A Decade in Review

In the spirit of the reminiscence the close of a decade brings, I did some digging and found some Facebook photos I posted on December 6th, 2009. I was living in the on campus apartments at Houston Baptist University, about to be halfway through my junior year. In the photos, I’m with two of my roommates. All three of us dressed in as many layers as we could find because, lo and behold, it had “snowed”. There is documentation of the light dusting our university had received and photos of each of us frolicking through it all. The picture at the beginning of this post is a close up of twenty year old me holding a snowball I had made, staring at it with joy in its purest form.

The Sarah Taylor of December 6th, 2009 could never have imagined the life that Sarah Hopkins lives on December 29th, 2019. At the very least, the former was overjoyed by the single snowball she was able to form while the latter lives in life-sized snow globe. The decade would hold true heartbreak, true love and true friendship. My faith would be refined through fires I never expected to walk through but am eternally grateful I did. Parts of the former still live in the heart of the latter, but the last ten years have produced hard-won, in-process character traits that can only come with time and experience.

I should also note that the Sarah Taylor of December 6th, 2009 could never have imagined that exactly 9 years later to the day she would be giving birth to her daughter in a Colorado hospital.

While my life has changed in more ways than I could have imagined from the day I stared at that Texas snowball 10 years and 23 days ago, the most beautiful thing I see over this time in my life is that God hasn’t changed a bit. I see his perfect plan unfold in the painful heartbreak I’ve known as much as I see it in the joy of my wedding day and the birth of our baby girl. I see his sufficient grace in mistakes I made 10 years ago, 5 years ago and yesterday. Every single day over the last decade is marked by his sovereignty - from places I’ve lived to jobs I’ve worked to people I’ve met. His love, joy, patience, holiness and justice have remained exactly the same despite my circumstances and my wrong turns.

I chuckle when I look at this picture of my former self. There was so much I was sure of that was, to put it nicely, woefully incorrect. There were so many lives I dreamed of living, but the one I have never made the list. And yet, I praise God that it’s the one he gave me.

In December 2029, I imagine I will also chuckle at the photos of my 2019 self. There are sure to be moments of doubt, moments of hardship, moments of joy and moments of complete exhaustion. But while I’m confident the work God has in store for me over the next decade will refine me in ways I can’t envision at this moment, I am also confident that he will remain exactly as he is right now and as he has been since the beginning.

Whether you find yourself blissfully reminiscing over the last decade or painfully questioning where it all went wrong, take hope in the one thing that remains constant through every season, day, year, decade and lifetime. God is with you. He is perfect. In him is everything you need for every question, every doubt, every praise and every pain.

And God will never change.

With that, I say so long to the 2010s! May the lessons I’ve learned help this stubborn heart of mine continue to cling to God as the 2020s begin. Happy New Year everyone!