Year-In-Review: 2025

Well, it’s been another year!

I’m growing increasingly fond of what seems to be a tradition of my parents’ generation, namely sending a Christmas/New Year letter reflecting on the past year.

What are some interesting or important things that happened in our lives in 2025?

Josiah

Of course, the most important event of the year was welcoming our son, Josiah Reuben, to our family in early December.

Leigha’s pregnancy was largely uneventful, and she felt healthy and well for almost all of it. Unfortunately, right at the end she was catapulted into a ‘high-risk’ status after developing gestational hypertension. Fortunately, this didn’t have any significant effects on the birth besides unexpected logistical changes. We expected Josiah to come later, like Naomi did, and thus to be born near Christmas; and we were looking forward to giving birth to him at home. Instead, Leigha was sent to the hospital after her diagnosis, induced, and we spent a few days at a hospital while others cared for Naomi. We are so grateful to our Service Adventure participants and our church community who provided support and care, especially for Naomi, during our unexpected absence.

So, instead, Josiah was born on December 3, giving him a nice 12/3 birthdate. The nurse had to catch him as he was born, because he came so quickly (albeit after many hours of induction and labor) that the midwife didn’t even make it down the hallway! He managed to one-up Naomi’s statistics in almost every way, despite being born 3 weeks ‘younger’ and at high elevation: 3.24 kg to her 3.14, and 20.75 inches to her 20.25.

Since then, we’ve enjoyed spending a low-key December at home and enjoying getting to know Josiah. He is much noisier (and gassier) than Naomi was, but all in all he is healthy and even-keeled (and cute as a button). Honestly, our teething, still-can’t-quite-express-herself, almost-2-year-old toddler has been the bigger challenge this month; learning how to give Naomi the attention she requests and deserves while still juggling Josiah (not to mention trying to find time for ourselves) is a new challenge. In short: infants seem easy compared to toddlers — until they throw up all over you!

We’re grateful to be able to host grandparents — Leigha’s parents in December and Christian’s mom in January — and have relished the shared joy that comes to a community with the birth of a little one. This was also a historically warm December; the only snow storm was over Josiah’s birth, and most of the rest of the month has seen highs of 50+ — positively balmy. So that was nice.

About his name: we called him “Joey” in utero, after an imaginary student we invented when we were teachers. (It was a full 8 months into pregnancy before I realized that a “Joey” is, rather fittingly, also a pouched marsupial!) Although we knew we didn’t want to call the baby Joey, we liked the idea of finding a Jo-name that might fit, and we eventually settled on Josiah. In the Bible, Josiah is the boy king of the nation of Judah who institutes deuteronomical reforms — and is denoted the most successful/righteous king for this reason (2 Kg 23:25). The name also means “Yahweh heals” or “Yahweh supports.” (Fun fact: in Hebrew, the name is “Yoshi-yahu” — so you could call him Yoshi if you really want!)

Naomi tends to call him “Baba” which in her mouth sounds a bit like “Bubba” — that’s the closest she can get to “baby.” We’ve largely taken this on as a nickname for him, though I’m trying to use Josiah more to get used to the name. (Choosing a name for an entirely new human being is weird!)

Work

At the end of last year (2024), Leigha began volunteering for RAWtools, a ministry devoted to prophetically imagining a world with fewer guns and less violence. In the spring, she became an official employee. Her administrative work is incredibly helpful for the many logistical pieces that this nationwide ministry (with one full-time staff member and many networks of volunteers) coordinates.

Christian began working remotely on an MDiv (Master of Divinity) degree at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS) in the fall. He plans to master divinity before moving on to more mundane topics like following Jesus. (Just kidding). He’ll concentrate on Biblical Studies, and the degree will take 3-4 years.

A big part of our fall was figuring out how to schedule our lives to allow both of these to go smoothly, while also taking care of Naomi and running the Service Adventure unit (and, for one of us, growing a baby). In the end, Leigha took care of Naomi most mornings while Christian worked on school; and afternoons were a less-structured combination of naptime, Service Adventure work, volunteering, and RAWtools work. We spend most evenings with our participants, either in regular household activities or just hanging out.

As far as Service Adventure goes, our year has gone very well. We’re old hands by now (ha! right!), and we continue to appreciate living in community with young adults. (At the same time, we also look forward to having our own space when we eventually move on from Service Adventure — see below!). We’ve had good conversations with participants about faith, life, simplicity, and politics, just to name a few topics; and we get to be there as they think about themselves and as they grow a lot in 10 short months.

Weddings

We were privileged to spend lots of time with family this year, and especially blessed to witness two beautiful weddings as two of Leigha’s sisters got engaged and then married. What wonderful opportunities to celebrate!

Upcoming Plans: 2026-in-preview

Lord willing, our plans this year include finishing our term with Service Adventure and moving to Elkhart, Indiana, where AMBS is located. We’ll spend a few years there while Christian finishes his degree, and then we’ll see what’s next!

That means we’ll be much closer to almost all of our US connections, who are generally concentrated in the Midwest and East Coast. We look forward to being within a day’s drive of friends and family, rather than a short-domestic-flight-but-still-a-plane-(planes-are-unsustainable) flight away.

We also plan to make better use of this blog! My (Christian’s) hope is to post at least once a month; not always an update, but also musings and interests and things-you-should-know. Perhaps things related to the classes I’m taking or papers I’m writing. A few ideas include:

• Mandarin Chinese, part 2 (and maybe 3!)
• The wonders of electricity
• Cars use a lot of energy!
• The gospel in Hercules
• A defense of substitutionary atonement
• Why you should switch to LEDs
• The case for Service Adventure

Thanksgiving

• Opportunities to visit (and host) families and attend weddings!
• Relationships with our participants
• Our church community and Service Adventure support structures
• Josiah’s successful birth and Leigha’s good recovery
• Naomi and Josiah and the joy they bring us and others!
• Lots of playgrounds and play places within biking distance of our house

Prayer Requests

• For our participants: that they challenge themselves, ask deep questions, and engage wholeheartedly with us and with others.
• For our household: that we continue to learn what it means to believe in and train under Jesus in self-sacrificial love.
• For our children: that they grow in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and people. May they become loving images of Jesus.
• For us: as we look toward another transition process and leaving another place/community we have come to love