03 May, 2018

Unexpected

Today I have "something I prepared earlier". I don't think I shared much here about what happened with my job in February, because that month was also somewhat dominated by taking our son to Australia. But I had some significant other stuff happening too.

So, I'm going to tell you a little now. One of my two main jobs is currently social media manager for OMF Japan. OMF is a world-wide organisation and at the moment the international communications team (based in the UK) is running monthly prayer foci (is that grammatically correct?). As in, each month they have a prayer focus that they post about throughout the month on social media. In February it was Japan, so obviously, though they had the lead on that, we had a big part to play. It was exciting to be working in a larger team on this and also to be using material that other people have had the time to create. It was also exciting to be able to re-use stories that I've worked on both on the OMF Japan blog and with Japan Harvest magazine. But on top of travelling and helping our son, it was also a pretty frantic month.

That's just background to say that this year I've been trying to dove-tail our OMF Japan social media with the international monthly focus, where appropriate (last month they had China, so that didn't work). This month, however, is "The Journey to Long-Term Missions", which we can totally work with. We've got blog posts coming up on those themes and I'll be working to create Facebook and Instagram posts that match the theme too.

The other day, to my surprise, I found that that the international team is using a series that originated on this blog. I wrote it as a series of answers for a friend I haven't seen since primary school. She was at Bible college and had an assignment to ask a missionary some hard questions. So I blogged my answers. That was 2012. Then last year I rewrote the posts to kick-start getting content up on our OMF Japan blog and new website (the first post of the series is here). Now, they are being shared this month on the OMF International social media channels. Their Facebook page is followed by more than 7,500 people and their Instagram page is followed by nearly 1,500 people. So that is a very much wider audience than this blog has!

It's always exciting to see things that I've written before being used again, and to reach a different and wider audience, especially if I've not had to write something new, or even edit the old! My husband faithfully prays every week that my writing and editing will be of help to others, something like this is a tangible answer to that prayer.

If you're interested in finding out more about OMF International's campaign this month about The Journey to Long-Term Missions, there is a succinct prayer guide here.

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