About two months before we would leave for Israel, we got the news that three Israeli boys had been kidnapped and murdered by Palestinians. This caused a lot of unrest in Israel. We were about to go to an unknown country, with an unknown culture, a very unknown language, where we’d arrive in a big restless mess according to the Dutch news. You can imagine our departure day was one that was filled with mixed feelings. We were excited to go and be on this adventure, but at the same time, it was really scary. And not only we had seen the news. Our family and friends saw it too and they too were a little worried about how it would be for us.
Anyway, we were at the airport and everything was settled, so we were saying our goodbyes. Right before we left, my mother in law gave us the mail that was accidentally delivered to Ramon’s old address. That way we could take care of things when we arrived in Israel. When we hugged and kissed everyone and got through security, we had still two hours left before boarding. We decided it would be a good idea to go through the letters now, so we wouldn’t have to do that in Israel anymore.
That’s when we saw it: a letter from Ramon's former employer, where he had a small contract before we left. Would it be possible for us to back almost €900, because they paid him to much money over the course of a year? We didn’t really get why we had to pay, but at first, you assume it’s correct. They’re the big organization with a professional administration department existing of people that went to school for it, so it had to be right! Right? You’ll understand that reading a letter like that right before you’re taking off to an unpaid internship, doesn’t really give you a happy feeling. We did have the money. We saved our butts off to get all the money for the wedding and our time in Israel and we had about €1500 for fun trips in Israel. Board and lodging were taken care of and we had money set aside for when we got back from Israel. That way we would have a little buffer for the time we were searching for jobs. But still, paying this bill would leave us with only €600 left in our Israel-savings. For five months. With the two of us. Too bad, fewer trips for us. ‘Oh well’, we thought, ‘we’re lucky we have the money’ and in good spirits, we were on our way to Children- and Youth Village Neve Michael in Pardes Hanna, Israel.
We were there for two days when my mom sent a text: ‘I’ve got a letter here from the Tax Authorities. Can I open it?’. Of course, she could, because you don’t want to respond to our tax-friends too late. They get cranky when you do that. So my mom sent us a photo of the letters: We had to pay back some money. We received too much social allowance because we were married now and our incomes were combined. There went another €300. Great.
Then another week in my mom texted me we received a citation for speeding because I missed a sign somewhere. That was it for me and I started panicking: we were here because God wanted us too right? Why would all these things happen then? I got a little pissed and was on the verge of packing my stuff and going back to Alblasserdam.
Lucky for me, Ramon sent me to a quiet room to go and pray. He told me: ‘Don’t come back until you’ve calmed down, because I feel like there’s a lesson for us here’. It’s always convenient to have a husband that’s a little less easy to get riled up. So as a good and obedient wife I took a little moment for myself and asked God if there was something bigger going on, and if so, what it was. I got this itchy feeling that this was only the beginning and I felt like God was saying to me:
’Everything you go through here in Israel is only training. Things with money that you need to trust me with, lack of privacy, intercultural differences that you need to learn how to deal with, everything is a training that you will need later in our adventure together. But just like any other training, it’ll get a little harder every time and this will not be the last time you’ll have money-stress until you can trust me fully.’
While I’m writing this down now, I still don’t get why my panic didn’t grow. Something weird happened. While I was writing down what I thought I heard God say (this is a habit of mine, so I can read it back later to test if it was really God speaking), I didn’t become scared or restless, instead, a great rest came over me. Sort of an ‘it is well with my soul’ feeling.
Long story short. In the end, the bill we got from Ramon’s former employer turned out to be a mistake on their end. After we wrote a few sophisticated letters, we got a notice that we didn’t have to pay after all! Besides that, we got extra, unexpected money from all kinds of places and people, which made it possible for us to pay for all the bills and still have enough money to do fun trips and keep our buffer for our return.
And as for the other things. Up until now, the things I thought I heard God say were really on point. We’ve head money stress multiple time and the amounts of money we were talking about became bigger and more impressive. But so did the miracles and the trust that came with them. I’ll write a little more about this later on in our blogs. But also the lack of privacy and the intercultural differences were topics that we kept encountering the past couple of years and of which we still are picking the fruits of our time in Israel. But this might come up later too.
