages. Black and white. One letter beside another, beside another and another. Words forming sentences and sentences forming paragraphs. Words expressing setting, feeling, character, et cetera. Words expressing a time and a place and a person and a thing. Nouns and verbs and all that jazz (which I know all too well, but is too much to list right here and you non-grammar junkies don’t want to be bored with…). Once I started reading English my understanding of the language began to expand as well. I began to realize what people were saying and was able to formulate responses. The fact that I was thrown into a foreign language and had to swim in order to survive helped immensely in the rapidness of learning the strokes. I had to. There was no way around it. I started to dive deeper and swim across many seas, from elementary to middle to secondary and then post-secondary school - studying language and reading and writing for more than I thought possible or desired!

Words, curves on lined paper; sometimes pressed hard and written ferociously. Other times beautiful lines expressing gentleness. Those first few months after immigrating I started writing, writing down my feelings - the good, the bad, and the ugly. Words went across the world, ink on paper across the skies. With tears sometimes blurring my vision and the words all the same. I wrote. I had to. I couldn’t express myself any other way; verbal communication was too difficult. I couldn’t find the words to tell you how I was doing, not in English anyway. Thus I stuck to writing, cards and letters, to you and you and you. Many read my words, my words of anger and frustration, my words of shock and awe, my words of hate and disgust about the North American way. [I’m sorry team, I was a teenager forced to move across the world and it was hard, okay?!]

Words. I think that’s when words started finding me, when my brain started connecting words with feelings and I started expressing myself more fully. It was a way for me to cope with the situation, manage my emotions, and find ways to deal. Writing wasn’t a conscious effort or decision during that time, it just happened and it happened to work.

In 2005 we vacationed in the Netherlands, only 9 short months after immigrating. During our time in NL, I had a conversation with an older friend and mentor. I vividly recall her telling me that she believed me writing was a way of processing and giving things a place… It wasn’t until years later that her words came back to me.

Words. Written on paper, they let you look into someone’s life, their mind, their inside. Through my words (many posted on this blog) you can read what was and is going on. I can’t always verbalize the thoughts, can’t always get it across, but it’s there somewhere. Through writing I learn to read. Through writing I see what is going on in my own life. And as I look back in old journals, come across old letters and cards, read essays I have written over the years, I hear myself grow. Words on paper or on a screen, you get to see me. Words shared with you, it’s an open invitation. Come on in, I may be far away, but you get to still know me - through those words.

Dear Debt, I am so done with you.

Not just Debt, but the whole money strapped feeling that weighs me down. It has been years now that I have lived paycheck to paycheck, years in which I was wondering when I would get paid next so that I could go get groceries again. During university there were months on months that I wouldn’t go to the infamous North American malls because it would be a temptation to spend money. It was better for me to just not go, or if I did go I would take only my driver’s licence along so that I wouldn’t be able to spend anything. It was terribly hard and I hated it. I then graduated university, with a lot of debt. I had this lofty goal that I wrote down - to be done paying off my debt by June 2018 - 2.5 years after the official ‘repayment time’ started. It is now December 2017 and I am far from paying off my debt.

It is now December 17. I make good money and I enjoy my job. I like getting paid and I still like spending. I still have  debit card (and a very small credit limit on a credit card I only use when I buy flights). That debit card is the most dangerous item in my wallet. It’s one of those tap and pay things. You don’t even have to do anything but tap the card and you’ve paid. I don’t even know how much I spend on things. In September I moved to the heart of a city in the Netherlands; it’s cute and cozy and it has lots of neat boutiques and shops. Everytime I walk out my front door I see shoes on sale, great discounts, and baskets outside the shops with fantastic deals. I live within walking distance of neat stores and also several excellent grocery stores. Some days I walk through my street with a 2 item shopping list for one store; say apples and yogurt. An hour later I come home with a bag full of groceries and arms loaded with other items. Where in the world did I go to spend all that money? Half the time I don’t even know. It’s those small purchases, 3 Euros here, 5 there, 9 there. Within a short time I’ve spent more than I thought possible in one hour…

Having moved across the world recently - and bringing only 2 suitcases full - I started here as minimalist. I still believe in minimalism. I want minimalism in my life because I don’t like stuff, don’t want to be tied down to things, don’t like the weight it adds in my life and the chaos it causes in my mind. (Plus it often means you’ve got to clean more and pack+move a lot - which I do relatively frequently.) Last year, before moving here I purged a lot, and it was fantastic to live a minimalist life in the 1 bedroom that I occupied in Canada. I had a small wardrobe and minimal space to store things so I couldn’t have a lot of things… Now I have my own little place and I had to purchase things to allow life to happen here - I have to live somehow. Much in my house was given to by friends and family, and I still stand amazed how few things I had to purchase in order to furnish this house. It is incredible how small purchases add up. I can’t blame the stores, it’s me who can’t keep that debit card at home. But the debt… it’s not going away, just an amount slowly decreasing in value but still with many digits. It sometimes makes me sad and gives me anxiety. Those numbers looming overhead, I know I need to pay it back and it seems to take forever! Therefore, I have been reading up on a lot of debt/financial/saving money blogs, columnists and advice as well as watching videos by money people like Dave Ramsey. I have done that several times already, but this time I am serious. Last winter I paid off the debt of two credit cards and cut them both up; then I got a little credit card so that I could still book flights but solely use it for that. It’s too bad that in Canada there is this ‘you gotta have a credit card’ idea floating around. (Can you do without one?) In the Netherlands, where I live now, hardly anyone my age has a credit card, so they also don’t have credit card debt. I no longer have credit card debt (praise the Lord!), but I do have a lot of student debt.

I started my first job when I was 14 and right away started an RESP that same year. We had immigrated from the Netherlands just before that so I couldn’t have started earlier. Four years later I graduated from High School and enrolled in college where I spent the $18,000 that I had saved in those four years. When I decided to go back to university after I worked for some time I depended on student loans and the few thousand dollars I made during the Summer months. Going to a private university out of province cost a lot! I don’t regret choosing private education and I don’t regret going out of province for my education. In fact, those were four years that shaped me and made me for who I am today, and gave me two bachelor degrees. However, that second round of post-secondary studies made me go deeper and deeper into debt; all the money I made during university were thrown right back at tuition or debt payments. It’s hard when you get paychecks and you see nothing of it. Even today, most of it goes to debt payment.

For Dutch people the debt I have is incomprehensible as most of them had a maximum debt of about 3000 to 5000 euros. (I also can’t wrap my mind around the grand number of dollars I still have to pay off... ) My payments per month are ridiculous and it makes that I live on a minimal amount of money each month. What I have meant to do for quite some time now is make a budget. I recently read a lot about budgets, including making  a Bare-Bones Budget (https://www.thesimpledollar.com/how-to-create-a-bare-bones-budget/), and I have known about the envelope system (https://www.daveramsey.com/blog/envelope-system-explained ) for a long time. So here goes - budgeting and using only cash from now on! Let’s get debt out of the way as soon as possible!

I will need to set some goals, makes some realistic decisions and do a lot of documenting to keep myself disciplined, but I need to get this weight off and be financially responsible. No more silly 3 or 10 dollar purchases, but smart choices and wise money spending. I will be needing discipline and focus.