Life at Work – Page 13 – A Liddle Good News

A preview trip to Germany

One of my favorite parts of going to a movie in the theater is watching the previews. Really. I enjoy those film snippets of films. They’re long enough to give you a sense of the plot, but they’re short enough to whet your appetite for more. Right now, I’m experiencing a “preview” of the work that I will be doing long-term in Germany with Wycliffe Europe.

Last month, my colleague Martijn de Vries (of The Netherlands) invited me to assist him in providing IT support for a conference being held in a town about one hour away from the office here in Holzhausen. The conference is for people working in languages that are spoken in places where it’s not so easy to distribute Christian materials. In those situations, people have devised broadcast and distribution methods that work around the difficulties in clever and ingenious ways. Most of these methods employ electronic media such as the Internet and mobile phone systems.

So I arrived yesterday (9/23) so that next week we can help the people gathering for this event with all of their computer and Internet needs. We don’t want technical barriers to exist in their meetings, which itself exists to remove barriers to distributing the Gospel. And, of course, the Gospel’s purpose is to remove the barrier between us and God.

It’s good to meet many of the people whose names I’ve heard but whom I had not yet met. And being in the place where we will be living and working strengthens my eagerness and motivation. There is much to do, but there are too few people to do it all. May God remove the barriers to our coming and take us from the “preview” to the “feature”!

Swimming to the wall

When I was in high school, I started swimming competitively year-round. One lesson I learned from my coaches, which has impacted how I work and live, is that the athlete must always swim to the wall, in practice as well as in competition. Often, in practice, we would slow down as we approached the wall at the end of a series, and sometimes we didn’t even touch the wall to complete the distance we were supposed to swim. Our coaches hated that lazy habit and drilled us out of it. “If you do that in a race,” they said, “your effort will count for nothing – you didn’t finish the race! Always swim to the wall. Finish! And if you swim to the wall in practice, you will do it in the race.”

Would Michael Phelps have won so many gold medals in 2008 if he hadn’t swum to the wall with everything he had in him?

My email migration team and I are approaching the wall in our project. We are on an excellent pace, doing far better than I expected – we have finished more than 95% of all the accounts. I expect us to be done by the end of this month. But we can’t let up now and just coast in, and we can’t stop short of completion. The last 5% require more effort now that we’re so close.

We have a mix of people who are left. Obviously, there are folks who have put off the process as long as possible. I understand that. Do you remember worrying over the order in which kids were to present their book reports in school? Most kids wanted to be at the end – and they’re the same way now as adults! There are also people who have schedules that are difficult to accommodate, and there are people who are traveling out of the country.

This week, I have to orchestrate the migration of some accounts for a couple who are so far out in the boonies on the other side of the world that they’re not even in email contact. I have to plan this in such a way that they don’t freak out when they return to the nearest city and that there’s someone on hand who knows enough about the situation to help them “get connected” again. These people are folks I do not wish to disappoint – the fellow’s a well-respected anthropologist who helps translators understand the people they’re working with. This cultural knowledge helps the message of the translated Bible really shine into the hearts of the people who read it.

So please don’t stop praying for my team and me – we want to touch the wall at full speed! (And not just with email!)

“Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” (Paul, in Philippians 3:12-14)

Closer and closer, but …

Our little email migration project, which started with our own IT department about a year ago, is now at the 83% mark. No, that’s not a special number or anything – it’s just where we are today. Now, we are getting to the point of having only 100 accounts left to deal with, and I’m pretty excited about that – the countdown will begin soon!

The trouble that has us all pretty down, though, is the fact that the young woman that I hired back in June to help with this project is facing a lot of issues with securing continued permission to live and work in the United States. It’s not appropriate to give details, but I want to take advantage of the attention you’re giving this note to ask you to pray for her. The situation could have an awful, sorrowful end if left to humans alone.

Please pray that God would cause our sister in Christ to find favor with the authorities who will make decisions about her future. Pray for the God of peace to bring calm to her heart and fill her with faith in His ability to provide for her always, no matter what the circumstances. Pray for His Spirit to be her constant companion and comfort when the world lets her down.

Yet I myself am not worried. I know that she is in good hands, since we serve the one who said, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)