Current Mood:
Annoyed & 
Huh? & 
Sweatdrop
Give that I had some giant savings account to save our hides from each time we face a financial curveball!
As I wrote to my family in the states,
Dear ones, I must say that I am still quite shaken in my boots over the rather painful news Mike and I deal with today. We have saved for a 4316 kw/h electricity bill, and it is due in February as an 8,000 kw/h bill. We are $1,400 short to pay the upcoming bill, and we have researched already all chances for loaning with our bank or private lending institutions- we don’t have that chance.
Please, pray for us, and if you have suggestions, do write. I sit even now and consider selling my computer, in the hope that it would somehow help.
Even my mother marshalled a blessed $200 dollars to help quell the uprising of the shark that is late winter bills. Everyone in January to April sweats bullets over their bank accounts and tighten their belts!
For God, paper money does grow on trees.
I spent two hours or so praying, weeping, listening to the windfarm radio and being blessed. I wrote my letter to my family in that time, and a bit after that all stumbled across a photo Aunt Lizzy had mailed to the Elderkin progeny when gathering resources to help family members who’d been hit by a tornado out south-midwest in the states. In an email posted ‘oops, forgot the attachment(!)’ (exclamation mark added for narrative voice <3), she had sent a picture of a money tree they gifted to our tornado-torn-kinsolk. It was complete coincidence that I clicked on the email, but it was like God putting his hand my my shoulder and murmuring all caring and parental-like, ‘Dun’ worry, I gotcha.’
It put my pulse down to half-speed again and gave me a lot of hope.
I started my letter to my family with examples of how God’s crowbarred us out of tight spots before, because what I really wanted.. what I was really crying out for, was ‘help, oh help, pray diligently for me!’
It’d be an idiot’s dance if I didn’t quote what I wrote to them, for you. I seek actively to live in the understanding that God answers prayers, because he’s done it too many times to me, yet to the very striking of 14:30 of my clock today!
Major answers to prayer in my life, 2002-2009
(Or, all those things I wrote down that I keep reminding myself of!)
Ever since I moved to Denmark the devil has thrown curveballs at the finances of my little home here- let me remind you joyfully of the attacks that have come, which you folk, unexpected tax returns and help from extended family here on this side of the atlantic, and not least by any means the way God watches over his children:
- In 2003 when Mike and I moved into our sweet little apartment in a renovated egg-packing factory, Satan sneered and sent us a $2,000 bill from our old apartment for building restorations. The foundation of the 1960′s construction had sunk several centimeters due to swampy land, and the private leasing company that had bought up the small apartment plot weaseled their way into paying for their restorations: by our leasing contract we were responsible for the condition of the walls, carpeting, tiling and cabinets of the place. They sent us the bill for raising the level of the foundation of the apartment the week before the legal time limit for sending such bills, and that way sealed off our chance to contact a lawyer in time to combat the bill. This was stopped right in it’s tracks!
- In January of 2003 God send my wallet back to me three times in one week, preventing possible abuse of my visa card- in that winter I was facing the amputation of my arm, to begin with already downtrodden, and the fact that my coat pocket thought it was fun to dump my wallet was.. just a side annoyance. Heh, what can I say?
- The first day, I was on the train to Odense for language classes, and the wallet ended up on the train to Fredericia. We had a little biblestudy to attend that evening, and in prayer my friend Heidi said she got an image of a wallet being put into a manilla envelope as if found- and sure enough the next morning, we were called by folk from the train station saying that it had been found there!
- The second day I had to run hard to make the bus to classes (either the bus or train can be taken), and after showing my bus/train pass to the driver and sitting down to check my pockets, my heart took a dip in the cold water again, to find the wallet gone! It had hopped out of my pocket like an excited puppy and kissed the flagstones of the sidewalk. I called and set hubby and his brother on a hunt up and down the sidewalk, but they didn’t find it- It was three in the afternoon when hubby and I headed home, and as we passed our bank, hubby’s advisor scrambled out to catch him, waving my wallet in hand. A person going to work in the secondhand store across from the sidewalk I had run down spotted the thing, saw the bank-logo on my visa, and delivered the wallet to our bank.
- As if twice wasn’t enough! I consider the unorthodox answer to prayer the first day to be enough to rocket my faith to a new level, but two days after the bank-advisor had returned it, my wallet returned to it’s lover, the blacktop, on an evening when we were out of town so hubby could repair a shop-owner’s computer. It was not until we were twenty minutes out of the parkinglot and down the road that my hubby’s mobile rang, and he asked me to check where my wallet was. Squeal! Again my heart took that cold dip in the pool of panic, but the shock was shortlived. The person on the phone was a mother who had come back from bowling with her family and seen the wallet on the parking lot. I had put hubby’s number in it, plainly visible, and we turned around right away to fetch the wallet back. What can I say? It is, by such events, one’s faith is tempered.
- In 2008, even so recently, hubby and I have experienced financial shocks. It is ever so important that we do not drop into the database of bad creditors, because it has great meaning for my citizenship and residency here as an immigrant. We have lived now two years in this generous little house God’s gifted us with, and November before last we thought we were in deep trouble. The oil heater had been inspected by the annual technician from our heating company, and he reported that the tank was several years out of date for replacement. A new oil heater costs frightening amounts- about $10,000 from the company we use, and hubby even contacted the one we rent from about it. She said to him that with the house itself being paid off still with the rent we give, she would have to sell the house immediately, and that we had at that point two months to move out. OI! We prayed rather hard over it that night- indeed, we spent the evening rather shell-shocked. The next morning hubby spent some time looking at the oil heater, and scrubbed at the installation date on it- dirt had obscured 1987 to read 1967, and he was able to call our oil company and set things straight- and later with our renter.
And I do so want to add, friend, that in a greyish January day in 2008, half-jokingly, I prayed to God (once again), for a cat. Perhaps earnestly for the first time- we’d had one the first winter of our marriage, of our own ideas and in a bachelor pad where animals were forbidden, and we had to put her down due to the illness she developed in the three months we had her. Her name was illys, and I wear her bell on the fancy collar hubby bought me a year later on our wedding anniversary.
When we initiate plans without consulting God first, or devoting them to him, they go awry and difficult.
In February of 2009, hubby mentioned that his Mom had had a little epiphany- her now-fiancee invited her to live with him, and she wanted us to take over her house.
We got the cat, and the house that came with it! Grumpy-loveable old Pluto, who we had to thwick-pop over the nose with a flicking finger every time he made to scratch or bite us. He’s learned, and is the treasure of the house.
A friend described him as the Walter cat, the grumpy old comedy puppet with a snide remark about everything and such humor he’s loveable. Here’s one of the Walter videos:
Jeff Dunham – Spark of Insanity – Walter #1
An’ God bless. I haven’t opened the emails from my family yet, I didn’t want to. Brian of the DAB admonished his listeners to journal while going through the bible, and Dagurnit, Brian, now I’ve gone and done two!
<3, -illys