Senior Year

Today is the first day of my senior year in high school. It's a weird feeling to be growing up and moving on through different stages of life. It's pouring rain and my ears are still slightly ringing from last night's 5 Seconds of Summer and One Direction Concert with my sister, but it's a great day. I know that as I move forward I'll probably have more mixed emotions and everything, but right now I'm off to a great start. We are also moving ahead in the adoption process and hope to travel to Poland in the next month. I am really excited, but I just want to go now. Waiting is not always the most pleasurable experience. :) It is so exciting living right outside of DC, and having family come up to visit recently has made it feel more like home. Riding my bike to work is quite a luxury.

In the past few months, a lot of unknowns have been dissolved, so I know that college and the next thing you might say will all be fine too. Now, I have to go to work to make coffee for my regulars. Well... after I get some coffee first! 

Goodbye India

You must understand that this is a hard thing to write. Over the past few years, God has really shown me things and taught me things that I never even thought I could experience. One way that this happened was by me and my family moving to India. I have had some amazing experiences and opportunities while I have lived here, including the opportunity to do an internship in a fine-dining Italian restaurant. Even though there are struggles, I call India my home. But that is about to change.

Over the past several months, my mom and dad have been feeling like God was calling us to something else. We weren't sure what that something was, but I felt it too. We thought maybe it was continuing in serving God how we are, or finding other ways here to serve Him. A couple of months ago this calling was cleared up, slightly. My parents shared with us that they felt that God was calling us to move back the United States. At first, I was shocked, and nervous, and scared, and very, very sad, and somewhat excited, and nearly every other emotion. But slowly, God showed me that this really is what He has for me right now, and that I need to just wait and trust Him. Now, if you know me well, you know that this is a tall order. Me! The one who plans things to the minute and is sort of a control freak! Okay God, I'll try my best.

Leaving India will not and is not going to be easy. I have become a teenager here. I have friends here. I have friends who have become family here. How can I pick up and move again? God. He is how. God has given me a peace that I can't explain, but I know that He has a plan. But at the same time, I have friends and family in the US too. I think that I am more nervous about moving back to the US than I was moving here, but God has a plan. I will continue in school, I will get a job, and I will go to college, and God has a plan for all of it.

There are many things right now that I don't know, but I do know that the next few weeks will be hard. In the beginning of April 2014, I, Andrew David Hartman, am leaving India with a heavy heart, but with the knowledge that God has something good in store for me, and that includes adopting, God willing, a new brother and sister from the amazing Eastern-European country of Poland. And that, at least for now, is enough.