Last January, for the first time in several Januarys, I set some goals for the year. I resolved to grow my bangs out (check with praise hands emoji), floss my teeth 5 times a week (hey, going from 2 times a year (i.e. the night before my semi-annual dentist appointment) to 4ish times a week is a success, right?), spend my commutes listening to audio books (gamechanger, y’all), and to read at least 22 books (check in large part thanks to the aforementioned audiobook resolution). Allison’s 2016 Book superlatives: Best nonfiction: The New Jim Crow – Michelle Alexander, Best novel: Homegoing – Yaa Gyasi, Best on Faith: Out of Sorts – Sarah Bessey, Best Audiobook reading: Americanah – Chimamanda Ngozi Andichie, Best Memoir – Between the World and Me – Ta-Nehisi Coates. Please nominate your best reads of 2016 as I am crafting my 2017 list now.

Goals that I did not quite hit were: make more lattes on weekends and blog about things other than cancer. Whoops. Perfection is overrated right?

For other highlights that weren’t necessarily on a goal list, please refer to my own personally curated #RealBest9 because no offense, your “likes” don’t determine what was the best about my year, I get to do that. (In order from left to right, top to bottom)

1. I got back into the gym habit this year and fell in love with a few new workout classes.
2. I read (sometimes with homemade lattes) more this year than in years past.
3. We got a cat. I adore little Bluegrass Granger with my whole heart. Who am I?
4. We sojourned to Asheville for a weekend and I fell in love with that little town.
5. Adam kept healing. So much good news on the health front!
6. Our little #CasaBuYARD veggie patch continues to be a source of joy (and produce).
7. I had an incredible work year, brimming with learning, failing, and travels. I got to share about my work at a national conference in Pittsburgh, was accepted into a national fellowship and traveled to DC and Denver for that, and was able to go learn at a conference in Austin.
8. We got to spend time with family and friends and enjoy it (and board games) thanks to good health.
9. I love the 2 boys I get to do life with (yes, Bluegrass is a real boy).

Every year for the last few years, I’ve picked one word that will be the theme of my year. At the close of 2015, I was emerging out of the destruction of my husband’s cancer rubble and declared that 2016 would be a year of restoration. After over a year of watching my husband fight for his life and the months of recovery that followed, I was looking to 2016 to be a year of rebuilding after the wreckage. I knew (or I thought I knew) that life wouldn’t go back to just as it was before cancer, but I was hopeful that we could renovate the ruins and piece together some old and new into something that resembled the old life.

2016 was a year of restoration in many ways. In a lot of ways, a sense normalcy was restored to our home and schedule. Our days have been restored to routine things like working, exercising, cooking, cleaning, and doing yard work. And in some ways, my soul was restored. This was a very quiet, predictable, unhurried year. This year, I had the time and space for reflection, which was necessary. I was worn, ragged, and fragile and I needed a year to just be.

Last January, I wanted my life and soul to return back into something that resembled my picture of “normal”. I longed nostalgically for old routines, friendships, beliefs, and purpose. But nostalgia doesn’t operate well in present tense and it certainly doesn’t coexist with change. As it turns out, current me doesn’t actually want my mind, heart, and life to be restored to the old me.

This year, I’d rather have a remodel than a renovation.

I’m ready for 2017 to be fresh.

Fresh in expectations, relationships, beliefs, thinking, priorities, food… Lots and lots of fresh.

I’ve done enough fresh food kicks to know that fresh feels good, but fresh takes work. And so I will look expectantly, I will plan, and I will protect 2017.

I went on my first short-term mission trip when I was in high school. I packed ankle length skirts and modest tops (and matching bandanas for my hair, of course) and headed to Managua, Nicaragua. In my short week there, I observed a culture very different from my own, I experienced what it felt like to be a foreigner, and I was exposed to extreme poverty. As I walked through the tents of a refugee camp that housed families who had been displaced by a devastating hurricane, I began to grasp my own privilege.

When I landed back on U.S. soil, I was simultaneously relieved and uncomfortable with the things that had previously been my normal – from meals to clothes to social norms to routines. It took me a long time to fully comprehend what was happening in my heart and mind and soul; I was somehow changed. The things that I had seen had impacted me deeply; they had begun to shift my worldview.

The tension was that while my worldview had shifted, my real-life non-mission trip world as a high-schooler hadn’t shifted. I had to return to school, to my part-time job, to friendships, and normal teenage social pressure, but my normal life didn’t feel quite so normal anymore. I had a hard time sorting through how what I had experienced and what I was thinking about fit back into everyday life.

