Beautiful Times

There's a song by Owl City called "Beautiful Times," and I've been listening to it on repeat a lot lately (along with "Video Game Books" by Hank Green and the Perfect Strangers, but that's another story... maybe). In "Beautiful Times," Adam Young sings, "I fought all through the night/ oh, oh, but I made it alive/ the sun's starting to rise/ oh, oh, these are beautiful times/ this fight of my life is so hard, so hard, so hard/ but I'm gonna survive/ oh, oh, these are beautiful times." It's such a great anthem for me as I keep fighting to survive. 

The last weeks have been full of struggles and successes, highs and lows. I'm so delighted to be returning to work, and I'm only two weeks away from seeing my students again. Praise God I have a job to return to and coworkers and friends who are willing to help me practice walking everyday. Praise God I also have knowledgeable therapists who are pushing me to work hard and heal better. They won't let me slack off - they know this fight is hard, but they want me to thrive. I'm super grateful for that.

I'm not giving up, and I'm consistently overwhelmed with the blessings I've received over the last seven months. Your prayers and encouragements are a huge part of that. Thank you to all of you who have continued to follow my story - you've eased the fear I felt so many times that people might not care after a while when my struggles linger on.

And in these struggles, I'm seeing beautiful things and discovering these are beautiful times. Last week, Dayla and I went on an excursion to Zurich so I could spend time in one of my favorite places to be - the bowels of a library. Dayla also walked beside me along the river as I made my way from about one third of the way into the bridge to where you see me seated in the picture above. I'm not good at guessing distances, but that's the farthest I've managed to walk without sitting down yet.

I'm still healing, and I'm begging you to keep praying that the healing miraculously continues. I've got a lot more function I'd like to see return, and it can only come by the grace of God. Please also keep praying for my ongoing conversations with insurance. They are covering all but one of my significant prescriptions. They're holding out on full coverage of my physical therapy. At this point they are only willing to pay for twenty visits a year which runs out quickly as I'm prescribed three visits a week. This leaves me with a 2500€ bill (around $3300). I'm also in the process of appealing their first denial of my home tools which is another 900€ ($1200). It's not impossible for these appeals to be approved and for insurance to cover these. However, it's equally possible they could deny them again.

Last summer, I asked everyone I knew for money. It was a painful yet beautiful process. I fortunately quickly realized I wasn't asking people to dump money on me for no reason. I'm asking people to partner with me to live on mission, to make God famous, and to serve students and those around me in Kandern, Germany. I'm going to keep asking people for money for quite a while so I can stay here in Germany to do what I feel I'm called and equipped to do. I'm so grateful that even though life is drastically different for me now, I'm still able to do what I love - teach. That other song I've been listening to on repeat has a line that says "No one ever gets to be/ quite who they want to be," and that really resonates with me a lot too because I realize that my impact on the world is much different than I anticipated, but that doesn't make my contributions to the world less significant. I'm still going to give everything I've got to make this world a better place - that just comes out slightly differently than I thought it would. I thought I might inspire three particular kids back in America with my life, and I've had a hugely different impact on countless other kids (and adults) which, I might add, is vastly humbling, despite the lack of influence I see in the three kids I left America "to inspire." So my life is not what I thought it would be, but I surrendered it to God to do with as he saw fit. He took me up on that offer, and my life has been all the better for it. One of the most exciting things to me about how God uses me is that he's using dozens of other people to support me as I in turn support the work of dozens of others. It's an incredible network.

If you would like to be part of the work God is doing through me, you can do so by going to give.teachbeyond.org and set up a tax deductible donation either as a one time give or joining my monthly support team. To ensure the gifts go to my support account, please remember to type "Laura Hewett" (two e's in my last name - we're the blind Hewetts; we have no i's) in the designation box.

Regardless of whether you give to me financially, I'm so grateful for your prayers, encouragements, comments, jokes, and postcards. Every kind of support is valuable to me, and I'll continue to update you on how I'm progressing through these beautiful times.