The last two months were filled with travel, a visit from Chrysti’s mum, and practicing hospitality.

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Out with Old Technology

October 2019 Newsletter

Dear Friend,

An afternoon game of Carcassonne.

In our last newsletter, we shared how our lives are busy and continue to get busier. The last two months were filled with travel, a visit from Chrysti’s mum, and practicing hospitality. It is important in all our busyness that we take time to rest and enjoy ourselves as a family. At the end of August our family took a much-needed stay-cation. We visited a few local attractions and spent a lot of time catching up on tasks around the house. Overall it was a restful time before Leon travelled to the US for 2 weeks to work on raising support for our ministry.

One coming change for our family will arrive in January. In early September, we once again returned to the hospital in Newcastle for an in-depth ultrasound scan on our new baby. I (Chrysti) had a lot of anxiety surrounding this appointment. As the appointment day drew nearer, I began whispering God’s truth to myself which filled me with peace as we went into the ultrasound room that day. We are praising God that Baby “Starlight” is happy, active and healthy! It is a relief knowing that we can proceed with this pregnancy as normal. Thank you so much for your prayers for this pregnancy. Please continue to pray as our early January due date approaches.

Happy Anniversary to us! We celebrated 9 years of marriage in August.

We appear to be standing on the wall at a museum of optical illusions in Keswick.

A Fruitful Trip to the US

I (Leon) made a 2-week quick trip to the US. Over 11 days I drove over 1500 miles and was able to meet with dozens of people. It was a fruitful trip. I financial support has increased although we still have plenty of room for additional donors to reach 100% financial support. We really saw this trip I did as making our trip to the US next year much easier as a family. We really do not want to drive that much with a young family.

While Leon travelled to the US for two weeks, my (Chrysti's) mum visited. It was a blessing to have her company and an extra pair of hands to help with raising and home educating three very active children.

It's... a... healthy baby!

Helping Grandma in the kitchen.

Our involvement in the home education* community continues. The children continue to make friends and look forward to either going rock climbing (bouldering) or attending a bi-monthly meet-up. I continue to make friends and find community at these events too. At the beginning of November, I will connect with a larger group of home educators at a retreat in Ambleside who share a love of the same philosophy we follow in our family’s home education.

*In our 2 or 3 years of home schooling, I’ve learned that it is referred to as home education in the UK. If I were to call it home schooling, I’d be corrected. Many families in the UK are fed up with the state education system and remove their children from school to home educate. Calling it home education implies that it is still learning without the formal classroom environment.

Ellis loves trying to boulder. He wants to be like the big kids.

Happy 4th Birthday, Titus!

A Way Forward for MFA

As an IT Team for OM we continue to focus on improving security. We are making tremendous progress with rolling out multi-factor authentication (MFA). The technical roadblock is still there. We have identified about 100 people who need to either upgrade their hardware, operating system, or software to stay secure. Microsoft are pushing the envelope and are forcing our hand when it comes to support for older technology as we saw with MFA.

We would love to be able to support staff who don’t have the latest technology but are finding that even if we wanted to do this, we can’t do it AND stay secure. People with old iPhones, Android devices, and running Windows 7, or using old software will have to bite the bullet and upgrade. Thankfully this is being pushed by our use of Office 365 from Microsoft and we can justify these changes because they are dropping the ability to connect from all these older bits of technology.

I think prayer is needed for fields and staff who have tight budgets and will need to be thinking of unexpected upgrade expenses. Pray that we can communicate effectively all this new information to the fields.

One of the simple bits of technology I am soon to implement for OM is called Azure AD Password Protection software. The software prevents the use of bad passwords when settings or changing a user’s password. It uses a banned-passwords list compiled by Microsoft and supplemented by a custom list that we provide. We currently have the software installed in audit only mode.

Prayer Points

Pray for wisdom to know how to communicate IT changes to fields and staff where those changes might have an impact on already tight budgets.
Praise God for a healthy baby! Continue to pray this pregnancy goes well.
Praise God Leon’s trip to the US was fruitful. Please pray as we seek to increase our financial support. We’d like to encourage you to pray about joining us in our ministry financially, too.

God Bless,

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