We are almost a year (wow!) into our serving here in Spain. Days it feels like the time has flown so quickly, and other days it felt like time was just standing still.
Our move to Spain has been one of the most difficult decisions I have ever made. It has truly drawn me out of any comfort zone I ever had. From learning a new language and not being able to communicate to being extremely far away from family and friends, overall it's been a year of many adjustments.
Lately though I'm starting to feel the process of "settling", and I started to reflect on our journey. Since I was 18, I have moved 9 times. Every year at college I lived in a different dorm or apartment. My poor dad dreaded the day it was "move Emily to another location". But he did it with love every time :)
After college, I moved back home for two months before Adam and I got married. I remember moving from Chapel Hill to Lexington was very hard for me. I loved college, the town I lived in, and the friends we had made. At that moment, I was extremely sad that God's plan was taking Adam and I away from there.
After getting married, Adam and I moved to Salisbury for 3 and a half years. We adjusted to not having couples of our own age at first but God brought people in our path (The Stroupes, The Dancys were closer now!, and the Harringtons). I changed jobs to join the auditing team at Food Lion and learned what it meant to truly love your job and your co-workers. We got back involved in our home church and jumped into the youth group there (the one where Adam incessantly irritated me as a girl and later I fell for his tactics realizing that they were love messages in disguise). Life at that point was better than I originally thought when first moving from Chapel Hill.
Then our hearts were moved to serve elsewhere. We left all we had last July and I cried the hardest I ever had as I left my family standing at the airport gate. It's a moment that will always be ingrained in my memory. At that instance, I realized I was back at the day leaving Chapel Hill. I didn't want to leave my job, my co-workers, my hometown...how were things going to be better.
And now almost a year later, I feel a whole different set of emotions. The last two days I have proudly watched the musical theatre class at ECA that I helped choreograph perform two outstanding shows of Pirates of Penzance. The love and admiration I have for those kids right now is one I never imagined I would have when getting on that plane a year ago. My accounting class I teach is wrapping up our semester in 2 weeks. My kids (I'm going to brag now) have the basic accounting tools under their belts. When they tell me they love doing financial statements and T accounts, my heart swells. One parent told me that their child loves my class. He was very disappointed when his grade dropped from a 100 to a 98 when their group project didn't balance and I gave them a 90. Let me tell you - this kid knows every answer that I ask in class. Always does the reading and when he doesn't get a 100 on my test I know something is wrong. Proud - I'm just proud of them.
I realized last night - during our cast party - as I was playing games like Signs (which I'm terrible at), Zoo, and watching the kids interact, I feel like I did in Chapel Hill and Salisbury. I am so much more invested than I ever thought. I have been having dreams lately where we leave to come home to North Carolina, and in them, I feel the same dreaded moving feelings I've felt in the past.
We still have a year here, so I'm going to relish in the fact I have one more year to be here. One more year to see Spain. One more year to see these kids grow and change. One more year until I move again.
