2018 Year in Review
What a year! 2018 was by far the hardest year of my adult life, if not my entire life. Never before have my prayers been answered with “wait” for so long. As many of you know, at the beginning of 2017, I was appointed as a missionary with TEAM. This meant quitting my job at Grace, support raising full-time and then at the end of the year, moving to Beatrice for a month or two to spend the holidays with my family before heading to Ireland… or so I thought. By the beginning of 2018, I was fully funded and ready to move, but there was just one little problem: in order to move to Ireland, I would need a visa, and that visa would turn out to be the struggle of the year! I spent the entirety of 2018 expecting to leave “next month” as I waited for my visa paperwork to go through. But each month one problem after another came up and my visa paperwork did not go through. As you can imagine, living your life from month to month, not being able to plan beyond 30 days with any certainty is an incredibly challenging way to live.
There were many people who challenged me to invest in Beatrice for however long I was here, to “bloom where planted,” if you will. But try as I may, it just didn’t seem like I was blooming well. I tried over and over again to get involved, use my gifts, and be a blessing, but since I thought that I was only going to be in town for a month or two, it was almost impossible to find ways to do that. I felt like a transplanted flower, taken from my original environment and
replanted. Everything was different: there was a different amount of sunlight, the water and soil weren’t the same, and my previous root system was disrupted. I was uprooted from Omaha, my community, my job, my home, and really, my entire adult life that I had built over the past decade. And I was transplanted to Beatrice where I was nervous to put down strong roots because I knew that I was going to be transplanted yet again to Ireland sometime soon. But because I was wary to put down deep roots, I struggled to get the nourishment that I needed from my surroundings: my community, my job, my church, etc. And as hard as I tried, I didn’t feel quite at home because I knew it was all so temporary. However, I also knew that this transplanting was necessary for my growth. And that hope of growth was what sustained me.
This hope was brought to me by many people over the past year. So many of you have made 2018 a
