the new blog

We've moved! In both the physical world and the blogging world :)

After getting married and beginning a new season of life, we decided to create The Harwerth Blog. And so, you'll find this blog continued over at: theharwerths.com where the rat tails tales, life lessons in Haiti, photos, and stories will continue on.

You can email subscribe to the new blog (just look to the right side bar, underneath the photo) so you never miss a post. And you can still leave comments. Same blog, just with a new last name. And a partner in crime :)

See you there!
Anna

An Update

Nebraska’s skies are bright and blue, with cotton-like clouds scattered across a vast stretch of emptiness. There’s a peaceful stillness to the air here. Throughout the day, a mama bird flutters to and from her nest buried behind the gutters of our garage. The wind gives the curtains a gentle, steady rustle. And every so often, the sound of car driving by drifts through the ever-open window.

East First Street has been home for 3 weeks now. The gray-blue house with white windows and doors is slowly becoming ‘our place’. There are seeds planted along the front porch garden box, tomato plants growing in the backyard, and an herb garden on the kitchen window. We’ve baked cookies, forgotten house keys, washed the sheets, and broken a glass or two in our efforts to turn a house into a home.

Life is good. It is an extreme sort of different for this born-and-raised city girl, and I am reminded of that difference every time the northern wind brings the smell of the feed yard into my house, or the woman at the grocery store knows my name, or I can literally get anywhere in less than 5 minutes. But it is good. 

We are adjusting to life as we learn this unfamiliar dance called marriage. There are days we find ourselves lost in the bliss of doing life together, something so simple yet so beautiful. Other days we find ourselves overwhelmed by a future riddled with countless unknowns, desperate for time and answers we don’t quite have. Some days we stand bold and confident, excited to embark on the adventure He has laid out before us. And at other times, we falter and we fear and we shake, questioning just how exactly this is going to work. 

We find ourselves riding a roller coaster of emotions—excited, terrified, confident, unsure, homesick, wonder-filled, frustrated, joyful. Life comes in waves. But it is good, always so good. And God proves Himself faithful again and again, in both the little and the big ways. And we find Him bigger and stronger and mightier than our fickle hearts.

There are lots of plans happening and many changes in the works (one of which includes a new blog). So don’t stray too far, because we are excited to share this journey and all that God is up to.

Words to a Small Boy

Dear Michael-

Not a day has gone by where I haven't imagined your brown eyes and that infectious smile. I have thought of you every day since I last saw you-- snoozing away in your new homemade pac'n'play in your home in Limbe. 

Long after you've gone, you still have this way of changing me.

I miss the sound of your laughter. The memory of our sensory play afternoons is never more than a breath away. The zip-up footie pajamas I walk past in Target never fail to make me pause, remembering you. You are a fond memory- one that pierces to the heart of me. 

One year ago, I watched you stand. 

Today I find myself miles from you. Yet I spend my days loving on another precious boy who reminds me every bit of you and the things I dream for you. So many dreams in one single day-- the dream to watch you blossom and grow, the dream to see you walk, the dream for you eat more than rice and spaghetti and oatmeal, the dream to see you thrive. 

In me you ignited a spark that lit so many hopes and dreams. In me you planted a fearless hope, to believe our God still does the impossible. In me you created this passion that floods my mind at night and consumes more and more pieces of me. 

You have given me a most precious gift. 

I'm finding the will of God it be a most puzzling place these days. I often feel like I am Abraham on Mount Moriah. But I am learning to trust in these heartbreaking and puzzling plans our God unfolds. For He is good. 

My arms ache to feel the weight of you in them, to kiss your cheeks and trace the lines in your face and whisper the ways you are so precious to the One who made you.

Until then,

All my love,

Anna

Unending Change

January comes with snowy mornings and pale sunshine. Its gray skies and ice cold days leaving the fireflies and grass-y smell of summer a memory. The new year has been laced with memories of, “Remember a year ago…” 

C.S. Lewis once wrote, “Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different?” 

Amidst the wedding planning and the nannying days, the way those words resound in my heart is taken to whole new meaning. So much has changed in such short time. Hard maybe, but never bad. Exciting, yes, alongside challenging and stretching. I don't know that one can transition from one season to the next without using the word, “Bittersweet.” 

