Angie and I wanted to take a quick minute today to introduce you all to our newest monthly contributor, Tara Livesay. Tara lives in Haiti, with her seven children and husband, and is working with pregnant women and new mothers there. We’ve been watching her for a while, and we think this community will be challenged by her words as much as we have. Here’s her official bio and a photo of her precious family:
Tara Livesay. Tara is the mom to seven unique personalities and wife to her best-friend, Troy. The Livesays have been living, learning and working with women in Haiti for seven years. During that time they have come to recognize that God is not made manifest in their ability to “fix” anything, but in their own need to be fixed. Tara is a slow and aging distance runner that enjoys writing, potato chips, diet coke, and spending time with her family. She is a self-confessed cynic and a hard core realist. (No one has ever accused her of being an optimist.) She is passionate about maternal health and is pursuing her midwifery certification while she works in a relationship-based maternity center serving women before, during, and after labor and delivery. She writes regularly at: www.livesayhaiti.com.
Take a minute to welcome Tara to the monthly writing team! You can check out the bios of our other monthly contributors HERE.
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Also, you’ll notice a new feature on the sidebar we are offering for subscribers. Because of the wonders of mailchimp, we are now offering readers the option of receiving posts in real-time as they hit the web OR the receiving the posts for the entire week once, on Friday mornings. As we add new writers and new guest posters, we wanted those with overflowing inboxes to have the option of simplifying!
What?! What’s that you say? You haven’t subscribed yet?! Now’s your moment, friends– that top right sidebar is just waiting for you to check it out.
And a community update— It’s been a big last few weeks in this online space. We’ve given away 23 books in three weeks (two written by our own team of writers here) and in the last week alone we had over 5,000 page clicks on our site. We’ve tackled issues like sexual abuse on the mission field, the strain international life can put on a marriage, the trouble with learning a language, and the tendency we all have to communicate poorly to supporters. And the conversations that have come from these posts, and from YOU, have been inspirational and challenging and deeply, deeply good.
So, thank you. Thank you for reading and commenting and sharing. Thanks for engaging. Something powerful is being built here in this corner of the internet, and we are thrilled to watch it unfold.
– Laura Parker, for both Angie Washington and I, the Editors