What do you do on the computer day and night?

Say what? by kahunapulej
Say what?, a photo by kahunapulej on Flickr. The inscription on this rock reminds me of some of the digital archeology I do in processing older Bible texts.

Here is what I do in place of a full-time job, in a nutshell:

  • Seek permission to publish Bibles electronically for free, with no copy restrictions, which God moves copyright owners to provide;
  • Process Bible texts and audio recordings in a variety of formats to make them publishable;
  • Write free and open source software to assist in the publication process;
  • Operate high-capacity web servers to host Bible sites;
  • Create and maintain Bible web sites in many languages;
  • Register domain names for those web sites;
  • Coordinate with others doing similar work;
  • Continue translation work on the World English Bible; and
  • Keep communicating with you, because we really need your prayer support in this battle.

In addition to all of that, I try to keep balanced in being a good husband and father, paying the bills, helping out at church, and whatever else the Lord asks of me.

That is a long list that involves different kinds of work. In a “normal” commercial company, one person wouldn’t do all of those things. I really can’t do them all at the same time, but I concentrate on one thing at a time, then switch to something else on the list. For a while, I was moving ahead with great speed on processing Bible texts. I caught up on that (i.e. I’m getting new translations much slower than I can post them), so for the last couple of weeks, I laid that aside, and worked on software development.

My current push in software development is to make a bridge between the file formats used by Bible translators and those used by Bible study software publishers, just as I already made a bridge to go to HTML for web sites. There are many Bible study program formats, so my first priority has been to support The Sword Project, which includes free and open source Bible study programs for Windows, Mac OS X, Android, iOS, and Linux. Converting between the two formats used to be a manual labor-intensive process, because the conversion involves much more than simple replacements. I’m trying to automate it as much as practical, because I have literally hundreds of translations to process. I just reached a major milestone in that conversion process, and I’m about half way there.

I’m excited. It isn’t just the fun of doing something technically challenging and getting it to work. It is knowing that what we do gets the life-changing Word of God to more people in more languages and more places than ever before. This isn’t just some video game. This is about working with Jesus Christ to populate Heaven with redeemed people to praise God! That is why we live on donations instead of a regular salary.

Thank you for your prayers and support!