The Year of the Visitor: Part I

It's super easy to communicate with friends and fam from home, and friends all over the world for that matter. I'm so grateful for email, internet phone, instant messaging, etc, it all helps us feel more connected with people we can't see regularly. And actually, being in Scotland has helped to strengthen a lot of our relationships with people from home which is pretty awesome and something I didn't expect.

But nothing replaces being in the same room with someone, face-to-face. We're about to reach the one year mark of our time in Scotland, and so we're doing a lot of looking back and looking forward. Figuring out what has worked in our work with kids here, what hasn't, what needs to change, and what needs to be done before we leave in a year.

We sat down to plan out the next year and realized we've got lots of big events going on, most of them include visitors from America! We're absolutely stoked. Last year my parents came right after Christmas, and then a group of 12 from our home church came at Easter to help us with a Holiday Bible Club for the kids here. Both visits were fabulous.

The part about people visiting that we love the most, is getting to share with them what our lives are like here. We want them to meet the people who are such a big part of our lives who've been an incredible support to us. We want them to see the town that we spend our days in. We want them to get to know the kids of Dornoch who we love so much.

We've already had our first visit of the year. A lady from Florida came to Scotland on a holiday and wanted to meet and encourage people like us who do volunteer work. We had the privilege of hosting her for a few days and getting to know her and all about the work she does (she's a counselor). It was very encouraging for us, and a great way to kick off the new school year, when lots of the events we lead start up again.

If you're coming to visit, we can't wait to see you, get excited because we're stoked! We can't wait to share our life in Dornoch with you and show you how fabulous of a place it is.