One of the ways we keep in touch with friends, family and supporters is sending out our MAF prayer cards. With little people in the family the photos can become out of date very quickly as you can see below. In the first one Abigail was only 5 months old and in the second Naomi was still in my tummy!
I know that people have found having our MAF cards useful. Many have them on their fridges, mantelpieces, in their offices or Bibles as a reminder to pray for us or remember the work we, MAF and MMS are doing. It is a great encouragement to us too ... more than I can express in words here .
As I mentioned in my Admin Mummy post ... the support raising part of being a missionary family is down to me because I enjoy it so much, while Mark's forte is fixing the planes! I'm thankful that we're agreed on this and can get on with our own areas of expertise!
This year is a particularly big year for us. Mark has just done and will do another Rapid Response trip. In the summer, Mark will also have completed all his necessary hours as an apprentice and will be taking his Airframe and Powerplant exams (of which there are a lot!). This means our time here in Ohio will come to an end and we will be placed in an MAF programme, most likely in Uganda or Tanzania, where I used to teach. So by this time next year we will have moved across continents again, said lots of goodbyes and hellos and be settling the family into a whole new culture.
We figured with all that is going on we would like our supporters to keep us in the forefront of their minds over the next 12 months. We wanted an up-to-date card (including Naomi!) for people to remember us with and as we won't get another new MAF card until we're in a programme I decided to make our own!
We budget for keeping in touch with supporters each month, postage, cards etc but I'm always looking for a bargain. For example, we never pay for our return address stickers, we always use an offer on Vistaprint and just pay postage which is only a few £/$'s. So I played around with photos on Snapfish yesterday and as I went to 'checkout' I thought I'd quickly see if there were any coupon codes or offers for that website as it was quite a big order.
I was really excited to find a 25% off code on the Snapfish website ... which was extremely short lived as it didn't work. I've never used the 'online chat' help on any website but I thought I'd give it a go and can't recommend it highly enough! Not only did the customer support advisor help very quickly and clearly, they found me a 50% off code instead. No complaints from me ... we saved over $100!
The order is in and for a lot less money than I'd thought, which is great as postage is $1 a letter from America, so we've got a bit more saved towards that now! For those of you who regularly receive our news keep an eye out in your snail mail for one of our 'unofficial' cards over the next month or so. For those of you who don't ... let me know if you'd like one to remember us with!
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