In our last newsletter, we mentioned the possibility of purchasing a house at auction. That sale fell through...

We Moved House!

August 2021 Newsletter

Dear Friend,

The children love all the space in our new back garden. (That's the shed, not the house. 😉)

In our last newsletter, we mentioned the possibility of purchasing a house at auction. That sale fell through. It sold for way over our budget. We then quickly tried to find another house to buy so our buyers would not pull out for our house. It was not until the 5th house that we were successful in getting an offer accepted. Houses here are selling quickly and for more than they are worth!

We had a successful offer at the beginning of April. It has taken until July for us to close on the house. We moved into the new house on 23 July. This is a typical timeline in the UK. Moving out and into the new house on the same day is also normal. It was very stressful.

Measuring the height of our sunflowers at the allotment.

Ellis is four years old!

The children were excited about the move. Despite Ellis’ birthday being the week before the move, he was more excited about moving. The 3 oldest children this spring began playing down at our local green space most afternoons that the weather cooperates. Ellis has his balance bike and the two older ones enjoy cycling around and climbing the trees. Asher and Eva Joy also enjoyed taking part in an 8 week introductory programme for cricket this spring.

Much of our spare time has been working our vegetable garden (allotment), going on local walks with friends and moving house. Leon has also taken up building a new dining room table from pallet wood. It is coming along, but won’t get completed until we’ve settled in the new house.

Eva Joy and Asher in their uniforms for cricket

We can finally hug our friends again!

We have been in lockdown in the UK in one form or another since March 2020. From 19 July we exited lockdown. Just in time for friends to help us move house. The delta variant is causing a significant rise in infections around us, although the vaccine programme here has thankfully helped keep most people out of hospitals so far. I think we shall have to accept that it is not “if” but “when” we shall contract COVID.

We met for church in person the first week of August. We have not met for a Sunday service since March 2020. Since that date we have only met others from church outside for picnics and in gardens/parks for small group.

Friends reunited after a year

A Lake District walk with the OM team in Carlisle

Our focus has been on enabling people to do their ministry through technology. A recent gathering of IT staff in OM highlighted that they have seen a 40% increase of missionaries working from home in some fields. They have requested help in providing remote support to these workers. We also shared in this IT gathering a recent working from home infographic IT checklist we produced.

You may have heard in the news that places like the Colonial Pipeline have gotten hacked. My team continually evaluates our infrastructure to reduce our risk to these types of hacks. As an organisation, we have completed a year-long task to reset all our passwords to new complexity requirements. I worked with all our fields to provide reports and complete the task.

We also use Parallels RAS to provide access to our Windows OS based HR and Finance application from centralised data centres. I am working on a helpdesk ticket with Parallels for the last 2 months to fix a problem preventing us from using multi-factor authentication (MFA) to access this application. We feel to keep our systems secure, we must not depend on only a username and password pair, but also some additional factor.