(This newsletter is available as a pdf here)

As you can see, our January newsletter is coming out a bit late. We’ve had a very eventful month and didn’t know until this morning what this letter would contain. The month started out well with a visit up north, where we were blessed to see some of you. Then, of course, The Gators became National Champs, which brought much happiness to the Bucks and Kraniches. Then we came home and found out we were finally pregnant. All seemed to be going well. We’d had an early ultrasound a couple of weeks ago to confirm that it wasn’t in a tube like last time. I felt like I was having a normal pregnancy.

However, this morning we were having a 7 week ultrasound to check on the baby and there was no baby in the sac. It was a painful shock. We’d planned on making a very happy announcement to you all today, and suddenly everything has changed. We hurt, badly, but we KNOW in our hearts that God is sovereign AND God is good. He is not cruel or uncaring. This would not be happening if there was another way. We don’t have to know why to know that God can and will work this for good for those who love Him, not just in our lives, but in how He uses things in the body of Christ and to draw others to Him.

Please pray that our thoughts would not allow seeds of doubt and distrust in and that we would grieve well. Please pray for the physical side of all this since I’m still pregnant and have a miscarriage ahead of me. Anja seems to be taking it in stride (she was there for the ultrasound), but we would all love your prayers. And of course, this means we still have infertility to deal with again after all. Our hearts just hurt.

We also planned on giving you an update from Karl’s work. Many of you got our emails in December asking for urgent prayer when we had database problems in the middle of the biggest donation processing period of the year. For those who don’t know, there were serious computer problems that completely stopped donation processing at one point. Throughout the month there were other problems that were less serious but still slowed down people’s work.

Thankfully, God blessed our database team. They were able to get the database working, and no information was lost. Then in early January we found and fixed the cause of the other nagging problems.

Please pray for the database team and their project next weekend, February 9 to 11. They’re planning to add much-needed capacity to our database system.
We appreciate how all of you support us in so many ways, and we especially treasure your prayers now.