I am always amazed when I find myself in situations where my status as a single person let alone a foreigner single woman `with no money or connections` (as Jane Austin would put it) gives the right to people to think about me as a less important unit, meaning not needing to have the security of financial stability the same way as those who are in families, have children to look after and protect their unity as such from burnout and financial instability. Especially doing mission year, everything that happens in the financial realm with me affects my team as well. Most people around us seem to have this romantic idea of us living like the early church sharing everything and be happy with the little we have to be able to serve the community. There is just a little bit of problem with that, whilst in the early church they could go and work on the fields and get some food in return, we can’t tell the cashier at Sainsbury’s that we just stay overnight and stuck the shelves in barter for the food we need. The best way for people not wanting that romantic picture to be ruined is whenever we cry for help, we are told you need to discuss it with your team that is the principle of mission year, that you help each other out. Yes, that all sounds amazing with one little fact that everybody seems to ignore. We are all severely overdrawn therefore can’t help each other out from high interest overdrafts. But because I am single that is ‘ok’, as I have no family to care for. Well, I do have parents who need my help and I do have dignity of a human being and I am just as worthy in God`s eyes as families, therefore my financial stability is just as important as theirs.
I would like to write about only nice things on my fist free Sunday. We had a great party last night with our one and only Debbie Heelan singing. The living room glowed in red with golden tinsels and fairy lights. My old half-broken IKEA lamp was covered with a piece of red material and set juts the right mood for celebration. We had pizza, cakes, tea and wine and lots of chats. I got the biggest Cadbury chocolate box ever from Matt and Ansa, which perfectly matched my purple and white psychedelic dress. At the end four of us talked about things we believed as children fairies, Christmas and Santa. I swear once I saw Santa`s cloak on our patio, when I was 3 or 4 as he leaped over the garden. I remember as if it just happened yesterday, I was standing behind the door between the pantry and the kitchen looking through the window, it snowed all day and I clearly remember the swinging red fabric with the white fluffy edge. Once I also remember seeing Little Jesus and the angles around our Christmas Tree. Jesus was a young child with beautiful angel wings and the angels wore white robes, just as like on Catholic paintings. Most likely I so wanted to see both Santa and Jesus that my mind turned the imagination into living memories. We laughed and as the most humble barrister I`ve ever met told her story we all swam in one of those wonderful moments of life when we seem to be able to recapture our childhood innocence once more. It came in the perfect picture of children running after a flying little bird and trying to catch it by throwing a piece of clothes over it. `We never caught it` she said and we all laughed with that special laughter of childhood innocence.
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