It seems I've barely arrived and adjusted to Sarajevo, and the mission team is already coming on Wednesday. Last year at this time I was on the mission team; we'd just finished a grueling 3 months of car washing and other such fundraising, madly making up for all of the extra airfare costs because of highly inflated fuel prices. I'd just finished my bachelor's degree (finally), and we'd had a beautiful graduation party in my back yard, thrown by my lovely family.

Here I am a year later in a little apartment in Sarajevo reflecting over the last year of my life. I started this blog last July right after I got home from Europe. After a month in Europe I was feeling crazy and disoriented and the blogging really helped stabilize me. I never would have started blogging had Rachel not practically forced me to, and now I realize how smart she was in doing so.

So I blogged and sat in the basement wondering if there was life after college. I honestly had no idea how to write a resume (I still don't, really), and the thought of trying to tell prospective bosses "a little bit about myself" terrified me. I felt I had no skills whatsoever that would remotely contribute to the workforce, and as I monster.com'd my way through each day, I felt a growing sense of terror.

I was unemployed from July to September. During that time I spent most waking hours on the computer trying to find any employment, wondering why I'd gone to college if I was applying for the position of a receptionist at a dental office. Sometimes I would do temp work, sometimes I would pass out beer samples in grocery stores for $20 an hour. Every month my debts increased and I wondered if I should just start working 60 hours a week at a grocery store. September came along and I finally found something through a temp agency. The work was blue collar, I was bored by the second day, but it was work and it was $12 an hour, and it beat a grocery store.

September through March were probably the most humbling months of my life (so far). I felt I was subsisting, just making enough money to keep myself afloat, and I shuddered to think that this was how it was always going to be. I knew my job was menial but I wondered if all jobs would feel this way to me. I had so many desires and dreams, and I was afraid that if I became a teacher or an editor or something like that, I would find myself trapped with no way to see my dreams fulfilled.

In late December everything changed. I'd been so caught up in trying to find a good job and make a life for myself that I hadn't realized the golden opportunity right in front of me. Suffice it to say God provided way after way for me, and here I am in Sarajevo. He showed me how He'd brilliantly set up all of the circumstances in my life that would make it very easy for me to go. My car had been paid off, and was now running so weakly I was able to get rid of it for $300, my job was easy to leave, and I was single with nothing, and no one, preventing me from packing up and moving 6,000 miles, or 9,654 kilometers, away.

When I got on a plane and came to Sarajevo last June I had no idea that a year later I'd be back or what would have to take place to get me here. If I'd known all that was going to happen I don't think I could stand going through it. However, if I hadn't allowed God to change me the way He did, I never would have known the feeling of coming through that rough season and rejoicing.