New cannot come without the old dying. Anticipation of tomorrow does not stand without some sort of goodbye to today. Every possible dream for the future is weaved with excitement, but threaded through the past is a sadness of sorts for something that is ending. 

Change is good. But change is hard. 

I have these conflicting desires. On one hand rests a desire for everything to always be new and different and exciting, for things to constantly be changing. On the other hand, I find myself with a want for the comfort of stability, the constant that comes with routine, the certainty that one can have when things stay the same. 

January turned the corner and I suddenly saw 2016 as the year of changes. Finishing my nannying job, a day-to-day living of life with a family which feels too intimate to be called a job. Marrying the man whose name makes me smile, whose gentle kindness melts me, and who gives the best hugs. Moving across states from the city to a small town, taking his last name and being known as his wife. Leaving the only home he’s known, boxing our few belongings, and leaving the States behind to fly to Haiti.

Every time the leaves change on the treetops, so will our lives. The thought is a bit daunting.

I think the fear is normal, maybe even necessary. Change and fear have this beautiful way of reminding me where I should put my hope. The seasons always change. Our lives cannot remain exactly as they are today. There is a time for everything under the sun, as the author of Ecclesiastes wrote. 

In the year of change and inconsistency and newness comes this whispering, “Embrace..” 

Embrace this, child. Embrace every single change through every single season. Because you know the One who does not change.

safety of the heart

It’s hard to tell which is louder—the pound of my feet on the pavement, or the pound of thoughts in my mind. It’s Tuesday morning and the light is early and golden. Busy cars drive their routes to work. The occasional walker hastily makes their way to the train stop. Tuesday is waking up to the world.  

A blogger I love recently wrote an article regarding the expression “Time heals all wounds.” In it he writes, “Once we reach a certain age, we learn that the healing of the physical wound is not the same thing as being returned to one’s original state of being. [It] does not equal “happily ever after.”

I’ve been waiting for time to make things as they once were. But ‘once were’ is gone the way yesterday is: remembered and cherished, but never held again.

I miss yesterday. The tin roof and thunderous rain. His crooked teeth and big brown eyes. Rice upon rice upon rice. Jolly phonics. Nighttime games with the rats in my ceiling. Cold showers and hot drinking water. Bugs and dirt mixed with sweat and tears, but a joy that runs deeper, a love that stands stronger, a purpose that stretches farther. 

Yesterday became a part of me in a way I never initially wanted. Today is wonderful, filled with such happy and exciting things. A family I love. A job with a little boy I adore. A fiancé who has been every bit kind and patient and loving (and who I’m crazy about). Words cannot capture the way I love today, or how thankful I am. But yesterday’s wounds will never mend me the same. 

And I’ve become the girl on a run who no longer knows how to trust her God with tomorrow.

I’ve learned to not expect safe from the Christian life in physical terms—ebola in Africa, sketchy boda rides, riots blocking roads, voodoo drums. Recently, however, I’ve realized I also cannot expect safety of the heart. Looking at the life of Jesus, I should expect just the opposite: weeping at Lazarus’s tomb, anguish in the garden, tears over Jerusalem.

My God is well acquainted with the sorrow.

Tomorrow is something I’m struggling to leave at His feet. In the midst of that though, I take comfort in the words of Job: “For He wounds, but He also binds up; He injures, but His hands also mend.” 

He cannot mend tomorrow what I haven’t surrendered today. The words of C.S. Lewis come to mind as I make my way to this thing called surrender.

“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. “Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he is good. He’s the king I tell you.”

He is good, friend. Let us never forget that.

beautiful forget-me-nots

The words don’t come easy. Not the way they used to anyway. They’re scribbled in notebooks, these thoughts half finished-- fragments and snippets of the last 5 months scattered on index cards and moleskin journals and iphone note apps too numerous to count. They hold everything from the craze of nanny days to a new-found relationship to the achings and longings for Haiti. 

Like the winter we’ve watched become summer, the seasons come and go. One moment they seem to stretch into eternity, and the next you’ve blinked and wondered how it all passed so quickly. We swear we’ll never forget, but it’s been not even 4 months and I can’t recall the sound of the snow crunching beneath my feet or the sound of the birds on the first day of spring.

