Skip to main content

Sunday in a snowy Amsterdam.

Friday I woke up to snow. A thick layer of white snow covered the city and it snowed pretty heavily throughout the day. And the snow is still there, although a lot of it has turned into grey slush where it’s been salted. The photo is the view from my living room window.

It was nice to walk outside today. I love the feeling of compacted snow beneath my feet and I love that everything looks so clean when covered in snow.

I am slowly getting settled. I think I came wanting to be fully settled in from day one, and I am realising that these things do take time and that I need to allow the time to get to that place. This week started off super-busy, but I think in time I’ll find a good pace.

Yesterday evening I went to a Brazilian church and it was so lovely to be somewhere where I understood everything that was said. It was so nice to hear Portuguese spoken and to get a little “taste” of something familiar, reminding me of one of my “homes”. I can’t wait till I get a grasp of Dutch. I had forgotten how mentally tiring it is to not understand, yet still I understand bits and pieces, which in some ways make it even more confusing. But again, I keep reminding myself that I can’t expect to learn everything within the first week. There is so much grace. And I need to have that grace with myself. I don’t want my “not-yet-learnt-or-knowing” to take away the joy of the journey of learning and discovering.

As I was walking around today I was remembering Psalm 37. About trusting in God, doing good, dwelling in the land, and befriending faithfulness. And also that He is a God of desire; a God who loves to fulfil the desires of our heart and a God who loves it when we delight in Him. He is so committed to our hearts, and He wants to fulfil the dreams I carry in my heart. And He also wants to fulfil the desire in the heart of every woman who is “trapped” behind a window right here in my neighbourhood.

So there you go. A few ponderings from a cold Sunday evening in Amsterdam.

Popular posts from this blog

Packing...again.

I just folded the last load of laundry and I’m almost packed. Off to the airport at 5am tomorrow morning, heading off to Amsterdam. I’m excited, a bit nervous, and wondering what it’ll be like. It’s been a good week at home with lots of quality time with family, especially the little nieces and nephew. I’m glad I’ll see them in April again. Well, not much to write and packing to be done and a bit of sleep would probably be a good idea too. Next time I write it’ll be from Amsterdam....
Read more

Single-tasking September: The art of single-tasking.

To change habits and ways of life, the motivation for change has to be strong, and the benefits outweigh the effort it takes to make the change.  For so long it’s seemed like the ability to multitask has been regarded as a great skill, but is it really a good thing? Recovering from burn-out, one of the effects I noticed was that it was harder to concentrate, and especially tricky trying to focus on many things at once. I’d try to multitask, only to realise that all tasks suffered from lack of capacity to complete any one of them. The challenge is that the habit of always doing many things at once goes deep, and when I tried to focus on just one thing, I found that it was actually really difficult.  As I did a little google search on the matter, I found it seems like multitasking isn’t as healthy as once thought, and that it doesn’t help productivity. Some even referred to it as “switch tasking”, in the sense that the brain isn’t doing many things at once, but shifting rapidly...
Read more

Reality starting to hit...

Today has been quite a sad day as it is slowly dawning on my that I'm not going to be here for much longer. It's now less than a month till I leave, and I feel sad. Sad to leave what has been a life for me. Sad to leave so many wonderful people. Sad to not be able to continue to fight for and invest in all the streetkids, families, prisonkids, and other random people I've been fighting for all these years. I doesn't feel like I'm giving up, but it does feel like I'm going to be left with a kind of void where all these people were in my life. I guess not knowing the BIG "what next..." doesn't help, but I do have peace. Peace that the God who called me here, and has kept me here, is still the same. Peace that He will guide me and walk with me. Even so...today I felt sad.
Read more