Keeping Married Love Alive

This post is rated PG-13. 

Tom and I last year after I returned from the States

 Tom and I have been a team for a long time. Either God gave us the perfect gifts and abilities to balance each other out or we developed those abilities to fill a vacuum or a mixture of both. 

When we're apart for these months every year, it can be challenging to not only keep up with our work on either side of the Atlantic, but also to keep our love alive.

On the work side: Tom is great  with graphics, photography and layout. When writing our update letters over the years, it has always been his responsibility to choose photos and art, layout our pages and make everything visually perfect. He does a wonderful job. It falls to me to do the words and text because.....let's face it....I love to talk. :)

One year, (and this was ages ago) Tom was in the States and I was holding down the fort, much like right now, only this was before Skype and twitter and Facebook and all this delightful technology. It came time to put out our monthly newsletter, so Tom did the layout and put in all the pictures and text boxes and then emailed it to me. I was supposed to then add the text and mail it out. 

On the keeping love alive part: In many of those text boxes scattered around the pages, were racy little messages to me. Tom had been quite creative in letting me know exactly how he felt about me and what he was looking forward to upon his return. 

I giggled, changed the text to match the pictures and update our family in friends about our adventures in Africa, saved a copy and mailed it out.

A few years (and annual separations) went by and nothing more was thought of that little document. Nothing, that is, until a fellow missionary here in Zambia asked us for advice on newsletter writing and Tom sent him a few examples from our archives. Almost immediately, this very nice man wrote us back saying, "I'm fairly sure you didn't mean to include one of those files". and he named the file. We opened it up and sure enough, Tom had sent the draft copy, that one with all the very adult, very racy, meant-for-my-eyes only, notes. Oops!

Now with Skype, Facebook, Twitter and all the rest, our communication is hardly hampered at all. We get to discuss things nearly every day and in great detail. It's such a blessing.

Occasionally though, we'll be in the middle of an 'adult' conversation and one of our children (on either side of the Atlantic) will walk in to the room and peek at our computers and all of a sudden our chat window has to look like this:

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Keeping married love alive is such an adventure!