I’ve Got Gazelle Intensity

I’m fired up! Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University gets better and better each week. My husband and I have a working budget. It covers all the bases, keeps our spending in check, and will eventually allow us to live the way that we want to live without being slave to our debts.

Tonight we covered lesson 4, Dumping Debt. I think I’ve cried a bit before about how the credit card companies and the loan companies and the banks seem like they control our lives. But, like Dave says, it doesn’t have to be that way. Dayman and I are in the process of Baby Step 2 in the program. We’re on our way to becoming debt free. Using Dave’s Debt Snowball program, we pay off the smallest debt first, regardless of interest rates. Once that debt is paid off, the amount you would have spent monthly on that first debt is applied to the next debt. And so on.

We have stopped borrowing. As of two minutes ago, we’ve cut up EVERY SINGLE CREDIT CARD! We’re running from the cheetah, and we’re going to get away!!!!! I think I will probably talk more about the Dave Ramsey course in the future. I really believe that the principles set forth in this financial plan will completely change our lives. For the first time, we will control our money instead of letting it control us.

If you feel like you are drowning, and there is no hope, take comfort from Proverbs 6:1-5 (TNIV):

My son, if you have put up security for your neighbor, if you have shaken hands in pledge for a stranger, you have been trapped by what you said, ensnared by the words of your mouth.

So do this, my son, to free yourself, since you have fallen into your neighbors’ hands: Go — to the point of exhaustion — and give your neighbor no rest! Allow no sleep to your eyes, no slumber to your eyelids.

Free yourself, like a gazelle from the hand of the hunter, like a bird from the snare of the fowler.

Amen.

Peace, linden.

Facebook

I was tugged into Facebook kicking and screaming. Literally. My best friend forced me to sit at my computer, create a profile, add a picture (ugh) and do weird things with walls, flair, bumper stickers and status updates. Then came the endless friend requests of people I had no interest in befriending. It led to the ultimate question, again, of who are your real friends. I decided to let most people in. After all, my life is pretty boring. If they want to hear about the latest poopy diaper, how I lost my crappy job, how my sister’s in jail, why my family still rocks, how big the kids are getting, how I love my husband more than ever before, how there are no jobs in Jacksonville, how I got a freelancing job writing ecards but lost it because I was running my sister’s monogramming business during Christmas… oh wait. I don’t put that stuff on Facebook. I keep it light. I like it light. This is the place for the heavier stuff. The deeper thinking. Or the latest midnight life crisis.

Argh. I buried the lead. The lead was supposed to say that Facebook rocks. Push aside all the cheesy gimmicky stuff, the time-wasting stuff like flair corkboards, and silent e-stalking. Look instead at the amazing ability to use this huge network to find people who (for whatever reason) drifted away, unnoticed, as you lived your life. And suddenly, one day, it occurs to you to check to see if your college roommate is on. She is! She’s… in Australia? How would you have ever found her otherwise? And then other possibilities arise — could that dear friend from Germany possibly be there… she is! And she missed you, too. What about those other friends who really weren’t that far away… but… but…

And somehow, through all the stupid status updates and the people you don’t really care about blabbering on about how their lives rock or suck or whatever… you realize that there is something to this social networking thing. It’s brought me closer to some very dear friends. And it afforded me hours and hours of useless entertainment at my crappy, boring job. Which I no longer have. And that’s okay, too.

So here’s a shout out for Facebook. Thank you to all the computer geeks who figured out where my friends were.

~~Peace~~ linden

Baby Steps

Psychiatrist: You care too much about the world. You take it all too seriously. You need to lighten up.

Me: But there are people dying of malaria in Africa. Malaria. Really. And then there’s the homeless. And there are poor people right here in our little town. People who have to decide whether to have dinner or pay the light bill. And there are old people who are lonely, and young people who have no friends, and people who don’t have running water…

Psychiatrist: So what are you doing to help? And why do you think you can change all of that?

I am an idealist. I firmly believe that if we all work toward a common goal, that it can be achieved, no matter the cost. But one of things that makes the world so great — diversity — is also one of the things that prevents everyone from working together.

Catch 22.

I wrote about this briefly in Gifts, where I mentioned my struggle to discover how best to use my talents. I bring it up again because of a comment my father left on that post:

Just remember that when God made the world, he made it of lots of small pieces. The largest mountain is made of many small stones. Each one plays its part and is important in its own right. If we wait for the one big thing we think we should do with our lives, we may be missing the many opportunities to do lots of small things that bring happiness, help and hope to others.

Thanks for the advice, Dad. I’ll still worry about malaria in Africa, but I’m going to cut myself a little more slack. Instead of waiting for my big chance to save the world, I’m going to work a little harder at the small things. Baby steps. It’s all about baby steps…

Poetry on a Napkin

I’ve always been fond of writing on napkins and other handy scraps of paper. Grocery receipts and the envelopes from junk mail are also on my list of favorite ways to recycle. Perhaps this penchant for strange stationery comes from my father.

Summer Memories and a Pink Elephant

There’s something to be said for a business who has two large, fiberglass elephants in its parking lot. What exactly that “something” is, I can’t quite decide. I think it’s great advertising for a fireworks store in a rural South Carolina town, however. I’d never even been off that exit of Interstate-95 until my father proposed meeting at the elephants as a halfway point between Jacksonville and Aiken.