Hotty Toddy 2026 ♥️💙 #HYDR
Watch our short videos
Click images or links below.
– John Hugh
We hope you had or still having a great Christmas season. They take the 12 days of Christmas seriously here – starting December 25th.
Since Christmas, all of us have had some semblance of the flu. We’ve made the most of it. It was a great Advent season as our theme for a church series was Light in the Darkness, from John 1: 4-5. You can listen to the sermon series on Spotify. Advent tells us so much about the reality of the world. There is darkness. We can see it in individual lives and in a global context. Yet Light has come into our world and the darkness will never overcome it. We finished our Advent season with a Candlelight service on Christmas Eve. Subscribe to our monthly EIC Rive Gauche newsletter here.
Yet that theme of Light in Darkness has been a theme for us all through 2025, as likely for many others.
On a family front, we’ve lost loved ones. Sometimes we’ve been able to be there and others not. We’ve felt the sadness of being away during challenging times for family and friends. It’s the ongoing conflict of a missionary’s life – to be fully present where God has you placed you and yet to be living in heart and mind with others not physically present in the world where you are.
We’ve seen light in our family here. Our oldest finishing his final year and moving on to college in the USA. Our middle autistic son thriving in the environments of school, church, and France in general. Our youngest making strides as he enters the full blast of being a teenager.
Our marriage has grown. Juggling both life here, planting and pastoring, language, all 3 kids, ministry context and seeing the blind spots this move has uncovered in year 5. We’ve had to adjust everything. It’s not always easy to be stretched, yet the stretching makes one more adept for the races ahead.
Often we feel like we live in 3 places – here, then over there with family, there there with friends and supporters. It can be conflicting yet grows our capacity of letting some things go to trust in the Lord. I’m still working on it.
A great and pertinent example of this is the SEC (Southeastern Conference) football. We love it. I actually love it more over here. We want our kids to love it too, along with the NFL. It is so American, and I say that as a very good thing. But it’s not a French thing, or even that much of an international deal (interestingly however, the Germans love football). So we’ve had a special season following Ole Miss, and particularly proud of this team for staying together and uniting after all the drama.
We’ve stayed up late many evenings to watch, or listen, to games and follow the scores. We champion these times with our kids and other SEC friends here (notably Texas A&M and Alabama). So we try to make a good deposit on the kids when they one day will be back there or elsewhere. Jack is on the precipice of college and will likely make a decision soon. Ethan might be a good fit for Ole Miss. Yet French culture and life here incubates us. Logan is thriving in a French autism school, something we would have been hard to find in Mississippi. We desire to relate & serve the Paris area, and, of course, to develop close friendships.
I have a phrase I use a lot – “There are no accidents in Christianity.” I do believe it. It ties to Romans 8: 28 – “All things work for good for those who love the Lord and are called according to His purpose.” Some might say, of course, yet that’s saying God works all things out – even those He might not plan or anticipate. I’d then encourage them to read the rest of Romans 8 and 9.
So now and here, when we long for the familiar and for shared traditions, or we engage in them with only ourselves, I harken back to literal examples of Jeremiah 29 and the teachings of Romans 8. Be who you are. And fully embrace the culture God has placed you. Learn the language, study its history, know it better than its own citizens do. Pray for it most of all. Be for its well being. Because in it, God gives us our purpose.
As we step into this next year we love starting with a Rebel victory. We are looking forward to our oldest returning to the USA for university. We look forward to a renewed commitment of another 5 years and see where that leads (we kind of take it 5 years at a time). Thank you for being part of the journey. The best is yet to come. We look forward to sharing with and hopefully seeing you in 2026.
Happy New Year for 2026 !
Hotty Toddy !
– Linda
2026 is a re-evaluation of my time in France. It’s been a crazy marathon to acclimate our oldest with no French into a French school and remain competitive for US universities. It’s been a long windy road where God literally gifted us an autism school in Paris for our middle son. Many French told us this autism school was like finding a needle in a haystack. Without this school, we would have been planning our return this summer 2026. The jury is still out regarding our youngest’s compatibility with the French school system. Educating our kids in the French system is incredibly tiresome and draining. It’s a highly academic system that is rewards rank more than the holistic child, and it’s a puzzle to find the right balance.
For those who don’t know, France is an adult centered culture. For good or for bad, events circle around adults: manners, how you eat and conduct yourself at the table, the finer things of life like wine, escargot (at the local Christmas markets), and foie gras. It’s a great education for us Americans who can be too familiar and less cultured, but the flip side is we spend less time with our kids than we did in the US. Most events we are invited to are “no kids” and a French meal doesn’t last 2 hours like an American one. It’s most likely 8:00pm – 1:00am!!
Just staying afloat with all our 3 kids has stolen time in my daily life: less time to stay connected to relationships back in the US, less time for some relationships locally, less time to fully realize all my ideas for EIC Rive Gauche, and less time to maintain this blog in a regular fashion.
Even with all the challenges we have shared on this blog, I have seen in real time how much our gospel witness matters. What do I mean by gospel witness? Jesus pursues you even if you don’t realize it, and He has more than you imagined if you surrender your idol of self-reliance.
I wake up every single day spending about 10-15 minutes in bed before my feet hit the floor cataloging all my anxieties – and there are plenty of daily unknowns living here. My prayer life has changed since moving here. Instead of praying prayers to shield us from hardships as a family, I am inviting God into the hardship and not asking for the hardship to go away, but to teach me.
This is true in our marriage which is seeing a renewal that often doesn’t happen to many of our fellow mid-lifers. This is true of our life in France.
I really do believe there is no good life without God! We live in a nice suburb of Paris, and we can enjoy all the benefits of Parisian life when we decide to engage: cafe culture and beautiful architecture, farmers’ markets with amazing produce, debating ideas with the French, an international crowd that amazes us consistently with its diversity across socio-economic lines, a rich art and literary culture, amazing landscapes and cute towns across France. If you live here long enough, the romantic dazzle of French Parisian life is not enough to sustain you, but I am sure most of you keep reading our blog and checking our social media to get a taste of it.
Community is everything. We believe the local church is Plan A – there is no Plan B. Paris has just crystallized for me that the pinnacle we are all chasing is available anywhere in the world. A small slice of our friend set reveals this is true. Whether it’s a humble home in Northeast Mississippi, in a small church community in Denmark, a beautiful apartment in New York City’s Upper East Side, a church community right outside the San Francisco Bay Area, family and friends in the middle of the Congo, we carry allegiance to our local nationalities (we have become more American in France), but we are incredibly free to give abundantly because of the unmerited grace given to us.
We made a commitment to re-evaluate our stay in France at the end of year 5 (coming up in August 2026). For me, the first 5 years has been trying to find a balance for our kids where they can maintain the values we cherish as a family – optimism, serving others, a growth mindset, self-sacrifice, patriotism, hard work, sensitivity to other cultures, and gospel grace.
In 2026 and our next 5 years, I will be taking the lessons I learned internally in marriage and as a family to share more outwardly – in our church plant, in other ventures we are praying through, and in all our relationships!
Happy New Year & Hotty Toddy from Paris ♥️💙
Paris Partner Goal
We have intentions to stay in France for another 5 years. God has been gracious to open so many doors.
Please consider becoming a Paris Partner for $25/month, $50/month, or a 1 time donation of $1000 or more. We have more ideas and dreams for Paris. Join us in the adventure by donating here!
Follow our church plant @eicrivegauche on Instagram or Facebook or visit www.eicparis.com.
