Today, I got to share the gospel with somebody – not, I’m vaguely sorry to admit, with a German, or even in German – but it was a good and unexpected opportunity, and it felt beautifully right to be given that opportunity on this of all days.

One year ago today, we landed: parents of one, not knowing where we’d live, having just finished a frantic scramble to sort out the details of moving overseas, jet-lagging and wondering how well the language would come back, hoping the stuff we’d shipped would find us someday, wondering what life was going to look like.

Just a week from today, we’ll be able to celebrate a year in our apartment. Two days after that, we’ll celebrate three months as parents of #anotherboy (as the hashtag of the hour goes). We’ve each put in a lot of hours trying to recover and strengthen our German, and we’ll never really be satisfied with our abilities, but we live and work, write emails and sermons and lecture notes, make small talk with neighbors and pray with friends, all in our second language. We’re long-term legal residents of Germany now. We have a church and a neighborhood where people know our faces, if not our names. We belong, in some small way.

What was life going to look like? A year isn’t quite enough to say more than the obvious: there will be ups and downs, failures and triumphs, trial and error and hopefully trial and success here and there. I dearly hope that life will yet look more and more often like this afternoon’s conversation, in response to friends’ and acquaintances’ questions about the workings of our marriage or our parenting, or why we’re here in the first place.

One year in, and it’s still the beginning. Thank you, friends, all of you who have financed this long beginning, who have cheered us on, who have prayed us through it. Here’s to many more August 14ths full of thanksgiving and wonder at what a difference a year makes.

-Ben