Reflecting and Projecting: How to Live Each Year with Purpose [Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Britney Christian Miller. Britney is sharing her story today about being a Christian missionary and musician abroad and her goals now that she is home in California this year. You may be noticing more music on Devotional Diva! I'm thrilled about this, and there is more to come ;) Thank you, Britney!] This time of year, all of us do two things; we reflect and we project. We reflect on the year we just lived and then we project our ideals on to a new year. Whether we do this for five minutes when we post our best nine on Instagram, or we spend several weeks pondering, none of us escape this deep desire for our lives to count for something in the future and wonder if it did in the past. Each year, instead of doing a new years resolution, I pick a theme that I want to work on. In 2016 my theme was “yearning. I wanted to wake up every morning with a deeper yearning for God: to know him more, to seek him more and to experience him to greater depths. My husband and I were about to move across the world, to a country most people have never heard of, and serve as missionaries to women enslaved to sexual exploitation and human trafficking. Yearning for God wasn’t just a luxury; it was part of my lifeline. It was my only security in an otherwise completely uncertain realm. Our experience overseas was full of curveballs. We moved there to work at a center for women coming out of sexual exploitation and the day we arrived, all the women who were living there had moved out for various reasons. But instead, I got to focus my efforts on street outreach to women who were still being exploited and God infused in me a deeper passion for reaching those who are held captive to the enemy. My yearning for God grew as I wrestled with witnessing evil and yet knowing the power of God in the midst of it all. Yearning was no longer something I had to muster up or work for; it became abso