Our Family

We are a family...

Matt and Jill were married on a perfect spring Florida day, in 2004.  Our first year of marriage was full of sky high newlywed bliss, a few pebbles to get worked out of our newly communal shoes, and then sudden sorrow, when Jill's mom went to be with the Lord in the fall of 2004.  It was a hard season, but also truly marked by great grace from the Lord for our needy, broken hearts.




In 2006 we welcomed our first little one, Isaiah Dale, and we moved to China when he was 5 months old.  This is the life, the work, that we had dreamed of and prayed for, both single and married, for many years.  But dreams come true aren't always easy.... Cultural pieces and various aspects of life here can still be breath-takingly hard (even more than a decade in!).  Still we wouldn't  change where we live or the work we get to do here for anything.    An abiding joy persists...

April, 2013

Marian Lynn was born on her Grandma Lynn's birthday (Jill's mom) in 2007 and John Timothy was born in June 2009.   Vivian Hope was born in our home, March 2011, with a spectacular midwife that the Lord brought here to China for us from America.  We delight in these gifts from God in our lives!  These four are a wonderfully fun bunch of giggles and squiggles and tickles and sometimes kicks and screams and growling, but most the time we're having fun.... or at least we're trying to.  



Jill does (so far) all of the writing here. 


We love hearing from you about your lives or in response to our posts.  If you want to leave a comment, I will read it before it is published for others to see.  If you'd like to let me know your email address to correspond, I would love that!  (And I won't share it with the whole internet community:))


We believe...
What we believe about ourselves (that God made us wonderfully, in His image, and that we are sinful and need to be rescued from the death our sin requires of us) and about God (that He loves so lavishly that he gave his own Son to be the Rescue we need) is the most important thing in our hearts and lives and relationships and in every day.


But we're not the best ones to express all the reasons we marvel or all the magnificence wrapped up in the everlasting, beyond our minds, rescuing us from eternal death, revealing himself to us, suffering for us, upholding his word, weeping with us, promising victory, steadying our hearts, leading our labors, giving us strength, fueling our joy, grace of God.


Plenty who have gone on before us have said these things better than we ever could...  We love how our home church (which belongs to the Presbyterian Church of America) states things, as well as the tried and true Apostle's Creed, the Heidelberg Catechism.