I’ve been having a hard-time articulating how I am feeling as of late. And because we have the best people in our lives, we are getting asked how we are doing a lot these days. As I’ve been doing some emotional self-assessment, I have decided that I’m feeling a lot like 11^th grade post-first mission trip Allison. I have experienced, observed, and been exposed to some incredibly heavy things this year as I have walked with my husband through cancer treatments. And now, while we’re on a break from treatments and normal life can resume (at least temporarily) I am experiencing that familiar tension. I’m not sure how what I have experienced fits in with pre-cancer life.

I’m doing a lot less “cancer-wife” activities these days and a lot more “normal-life” activities. Life is starting to look more like it used to – it just doesn’t quite feel like it used to. I know that, at least with mission trips, the fusion of new experiences with normal life does happen. Normal life shifts a bit to accommodate new world views, and world views shift a smidge to accommodate the mandatory normal and somehow, in time, there is less incongruence. But ‘in time’ is the key phrase.

And so here I am, in the middle of waiting for normal life and cancer life to fuse into something that feels normal-ish. I’m waffling between cancer-shock and acceptance that this will forever change me. So in the spirit of honesty, I’ll leave this post in the tension that I’m feeling without a nice summary or Scripture-bow on top – maybe those will come with future posts.

11 years ago today, we stood facing each other; hands clasped, gazing into one another’s youthful-faces at an alter in a little white country church. We pledged our vows to one another in front of our God and our dearest friends that we would love and cherish each other in good times, in healthy times, in times of abundance, and also in the times that were not so good, not so healthy, and not so abundant. We also declared on that day, through verse, song, and homily that we wanted our marriage to be a story of God’s faithfulness.

We had everyone leaf through the blue hymnals in their pews and sing our favorite hymn, ‘Great is Thy Faithfulness’ as a testimony and prophetic anthem over our marriage that God’s faithfulness would be our theme. The verse on our not-so-cool wedding program (Thanks Pinterest for being a decade too late) was Psalm 115:1 “Not to us, O LORD, not to us, but to your name be the glory because of your love and faithfulness.”

We didn’t know much as wrinkle-free, and nearly carefree 21 year olds, but we knew that we wanted our marriage to serve a greater purpose than ourselves –We wanted our marriage to be as much about loving others as it was about loving each other. We wanted to serve God better as a couple than we would individually. We wanted our marriage to glorify God and point to God’s faithfulness.

As enthusiastic not-yet-college-graduates, we had vague grand dreams of what that would look like and ambition to fill in the plot holes. We envisioned that we would do significant things as a couple that would be a story of God’s faithfulness in mending our broken world.

What we forgot, in our grand, innocent, well-meaning pre-marital vision, was that we were the characters in God’s story, not the author – and characters don’t get a say in their own story. Thus far, the Author of our story has seemed far less interested in compelling plot lines and heroic daring adventures and far more interested in character development.

It seems as though the majority of our 11 years of marriage have been spent on developing our character – individually and as a team. Committed, long-term relationships have a way of developing character, don’t they? For that matter, life stuff has a way of developing character. But marriage has a knack for drawing out the hidden, dark, flawed stuff we can hide from most friends and it also has the potential to draw out the deepest reserves of beauty, strengths, and gifts. Through our married years, character has been forged through fire and desert and valley and straight roads, too. We have learned about perseverance, faith, faithfulness, trust, forgiveness, fortitude, and selfless love.

12 years ago, our soon-to-be married selves didn’t realize how much we needed our own restoration individually and how much we would need it as a couple. We thought God’s faithfulness would be more evidenced through our marriage, but instead, His faithfulness has been most evidenced in our marriage. And while that type of story rarely makes a best-seller list, it’s a powerful story best told around tables filled with good food, on couches with dear ones, and sometimes over coffee with a friend of a friend who needs to hear that story. We have found that as we allow others to see God’s work – the messy, arduous, refining work of restoring us as individuals and as a couple, His faithfulness is most evident.

And so, after 11 years, our story isn’t one about a power duo changing the world, and it isn’t a top seller – in fact, our story doesn’t even have a terribly coherent plotline. But really, isn’t it the messy, imperfect, broken, vulnerable stories that make the best backdrops for stories of God’s faithfulness and not the strong, perfect, neat, and tidy ones?

We couldn’t have imagined the chapters that would emerge when we chose “Not to us, O LORD, but to Your name be the glory, because of Your love and faithfulness” as the back cover to our story. But we are grateful that our story is our story, and more, we are so grateful that God is faithful.

Here’s to 11 years of character development and God’s faithfulness and the cherry on top of friendship, joy, and laughter. Here’s to our marriage and our story and the stories that have yet to be written. I love you, Adam.