I recently moved into a new office and onto a new team. I am working full-time with Writing for Life, training and coaching communicators at Cru.

Now I report to Judy Douglass, the wife of Cru’s president and my friend, with whom I have worked for the past five years. She’s thrilled, and so am I.

While I train and coach the three writers in her office, I will also develop new material to train and coach other communicators throughout Cru. You can see what I’m up to at www.writingforlife.org.

A year and a half ago, I took a position on the writers team to write for Worldwide Challenge and Cru.org, reaching more than 50,000 readers.

I traveled overseas and wrote two international features. I also wrote about how to share your faith as well as a personal experience piece about fasting. In so many ways, it was a great time. But it came with a cost.

While meeting writing deadlines, I also trained communicators on other teams throughout the ministry as part of Writing for Life. As the year progressed, the training opportunities outstripped the amount of time I could give to them.

In an attempt to balance my time, I thought I would step away from some of the training I had done. When I tried to scale back, people like Tim, the leader for the communications team at Athletes inAction and Larry, one of the editors from the Campus ministry, asked me to please keep trainingtheir teams.

Finally, when I missed a writing deadline, we knew something needed to change. I had to pick writing or training. I couldn’t keep doing both. While I miss my companions from the writers team, it’s a relief to have one job description instead of two. And I hope Judy’s influence will help open some doors for me to train teams internationally as well.

Thank you for your prayers and support of the work Mark and I do for Cru. We are grateful for your involvement in our lives. We can’t do what we do without your help.