What's Going On: Saying hello to a new adventure

Ernie Harwell provided baseball play-by-play for 55 years, including 38 with the Detroit Tigers.
In his final broadcast, he told listeners “it’s time to say goodbye, but I think goodbyes are sad and I’d much rather say hello. Hello to a new adventure.”
My family and I will be saying “hello” to a new adventure starting in February 2016, as we will be moving to New Ulm, Minn.
I have accepted the publisher’s job at the New Ulm Journal, a seven-day-a-week newspaper located about 90 miles southwest of Minneapolis.
And while this job not only is a major step up for my career and will at the same time improve my family’s quality of life on several levels, there’s a great deal of sadness accompanying it as we have to say goodbye to a community we love.
Which begs the question: If you love it here so much, why are you leaving?
It’s a great question, and one my wife and I have grappled with for the last couple months during the prolonged hiring process.
In the end though, the answer is simple: New Ulm is where God wants us.
As many of you know, this has been a long year for the Orear household. But beyond multiple cancer diagnosis, long hours at work have compounded our stresses, frequently leaving me physically and emotionally drained, while feeling woefully inadequate as a father, husband and brother.
I ended many a day with a simple request to God: help.
I did not know what form that help would take, but now it appears obvious.
This job will allow me to be home more with a family that needs me, while also providing my wife top-notch medical care from a Mayo Clinic oncologist just 25 miles away.
And yet, despite the obvious signs New Ulm is where we belong, the sadness remains as there is so much we will miss from Southwest Iowa.
We will miss Memorial Day services in Red Oak and the flag-adorned Evergreen Cemetery. Nobody does it better than the Montgomery County Court of Honor.
We will miss the Rainbow Café. Every town has a favorite dive and this one is a beauty.
We will miss the Baird Christmas lights, a holiday tradition my family enjoys on an annual basis.
We will miss our friends at First Covenant Church and I will personally miss Rev. Alan Dean’s weekly sermons. They are regularly thought-provoking and challenging.
I’ll also miss my regular bridge game at the Red Coach Inn, and especially my 94-year-old partner, Eloise Brower. She’s a hoot.
We will miss the Red Oak school system, especially the teachers, administrators and staff we’ve become so familiar with at Inman Primary.
We will also miss seeing Tigervision come to fruition, although it will take longer than it should.
And we will miss our home. The two-story Victorian home with the acre-sized back yard in the heart of town was going to be the backdrop for so many family memories.
Now, we will make those memories in Minnesota.
And we are ready to say hello to that adventure, even if it does include a few sad goodbyes.