Did you ever have one of those times or seasons where challenging things keep happening? I can totally relate. I suppose most people can. Here is a little bit about what I recently was working on and how I kept in peace through it (unlike I would have been in times past). This last couple of weeks had many technical challenges. Of course, even technical challenges seem to have a spiritual warfare side to them, especially when the technology I’m working with is for distributing God’s Word all over the world. I thought that we had 22 web sites and 1 ftp site running reliably all on 2 servers in my home office. Then we started getting short intermittent outages that I initially could not explain. I almost figured that out when the contractors working on paving our driveway found our fiber optic cable with their shovel. That blue conduit in the picture, above, got pulled and it broke the little fiber optic cable inside. Fortunately, we have a backup Internet connection (Starlink), but it wasn’t yet set up to automatically take over. For technical reasons, it is not possible to serve web sites over a Starlink connection the same way I was doing with the Fioptics connection without some sort of external service. I spent a lot of time setting the necessary external services in place to make it so that I could seamlessly deliver Bibles through either or both Internet connections. While I was doing that, I had additional failures in two of the external services. It was a big mess, and I admit that I’m tired, but I’m still full of joy. Why?
Grace. God knows that I was in over my head with technical challenges, but He helped me to calmly figure things out and get the digital Bibles flowing at high speed, again.
Perspective. We have been through much worse than a temporary digital Bible flow disruption, and God always helps us through our trials.
James 1:2-6 isn’t in our Bible by accident. It is truth I repeatedly find helpful as I live it. Overcoming adversity really does bear good fruit in our lives.
INTERNET IN THE JUNGLE
Working on technical issues can be dry, and a broken fiber optic cable isn’t fun to look at. But it helps me to keep in mind the people I’m helping and the Bible translators that work in remote places. Above is a picture of some cute children from Bulal Village, Madang Province, Papua New Guinea (below). They were literally our neighbors for a while. At the time I took that picture, it was about a mile walk round trip to get to the nearest working telephone, the nearest electrical power, and the nearest cold soft drinks. Today, there is mobile phone and Internet service in that same village, and many people there have smart phones, so distributing Bibles in tribal languages like they speak doesn’t seem so silly any more.
Please Keep Praying
- Thank God that he helps us with technical stuff that helps keep the digital Bibles flowing!
- Thank God for peace in adversity.
- Pray for Lori and I to stay healthy and active in ministry.
- Pray that I would properly triage the work that comes to me and do the ones that God regards as important in His way and in His time, and not get distracted by the other stuff.
How can we pray for you, today?
Thank you for your part in our Ministry!
May God bless you!