So we write, in attempt to always remember. We string together letters and words with the hope that sentences will bring back all the memories and feelings like how it was in the very beginning. 

This is my effort to never forget.

I fell in love with him—this man who sings hymns on 7-hour road trips and stops mid-sentence for the airplane flying overhead (even via FaceTime), this man who prays over our meals and our lives with a fervent passion and continues to teach me more and more about the God I serve, who cooks eggs every morning for his breakfast, and his mischevious eyebrow arch can be traced all the way back to the baby pictures. 

He took me on a roadtrip to see his 3 week old niece and nephew, and we cradled the scent of newborn in our arms. He tracked my plane and held me tight when it landed. We grocery shopped and cooked the macaroni and melted the cheese and had dinner together. That weekend he took me out at 10 o'clock to stargaze and watch the moon dance shadows on the Nebraskan fields below. We picnic lunched at a rest stop in the middle of the nowhere and it was there that he knelt on one knee and asked me to be his wife and share life with him for as many days as we have left. 

Sweet sunshine filtered through the tree tops above us, spilling patterns on the picnic blanket. The sky was this brilliant blue, with puffy white clouds all around. It was there that his question hung in the breeze. And it was there, looking into his eyes that I could see it all: the stargazing that first night in Haiti, the heart-wrenched sobs of a girl who was leaving a life behind and the way he just sat beside her, the night she killed the spider for him; the hopes for the future and the taste of adventure in his words; the late night FaceTime calls, the very hard and very long talks, the packages mailed and plane tickets bought. 

And it was there that I said yes. And it was there that we began the most terrifying and most beautiful adventure. 

The coffee mug is half empty sitting on the table beside me. I’m watching out the window for the bus to bring Fin home. My ring keeps catching on my coffee cup, clinking at every touch. I’ve whispered the words under my breath a hundred times… Spirit lead me where my trust is without borders, let me walk upon the waters wherever You would call me. Those words took a frightened 18-year-old to Uganda, to the world of special needs, and to a country where evil runs rampant. But I never anticipated it leading me to a nanny job in the suburbs, or a relatioship-turned-engagement. 

The past 5 months have been a whirlwind I’m still trying to keep up with. They’ve been hard, and beautiful, and unforgettable; thought-provoking and spiritually stretching and filled with such bliss. Some days I rest in the peace of knowing He has held and ordained every moment. At other times, I’m the one whispering late into the night, struggling to believe her God is good and gives only good gifts. 

Summer has only begun, but I can feel how fall is just around the corner. And it’s human nature to forget. So this, right here, is my effort, to always remember and choose to believe: 

there are things too beautiful to forget.

These Things that Remain Constant

What I miss is the sound of the rain on a tin roof. Thundering, it drowns out every other noise. I can close my eyes and see the 4-wheeler rumbling away, that small bundle of stubborn energy and spunk holding on tight. No one’s called me “Hannah” for 12 weeks now and I can’t remember the last time the power went out. I can still feel his red overalls, tattered and worn, beneath my fingertips. Rats don’t scurry in my ceiling at nighttime. 

How do you leave a life behind you, and remain the same?

It’s funny the things that bring it all back to you. And it only takes a moment-- a song, a line in a book, a sighting on the street, a photograph on your phone, a passing comment in conversation. Sometimes it’s nothing but the stillness. For here in the silent darkness, the whisper of memory surrounds you.

It leaves you aching.

I told him there would always be longing. I know longing the way one knows the feel of their skin and the sound of their breathing-- fully and intimately. Every moment is laced with it.

I know she mends—the girl with the broken heart. But I don’t know how. I know she always longs. Unlike the vapor and the raindrops, I know her aching never fully vanishes. Her life consists of a little bit of empty no matter where her feet wander. Because she’s tasted something more, something better, something far beyond.

Sometimes I want to forget. Memories burned in my mind puncture like a needle to the flesh—fragile and messy, painful. Yet how will we know the joy if we do not also know the ache? I remind myself of that on the nights where their faces haunt and that life of adventure feels so distant and fleeting. 

I hear Him beckon, here in this aching stillness. Like the pulsing in my veins and the breath in my lungs, there is this constant calling… 

There’s so much more love, so much more.