Post-Thanksgiving Excitement

Our latest newsletter is out & circulating! This feels like a major accomplishment to us, for several reasons:

1. It's our first official newsletter as a couple!
2. We've spent almost a month trying to consolidate our individual contact lists into a single document, sent from ONE e-mail account. 
3. Although we are writers, we labored over what we should share, and how long we should allow our letter to be. 
4. We signed up to use an e-mail distribution site called MailChimp. It's fun, it's eye-catching, and if you've never used it before, it really throws a monkey-wrench into your plans for getting a newsletter out in a day.

We finally hit "send" about 11 p.m. last night, and we've been checking the distribution report to see just how many times that letter has been opened. Are you ready for this? 199. 

199 people have actually received and opened our newsletter. Wow.

We can't speak for every missionary everywhere, but for us, we've sometimes questioned if the time & effort poured into each newsletter was worth it. We've both had the experience of writing up what we felt was a really poignant post, only to catch silence on the other end of cyberspace. And we would wonder, "Did anybody stop and read what was written?" 

For all of the headaches we endured in formatting, exporting & importing contacts, we're pleased with the final product, and we're pretty pumped that MailChimp will tell us exactly how many times someone opens our letter. It's not about the compliments on our writing style, or the commentaries on events in our lives. It's just having the awareness that we're not alone in the work we are doing. It's the knowledge that someone took the time to read an e-mail. It's the hope that our readers are also prayer partners, who will join with us in lifting up our needs & requests.