Free at last!

I enjoy people.
I left the office just after 6 p.m. tonight. I had a "people" day. I had a meeting with a woman this morning who is going through an interesting time in her life. We got a way off the subject of our meeting and started talking faith, life's journey and our frustrations with "Church". I appreciated talking with someone with similar perspectives as I have. This afternoon I went to two chaplaincies. At the first there were no real deep conversations but there was just good fun conversation and friendship. At the second I was intrigued how several individuals just conversed naturally about events in their life in a relaxed way as if they were talking to a friend.  While it might be said that I am sharing love by listening, there is a certain gift of grace I am receiving as these people let me into their lives. I value this gift immensely.  
Free at last.
Just after 6 p.m. I left the office and came home. As I wandered around the kitchen wondering what I could graze on my wife said, "Well I sent the final cheque away." "What final cheque?" I quizzed. "The final cheque paying off our mortgage!" ... We had talked about this. It is a good feeling.
I turned to a discoloured card hanging on the wall and grinned. "Now we can throw you out!"  In 1968 (before we were married) we put a deposit and acquired a mortgage on our first house on Baldwin Street, the steepest street in the world. That was when we acquired that card. We then trained for the ministry and for a time rented that house out. We sold it to help finance our setting up home in a church manse in Palmerston North. We put a deposit on another cottage in Fielding which we rented out, but never really made money on it.  We sold that and bought a house and acre of ground in a country village. It was a run down house most people would bulldoze, it did not cost much, but I remember walking around the acre thinking, "This is mine! The government can stuff the economy up, but I still have a house and an acre of ground I can use!" We moved a little reluctantly down to Dunedin and after a failed project put a deposit down on this house. The deposit came from selling some shares a man in my student church congregation had given us. Around 23 years later we paid our last cheque. It is not very flash, but it has an acre of ground, a creek running through it, and now it is ours. I was down the back feeding the hens and looking at our vege garden yesterday and started dreaming. Maybe in a few years I will have more time to enjoy this, by then it really will be mine and we can do a self-sufficiency thing on it. I have never and will never earn big money. (I discovered a "technician" - glorified labourer - at the brewery received a bigger wage than I do!) We are not good at saving and we tend to use our money regularly in ministry, but that's OK.  It is nice to be free of a mortgage though. It will bring added temptation though. I will have more money each week to waste?  I have often thought I could get an easier job for less money if I didn't have a mortgage... may be I'll be tempted to in my down times?

I think though I am really hooked into some form of working with people, with my personal base being Jesus. For a shy guy I really love connecting with people, and being a "Jesus representative" doing it.