Dear Friend,

Happy New Year! We trust you’ve had a blessed Christmas and New Year. As we reflect on 2012 and set goals for 2013, it’s important to remember that God calls us to look ahead and hold our plans loosely.
 

... Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on towards the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. ... The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps. (Philippians 3:13-4; Proverbs 16:9 ESV)

 
Life in Carlisle is beginning to pick up again now that the Christmas holidays are over. While we enjoyed the break, we’re glad that we can get back into our routines again!

In this update:

Family Christmas
This year was, of course, Asher’s first Christmas! We enjoyed sharing it with him. We first celebrated Christmas with Leon’s family over Skype. This was something we started last year. I (Chrysti) found it enjoyable to more or less “be present” with Leon’s family even though we couldn’t be there in person.
 
On Christmas day, we celebrated by opening the remaining gifts that we hadn’t opened when opening presents with Leon’s family. I’m not certain that Asher quite understood the whole presents thing or the Nativity story, but Leon and I enjoyed it. We also had a friend around for our traditional Christmas doughnuts.
 
We spent the remainder of our day with two OM families who were also in Carlisle for Christmas. We had dinner together. We really enjoyed the fellowship and having “family” for Christmas.

Leon’s work
I have a few projects to keep me busy these next couple of weeks. I have just started implementing an upgrade of Nagios for monitoring our IT services using a plugin for Nagios called check_mk. I am also, for a different project, looking at a way to leverage social networking more with OM’s news emails. We have identified MailChimp as a good solution and I am seeing at how to integrate it into OM’s email systems with the API’s they provide.
 
But what I am most excited about is a week of meetings starting next week Monday. We will be discussing OM’s Global IT Architecture. Essentially where do we want to be 5 years from now and how do we plan on getting there. I really enjoy these abstract, technical discussions. It might be because I can imagine how this will help more people come to Christ.

Hedding Family News
Our family had an exciting event happen over the Christmas holidays! Leon's sister Kelli got engaged! They're getting married in May. We will be travelling to the US for the wedding, and spending some time on home assignment while we're there. We're excited for Kelli and Loren!