Blog Update & Maternity Photos

One of our primary communication goals since moving to Austria has always been to communicate regularly with our partners, supporters, family and friends in America. When we were first raising support and preparing, this was pretty easy - we had no kids and our full-time job was getting ready to move to Austria. Then during language learning, we were still able to regularly set aside plenty of time for this task. But as family life and ministry have intensified over the years, it's become more and more difficult to maintain all of the lines of communication. I'm sure this is no surprise to those of you who have been through these transitions before or who have also gone from couple with no kids to a family life that involves children. The demands placed on us have increased, and we have had to get by with less communication. 

We have continued our monthly email newsletters and in all our 10 years in Austria, have only missed one month. This has always been really important to me, and I see it as our primary method of communication with our key contacts and supporters in the US. Writing these monthly emails takes priority over lots of other tasks. What's been more difficult, however, is maintaining our blog and Facebook page - aspects of our communication that are helpful but perhaps the impact is less concrete. 

Another challenge, however, has been about maintaining privacy. As we go further in ministry, many of our key stories and things we might blog about involve specific people with personal lives of their own. We see God working, but we also want to respect the privacy of the friends and neighbors we interact with and, as such, we are often hesitant to share personal stories or post photos of people on the internet. When we draw this line, it means that we have less stories to share publicly, and this limits what we can put on the blog.

All this to say, we will continue to post on the blog here and there, and we see it as an especially practical place to post personal/family photos. However, the blog will include less ministry-specific posts and more family-related or WorldVenture-related posts. Occasionally, you'll also get to read posts from us about something we are learning or mulling over. We apologize for the change, and if you are disappointed (I doubt anyone reading this has strong feelings on the matter, but you never know...), please be sure to subscribe to our monthly emails where we share more in-depth updates and prayer requests about our work in Austria.

So...in keeping with this new reality, here are some recent photos of a maternity photo shoot we did to capture the upcoming arrival of our third little girl in December. We are thrilled to be welcoming her into our family after nearly 4 years of secondary infertility. (If you want to hear more about this journey, feel free to message us personally). God is a miracle worker and we are so thankful!