Happy New Year! :-)

It's very hard to believe that 2012 is here.  Fortunately, my time home was enough to make me feel that at least it was winter.  But waking up the first day of the year to birds tweeting outside my room...a little strange. 

In the last year a lot of changes have gone on in my life, and I've definitely learned a lot more about trusting God and stepping out on faith.  I started this blog a little over a year ago, and re-reading some of the entries makes me remember the ways, large and small, God has shown me that He is there, and this is where I'm supposed to be.

My time at home was definitely good.  I'm glad I was there.  But now I need to recover.  Being here feels in many ways like coming home.  I've been down to the school, seen people, spoken in Spanish...it all feels familiar.  It's strange that this time last year I had just been asked to come down and teach, I still didn't know it was really happening, I was waiting on the official word from my school to see whether or not I was going to get a leave of absence.  Four months later I had a ticket, and less than three months later I was here. 

I know I have an interesting year ahead of me.  I'm here (in Honduras) for 5+ more months.  My time home definitely showed me that I'm supposed to go back to the States and teach there for at least one more year.  After that, I really don't know what God has in store for me.  I may be there, I may be here, I may be somewhere else entirely.  It will be interesting in this coming year to see how I've changed teaching here, living here, and seeing how God has worked in my life and the lives of those around me.  I know in many ways my perspective is different.  I'm less busy here, and I like that.  I'm not afraid of down time anymore, I know I'm not done working through some of my issues and stuff from my past, but I've definitely made strides in that, and I know that God can carry me through that and heal me.  I'm probably going to try to back off of some of what I was involved in before I came down.  School and Campus Life most likely won't change...but I don't know about a lot of the rest of it. 

I'm sure there are a million stories and things I could say about the year, some of them rehashing what I've already written about, others are things I never wrote about, but this late at night nothing is really coming to mind.  I'll blame part of it on tiredness, as I haven't completely recovered from traveling here, but a lot of it is looking back on the year, I'm more seeing it as one connected whole rather than individual stories.  I'm looking forward to what God's going to be teaching me and how He's going to be using me this year.  I hope I learn quickly...it tends to be easier that way. :-)