Monday, August 29, 2005

The big picture?

This morning Pete and I spent the time together talking about the plans for the future… and praying a little. We decided this will be what we do each morning this week. It's very easy for us to get caught in the hussle and bussle of every day work without seeing where we are going.

For instance, one project we have been working on is a gateway between SMS mobile phone messages and a secure website, so that people responding to the radio stations can send SMS messages. It had been causing us grief keeping it all working and we were wondering if it was worthwhile. At a meeting a few weeks back we found that there were about 15 messages per day going through the system and growing. This sort of thing helps us focus on why we are doing what we are doing… rather than just doing it!

Pete's feeling a bit under stress with keeping all the Internet stuff going and we really need more technical support. We have so little free resources that even trying to improve things can end up causing problems elsewhere. Of course, this is the story of non-profit organizations the world over, but it doesn't ease the stress.

Anyhow I spent the afternoon catching up on email and helping Peter with one of the problems that is bugging us. We have two ADSL connections to the Internet. This is both to increase the bandwidth we have available and to have some redundancy. The redundancy is the problem. We want to allow people to connect to us on the second link if the first goes down. Sounds easy, but implementing is somewhat more difficult. At 6pm we left the office with it still not working.

So, back to the big picture… there are way more things we could do than have manpower and money to do, so deciding/finding out from God which we should do is the issue. Please pray that we find out God's will for what we should do in the next 12 months and what we should not do! Oh, and while you're about it, pray for more people to help us and the money we need, particuarly the money needed to cover the costs of such mundane things as the rent.

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