Change comes with no warning...

Exactly two weeks ago I found out that my car was going to cost more to repair than I paid for it. (It was my first car too!). I was struggling with the decision to buy another car, when due to my income I didn't really have the money to afford a car. (Luckily, my friend lent me his car for two weeks)

Exactly 10 days ago I found out that my cafe where I worked was closing. I have just now come to accept the fact that it has actually closed and that I am unemployed.

Exactly 1 week ago, on what was supposed to be my last shift at work, I got food poisoning.

Needless to say I had a pretty bad week. However, I am grateful for this opportunity for change. I called one of my good friends yesterday to tell her all of this news and then I asked her if she knew what I was going to do now. I think her response shows how well she knows me. She said "You're going to go somewhere awesome and do something amazing, even though you have no money, but you'll make it work."

I am letting my lack of a job and a car give me the freedom to travel. I have said (for many years now) that I want to learn Spanish. I have tried CD's. I have tried informal classes with friends here. I have talked about learning Spanish - but I have not committed. I know that the only way to learn is to immerse myself in the language. That is just what I am going to do.

A friend of mine recommended that I go to Guatemala. I have a found a school that offers one-on-one instruction and a home stay for a very reasonable price. So, once I have my subleasing arranged for my house here I'll be booking airplane tickets and reserving a place in my school.

I am making positive change in my life. I'm actually glad that I lost my job. Although I am not looking forward to my job search when I return, I was not happy with my job before. I now have an excuse and a push to find a job that will be more fulfilling for me and will hopefully be more of a 'career' job.

Heaven?

One of the bloggers that I like to read recently wrote a post about what it takes to get into heaven. Her article was interesting because we do condemn the idea of indulgences from the middle ages as something that we would never do. After all we protestants reformed the Catholic Church over that issue, among others. Yet, it seems that legalism knows no time. There was legalism in Jesus' day among the Pharisees and Scribes. There is legalism today within every strand of Christianity.

I struggle with legalism. Yet, Jesus came to set us free from these rules. It's hard to understand what that means though - I mean what does that really mean? I suppose the difference is how we approach the rules. If we are simply following rules so that we can get into heaven some day that is legalism - but if we are choosing to live our lives as Christ calls us to and that happens to mean that we live by the same rules that the "legalists" live by, we are still not living under legalism because the rules are not an end in themselves. The rules are simply another way of following Christ. After all that is the point of being Christian - at least in my opinion.

Last night I had some really interesting conversations with a friend who invited me over for dinner. After dinner we were talking about if we thought the world had more problems today than in the past. I am not sure about this - sometimes I think that we just have more knowledge of the problems than actually having more problems. He seems to think that we actually have more problems. (Of course numerically there are more problems simply because there are more people in the world). We ended the conversation by agreeing that whether or not the world has more problems today - the problems that we have today are epic. If we do not change our entire world order we will destroy ourselves. Yet changing everything about society seems impossible - however it is just as impossible that things continue the way they are. Strangely enough, this is the exact same conclusion that I had been reading in an articles I am editing for Student World. But the article was written just after World War I in 1919! Perhaps this change in society is the freedom that Christ came to show us.