Hello friends, family, supporters of CODE and ministry blog enthusiasts! It has been a little while since I last wrote to you all, so I figured my first blog back should be a bit of an update on where life has taken me in the first half of 2015.
The year started with me meeting my now fiancée and future wife! We met online late last year and are planning to have our first of three weddings in early August. This new adventure in my life has taken me back and forth from NY to Toronto more times this year than I can count! It has been a good time and I was even able to chauffeur her on her first visit to the States and was able to surprise her Mom on Mothers day!
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The beginning of the year also started off with a new look to CODE. With a new website, a new logo and a new much more aggressive web presence that we were missing in the past! I spent much of the beginning of the year learning how to create a website and maintain it. I have had a lot of help from our wonderful ministry partner Amy J Stoddard Design!
While this was taking place, I was also hard at work planning our 2nd Annual CODE Ministry Banquet! I never knew how much work went into planning an event like this, but now I know and am so impressed by all the folks that do this kind of thing for a living. I don’t know how you all do it, but kudos! The Banquet went amazingly and we were able to get almost all of our domestic missionaries in to speak at the event!
I also started a new program where I have been speaking to all of our missionaries and staff on a regular basis. We have implemented some new reporting processes that have helped out greatly, but I have been able to speak with every person that works with us at least semimonthly and have been able to help foster good communication between the staff and the board! Many of the new reports are shared between the different staff members as well; this has created great community amongst everyone that works with us even with people who have never met in person before!
These three things have really kept me busy for most of the first half of the year! My focus more recently is continuing with some tweaks and updates to the website, helping my parents with their outreach project of flipping a house in our neighborhood, focusing on improving our reporting and internal systems, and of course getting married soon! Stay tuned for more details on that!
I am looking forward to the second half of this year! I hope to stay focused on continuing to grow and expand CODE. I hope to continue to improve upon the areas of the ministry that could use some upkeep. And I am very much looking forward to continuing to serve our partners, our missionaries and our staff in every way I can. I also hope to be writing a lot more now that I got the elusive first blog back out of the way!
Until next time…