The Madsens' Maine Thing
Hello from Andrew and Lauren Madsen ’20 & ’22! Since graduating from Wheaton, we have gotten married and moved to the beautiful state of Maine. The only things in place when we moved were that Lauren would be doing a Master’s in Geology at the University of Maine and that we could crash in a dorm room at the University of Maine at Presque Isle (known affectionately as UMPI, pronounced “UM-pee”) for five weeks while she did her fieldwork. God graciously provided for each one of the remaining unknowns within just a few weeks of our move, with an awesome job in land surveying for Andrew, a solid church with tight-knit community, and a good apartment to live in, followed by a cute little house a year later.
Lauren finished up her Master’s in August of 2024, which focused on the formation of manganese deposits in northern Maine. Lauren has continued on to a PhD at UMaine, where she dates minerals in critical mineral deposits. Now that they are married, Andrew no longer feels the need to remind her that the only thing she should be dating is him. She dates the rocks by shooting them with lasers, just like Star Wars, except the rocks are not quite as big as Alderaan. She is also taking advantage of every opportunity to grow as a teacher: teaching introductory earth science labs, joining the “Graduate Teaching Academy” in the fall semester to develop her teaching skills, and serving as a personal assistant to a low vision student in lab.
Andrew is still loving his surveying gig. He is over halfway done with his surveying coursework at UMaine and hopes to attain licensure in the next few years. He has enjoyed working many projects start to finish, doing most components of the office work and fieldwork, both of which he finds interesting. This year, he has particularly enjoyed spending several nights camping on the job; getting to canoe, snowmobile, and drive the ATV; and working on a few of Maine’s beautiful islands. Unfortunately, he still does not have any cool moose or bear survival stories (not from work, anyway…). The most danger he has been in was when he almost fell right down a sewer vault because someone left the cover off.
Over the past several months I (Andrew) have been trying to meditate on God’s grace. This update paints a rosy picture of our lives over the past year, partly because we are thankful not to have experienced any major tragedies, and we have been blessed with great experiences and relationships, but also largely because our many moments of failure, of depraved and selfish choices, and of emotional dysfunction don’t make for good update letter material. If you’re anything like me, it’s easy to beat yourself up in these moments because we feel like we should be self-sufficient enough to be the man or woman that we know we ought to be. I was recently convicted by something I read in a devotional on anger: “Self-anger comes when you pursue a ‘righteousness of your own’ that is built on standards of your own. When you succeed, you swell with pride and self-righteousness… When you fail, you attack yourself in anger or sink into depression.” This sums up my predicament to a tee. But the good news is that Jesus offers us an alternative to the emotional rollercoaster of trying to live life in your own strength. He forgives us each and every time we screw up and offers us strength to grow, usually just a little bit at a time. We are right to feel inadequate when we fall short. But that’s the point of grace—it’s God’s many blessings to us in spite of what we deserve. Our prayer is that each of you would experience God’s grace.
Blessings,
The Madsens