#6 - The Netherlands

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When Thomas had left, I started to get really homesick. I was pregnant and I wanted to go home to my family. We'd already missed the birthdays of both my mom and me and Christmas while we were in Israel and I suddenly didn't feel like 'missing' New Years' Eve. With a little help from the homefront, we booked a ticket and within a couple of days, we were on the plane back home. Saying goodbye came with mixed feelings. We wanted to go home really badly, but some kids had really stolen our hearts. Like the boy in the photo; I would have adopted him and taken him home if I could. Anyway, we got into the car and left for Ben Gurion to fly home.

When we got home we didn't have a house or a job yet, so my parents turned one of their bedrooms into a little house for us. Everything was there: a bed, a table with chairs and space for our clothes. After a couple of weeks, we found a little apartment in Zwijndrecht. The job hunt had already been started when I was in Israel, but so far no luck. We applied for a social aid program just to be sure. They made me apply for at least 5 jobs a week, which I already did so same difference to me. I applied for every available job: cleaning, delivering pizza, aid in a nursing home, receptionist and of course youth worker. After all, I did go to college to do that.

64 job applications, rejections, and no-responses later I still hadn't found a job. When we were still in Israel, I did see one job at a place called Agape (CRU in the USA). It was literally my dream job, everything I wanted to do and not do was in it. Just one big downside to this job was that it was paid by partnership funding. Meaning: I needed to find partners to support me financially. I didn't know what it meant completely, but it didn't really feel like something that was 'for me'. But now, a few months later, it was a Friday night and I needed to apply for one more job that week, so I checked the website, hoping they now had a job that was 'normally' paid. They didn't, but my dream job was still online. So Ramon and I prayed and said: 'God, if this is what you want, we'll go for it, but it's really scaring us. Within a week after sending my letter of application, I was in their office for a job interview and another week later I got the call I was hired. I could start right away with filling in someone's pregnancy leave and they would pay me 'normally' for that. That gave me a little bit of space to start figuring out how the whole partnership-system worked. I really felt in my soul that God wanted me to work at Agape, to train me more. And so He did, in so many more ways then I could ever imagine.

When I started working at Agape I told God I had one condition to working there. If ever the day would come that I wasn't able to buy food for our baby, I would quit my job immediately and find something else. A few months later Jeremiah was born. Financially speaking, things were tight, but okay. Until a big setback came, we had no more reserves and ran out of money. We had just €12,68 on our bank account, 12 days until the next paycheck came in and we needed to buy new formula for Jeremiah. That morning we prayed: God, today is that day we spoke about. If today before 5pm there hasn't been a miracle, I'll call my team leader and quit my job. Two hours later we got a phone call from a neighbor in our building. She had had a lot of groceries from a friend, but since she was alone it was way too much for her. She asked if we could use it? The groceries were literally everything we needed for ourselves for 12 days and we could use our money for buying formula for Jeremiah. Another couple of days later, Ramon found a job and our money problems were solved. Those groceries-packages later turned out to be a favorite in God's way of helping us. A week or two after our first package, someone from our church posted a message that she had leftover-grocery packages for interested people. We are still very thankfully using those packages. Every Tuesday is another party and Jeremiah and Ziva call it 'Blessing Time'.

The house we lived in, in Zwijndrecht was Temporary Rent, which meant that the house was waiting to be either renovated or taken down. On my birthday of the year 2015, we got notice, that we had to be out of the house by February 2016, because they went for building new houses. We started a search and found a house on time. It was a gorgeous house in Dordrecht. It wasn't big, the location wasn't perfect for us, but it was completely renovated, so all we had to do was move our furniture and move in.

After a couple of months living in our new house, we noticed that it still wasn't becoming a 'home'. We didn't feel at home, the drive to our family took a lot of time and foremost, we missed the space to be hospitable and let people stay with us in our house. One night when we were praying we told God: 'We're super grateful for this house and we can definitely stay in this house. But just in case you have something bigger, with more possibilities, we're available.

About a week and a half later we got a phone call: neighbors from my grandma's apartment complex had a house and they wanted to rent it out to us. If we weren't interested, they were going to put it up for sale. My mom (who called me) didn't have all the details, but it was in Alblasserdam (check!), had 3 large bedrooms (double-check!) and we could move in whenever we wanted (sold!). I called Ramon, we arranged a viewing. This was a Monday, the viewing on a Wednesday. We came to the house and it was perfect on all accounts. Of course, it could use some work and it was a little of a fixer-upper, but every house has its things. Even from a budget point of view, it was better than our house in Dordrecht. We were interested, but there was a small problem: We lived in our house for half a year, and we were on a year lease. We decide to call our renter and explain the situation to him. On Thursday night he let us know he would let us out of our contract, under the condition that the house wouldn't be empty and we would find new tenants. I started the big search on Friday, which got me 2 viewings on a Saturday. The first ones to come and see, we're sold right on the spot and said 'yes' right away. And that's when the Bakker family moved for the third time in a year and a half. Hopefully, now it was for a longer time. And that's the case because we're still in this house.

Lianne Bakker