Big News!

It's a moment we've always known was coming but that we never knew exactly when to expect: after more than four years, the time has come for us to move on from our ministry at Caribbean Mountain Academy!

Click here for our fall newsletter update, which includes our big announcement about leaving. The rest of this blog post will be a follow-up to the newsletter, so make sure to read it for context! In the meantime, enjoy some pictures of us with Kevin (and Kevin's BFF, Numi).

Alright, hopefully you've read the newsletter by now. So let's dive in!

We have always known that we would eventually be leaving CMA. When we moved here we didn't know how long we would stay, but we knew it wouldn't be forever. When our first two years that we committed to were up and we knew it wasn't our time to go yet, we pretty much threw all of our expectations for timing out the window and decided to stay until we knew it was time to leave. Whenever that would be. That decision was made in November of 2019.

A year later, everything had changed.

When we decided to stay, we didn't yet know that Jon's dad had cancer, nor did we know that we would lose him before the end of the year. We didn't know that my dad would finally be forced to move himself and my grandma out of my childhood home, as the government had been promising for years. We didn't know that Covid-19 was about to change everything about life as we knew it. We didn't know that a lot of our friends would leave us here without the support system that we had developed over the first few years. We didn't know how hard all of this was going to be without them. We just didn't know.

But even with all of that, it still didn't feel like it was our time to leave CMA.

Seven months after our third anniversary at CMA, though, we finally started to see some of the signs that we had been wondering whether they would ever come. Opportunities and possibilities arose. And aside from that, for the first time ever, we each felt the desire to move on. We had a vision for a future beyond CMA, and saw a way that we could move on and hopefully leave CMA in a way that made it better because of our decision.

The nutshell version of the story is that our ability to commit to additional employment for any length of time was shrinking as we were continuing forward in our various stages of grief. One of Jon's counselors seemed like a good shoulder to tap to take over his position, should she be willing to take on the role and make a longer-term commitment. She accepted, which now leaves CMA in a much more stable place and in much steadier hands than what we could have continued to offer with where we are currently at in life.

CMA is a very transitional place by nature; while that is sometimes a hard truth to grapple with, it can also be a very good thing. New people with new perspectives are constantly coming in, bringing fresh energy and fresh ideas to the ministry and organization as a whole. Because of this, it makes it impossible for CMA to ever get stuck in a rut. CMA is always pushing to be on the cutting edge of best practice in its field, and Crosswinds itself seeks to work towards being the number one counseling agency in the nation. It was good to be a part of that for the time that we have been here, but it is also good to take a step back and move on, taking what we have learned here as we move forward and making way for continued fresh ideas at CMA in our wake. It's not that we couldn't continue to provide forward motion in this ministry, but our leaving essentially ensures it. As Jon's home pastor pointed out, in ministry it can be hard to recognize when its time to take yourselves out of the picture, because you will always see needs and always want to fill them, no matter how you are doing mentally/spiritually/emotionally/physically/etc. We don't want our personal state to be in the way of stability and forward motion here at CMA. And we want to take care of ourselves and this life that God has given us together.

All of this, as well as a handful of other things, finally led to our decision to pick an end date for our time at CMA. We were committed through the month of December 2021, and by this point it was June, so it seemed perfectly fitting that December would be our last month. We always knew we wanted to give the organization six months notice, so that was that! The decision was made. We began to let people know about our intentions, starting with our director and moving on to the other counselors, our staff, our students, and also our friends and family. Everyone has been so supportive and helpful and good to us in the process of our transition, which has been great to say the least.

I know I've been talking a lot here about WHEN we're leaving and WHY we're leaving, but I've also been thinking a lot about HOW we're leaving. In everything we do throughout this process, we want to do it well. To do it right. We don't want the ministry to crumble when we leave. We don't want to be so integral to what they're doing here that they can't function without us. If that were the case, what were we even doing here? What would have been the point? Was it all about us then? How did we actually help set this organization up for longevity and stability? And I feel confident that this is not the case for us. I look at the future possibilities and I am excited for what's to come for the ministry here. This new clinical coordinator is going to go to bat for the counseling department in big ways and she is going to accomplish amazing things. As the kids say, Jon walked so that she could run. They don't need us. We helped; we played a part, and things are better because we were a part of them, but they don't need us. That is a good thing. I'm pretty sure at least.

It's also SO strange to think that possibly within a year, and DEFINITELY within the next five years, it's very likely that there will be neither student nor staff left in this place that remembers who we were or what we did here. Still not sure how that makes us feel, but it's definitely just a weird reality.

The way we see it, its time for us to move on. And in ministry, one thing I remember from my *questionably pointless (but that's a different story (but also I know it wasn't pointless))* intercultural studies minor in college was that you always want to be preparing the people you serve and those you serve with for your departure. And that makes sense to me. You want to be preparing the next generation to step up and fill these roles. Just like in life, mentoring up the next generations of human beings, imparting our wisdom and influence and making our mark by leaving a legacy in the ones who are ready to go when its our time to leave. Whether that's a ministry, a job, or life. Or with kids (I assume, since I don't have those), preparing them to one day leave "the nest." You probably want them to be able to function without you. Well, it's the same with our kids here. Same with our ministry. We are so proud of our students, so proud to have been a part of what we have all accomplished here together, and we hope the staff and students here continue to do good work long after we're gone.

*sheds tear*

Welp, on that sappy note, here is some good-old light-hearted excitement! We're going to be staying here in the Dominican Republic after we leave CMA, so yeah, that's really exciting!!! We have LOVED living in the DR, functioning outside of our comfort zone (though it can sometimes be exhausting), speaking Spanish, hiking mountains and chasing waterfalls (even though TLC told us not to), and we aren't quite ready to give up living on a tropical island yet. A tropical island on which we can ride our motorcycle to the beach for $7 worth of gas and stay at a cheap AirBnB for the weekend. I mean, we briefly considered moving out to the beach!!! Wait, why aren't we doing that?! Such a good question. Haha. But we do love it here in Jarabacoa. We'd both prefer to live here and vacation at the beach, rather than live at the beach and vacation here. It's mainly because of the Sunday traffic, though, to be honest 😅 But really, though, we do love Jarabacoa and the people who live here too. It's a great place. Come visit us! We'll have a guest room!

So anyway, to wrap up this long and rambly blog update, if you have any questions, please feel free to call, write, or leave a comment! I just figured out how to enable comments on here so I'm pretty proud of myself. I plan to update this more often once we are no longer on that nice and convenient Crosswinds newsletter train, because I'm not that great at keeping up with people back in the States and at least those quarterly newsletters let y'all know we were still kicking down here! So yeah, I'll try and keep up at this being-a-person-who-semi-consistently-updates-their-blog thing at least quarterly. No promises beyond that though!