This past weekend Travis, my dad and I took a “choose your own adventure” trip to the East Coast of Taiwan.

We literally packed a bag, boarded a train and had not a single plan for the entire weekend. Usually these scenes in movies are sexy ones, the wrong turn leads them down some glorious and unpaved road to the best weekend of their lives. And though our hopes relied on these odds – we spent most of the weekend missing buses and losing stuff. For starters, Travis left his phone on the train – only realizing it after it had departed for the next station (we still haven’t recovered it, though we hold out hope). After waiting a couple hours for a tour bus to bring us back down a mountain, we reached our destination without Travis’s kindle. We arrived back at our hotel only to realize there was no vacancy that night and we had missed the last train home. And to cap off a long day of miscues, I left Travis’s backpack at a bus station – yes, it contained his MacBook Pro and his passport.

We took a taxi back to the bus station and caught our first break of the weekend – his backpack was still there and nothing was missing. By this time it was 6 o’clock and we hadn’t hardly eaten a thing all day. We decided eating would probably be a better prequel than a sequel to finding a hotel on New Year’s Eve, so by the time we took a cab into town, found a restaurant, and filled our empty stomachs – it was past 8 o’clock. We grabbed our bags and started to wander through town in search of a few empty beds. And then the rain came. Not just a drop of rain but an all-out downpour. Some might say a “gullywasher”.

Quickly we ran for cover under the awning of a storefront, wondering how long it would be before we could walk in this. It was already dark and we’d be lucky to find one room for the three of us. A college-aged girl saw our plight and offered us some parkas from her family’s lottery shop. As we fumbled to get them on over our big packs the girl nervously asked us in broken English if we needed a place to stay for the night. Our 3 heads shot up in unison and hung in the air a second or two before I fumbled out the word “YES.” It turns out the rain had landed us right in front of an apartment that was rented out by the night. We got two luxury-style rooms for less than $100 total and I think my dad was snoring within 10 minutes.

I didn’t make it to midnight, but as I prepared to sleep after a frustrating and dead end day I realized the last day of 2016 looked a lot like the whole year. For more days than not this year I wondered if I was going to make it to bedtime without having some sort of emotional breakdown. Moving to Taiwan felt like losing everything I had spent the last 4 years of my life building in North Dakota (except for Travis, of course). I rarely felt confident or passionate, known or planted – yet God came through every time, revealing Himself at just the right moment.

Our wedding was a reward to a long season of waiting and traveling and changing. In the midst of such change & loss, Travis and I were able to celebrate everything God has done so far – with so many of the people He has written into our story. People we never knew we would need, champions who played such simple but vital roles in our journey.

And now it’s time for new characters. Not just to be in our story, but it’s time for us to be characters in a new set of stories. People we hardly know – and maybe haven’t even met. Building something from scratch is laborious and not quickly rewarding. You have to make choices about the simplest of things – like leaving the house or asking someone you like out for coffee.

But I know we serve a God that shows up, that delivers before it’s too late. He might not fight for all the words in the middle, but He will definitely get the last. We can smile about 2016 because at the end of the day we want to remember how and when He came through on His promises, not revel in the minutes we felt we wasted waiting. He can use it all – and I have no doubt that He will.

Cheers to 2017!