Preface: If you don’t feel like reading this whole post here’s the twitter sized version – My friend of 10 years, currently living in England with husband and 2 kids, needs help raising money to visit her family in TX. You could donate even $1 to help. OR tweet this with #UK2TX

One of many things that I love about social media in general is the overwhelming generosity I’ve witnessed time and time again. I think those of us who completely join in the social media world do so because we are by natural “joiners”.

Last week I was Facebook chatting with my college roomie. She and I met over the phone in the summer of 2001 when we both got the letter “introducing” us as dorm room roommates. I still remember the first day we met, which feels like yesterday and also a lifetime ago. Sooooo many people have horror stories from their roommates. I think the only bad stories I could tell about our time living together (all 4 years!) was that we often stayed up too late listening to music (which made our 8am classes quite fun), we *may* have been in the habit of letting our alarms run for entirely too long in the mornings, and I can’t say we were the most organized pair :P.

I’ll give you a quick fast forward to get us to 2011 – while we were in college, Holly (just realized I hadn’t said her name yet) worked in the study abroad center, she met many fabulous people and got the travel bug… might I mention she had never been on an airplane. After graduation, she decided to move to England “for a year” before returning home to use her teaching degree. As you might have guessed, “for a year” was in 2005 and she’s still in the UK. In 2007, the girls and I road tripped down to small town Texas to stand with Holly as she married the love of her life, Ellis. She’s been living in England since. And so, back to 2011, Holly and Ellis have two adorable children and while they love the UK, Holly is missing her Texas family. I’ll let Holly tell you the next part of the story…

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So it seems as though having babies during a recession and living in the UK, 5000 miles from your family in Texas, makes family visits a bit difficult.

Our family consists of – Dad: Chaplain to students, Mom: on maternity leave, Dylan: 2.5 year old, Coen: 4.5 month old.

Mom (Holly) is a native Texan, Dad (Ellis) is a Welshman by birth. Brought together by God in love. Blessed with our first son, Dylan, in 2008 who was able to visit his grandparents, meet his aunt and uncle, two great-grandfathers and two great-grandmothers, among many other family members for Christmas 2009. Unfortunately, since then, we haven’t been able to make it back to visit.

Our second son, Coen, was born in January of this year and we’ve been desperate to get to Texas for his Texan grandparents to meet him while he is still a baby, along with many other family members. At this time the expense of the plane tickets is the big holdback. My friend believes that people want to help others where they can. I agree with her, but never imagined myself on the recipient end of such kindness. In this situation though, I’m not the only one set to benefit from said charity. Memories for many that will last a lifetime. A modern day miracle if you will.

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So, here’s where you come in lovely people of the internet… you can help bring our family together by:

• Donating using the ChipIn plugin above or on the web – even $1 helps! (it uses paypal, for those wondering about security)
• Sharing this blog post in whatever format you like! Email, Facebook, etc.
• Tweet this post and hashtag #UK2TX
• If you are the praying type, add this family to your prayer list for good fortune and safe travels.
• and use any other creative form of expression you can come up with to help spread the word.