(found this at Honiara, Solomon Islands at Henderson Field....a key victory by the U.S. over the Japanese in the south pacific)
I am now a manager of a section in my department. We are in charge of repairing and maintaining all the laptops/desktops and servers, the telephones, and the software of in this country. Since I'm the manager, I thought that I finally should share my passion for this work. I thought I'd share it with you too.
When a Bible translator puts their laptop in your hands to repair, when they entrust their internet communication to you, when they trust their hard work in the form of data to your backup system.... they are putting in your hands their ministry tools.
We are responsible for many of the tools that people use to get the Word of God into the hearts and minds of people in this country.
Because of this we should give them the utmost professionalism. We need to deserve their trust. We need to have excellence in how we deal with these tools, so that we can glorify God with our skills.
And that's what we do.
When you come to our department, you are not getting third world technical support. You get first class, professional help. That is what our aim is, that is what we have achieved and endeavor to continue achieving.
Sometimes we get very fortunate and get to do something glamorous like flying to the Solomon Islands or to a regional centre like Buka (leaving for there in 1 hour) and get to do something that is good and hard work. We get to take awesome pictures that help our people back home realize we're not always at a desk.
We get to install satellite dishes, run cabling, climb ladders, dig trenches, run conduit, patch cables, crimp connectors, raise antennas, work with nationals, etc.
But that isn't every day. 9/10 days we'll be at our desks, accepting broken hardware, and repairing it.
We do this so that these tools can go on serving God's purpose. So that His Word can get into the language of the people in this country and their lives would be changed by it.
We work on tools. We do so to glorify God with the skills we were given.
But as we work on tools, we work WITH people.
We get to treat them with love, and care. Let them know they are valued help in this common goal of seeing lives changed by God's Word.
We work with the people who trust us with their tools.
We work with the people who enable us to be here.
We work with each other as we need help fixing these tools.
We work with people whom Christ loves, and whom we will treat with love.
And this is how we justify why we get to do this work.
It is exciting and fun and rewarding to be serving God.
Let us not get discouraged by losing sight of why we're here in this country.
We are here because we are fortunate enough to be sent here by all the people whom God has worked in to get us here.
EACH person who supports us to be here has a story of why they support us, how they met us, why they sacrifice to send us here.
We are indeed blessed to be doing this work. What better job to have with your skills, than to be serving in the King's court?
Some people want to do something more exciting. There are a lot of exciting jobs out there. Sitting at a tech bench and fixing computers may sound like the most boring job to some people.
But I get excited.
My life has been a non-stop series of surprises and excitement since signing my life over to Christ.
I look down at this modem I'm repairing, and I imagine it is making it's way into a village. And it's being connected to a solar panel/inverter system that a co-worker setup. And it's getting power, and turned on.
And then it starts sending and receiving data, and that data is the latest revision of Mark in the Kuman language. And it travels through the radio waves, across hf-radio, over an antenna that another team member installed, and into our servers here.
Onto our file server, and our tape backup, and it will never be lost. And then, eventually that data gets printed out and put into the hands of someone who previously thought God didn't speak in their language.
And they are changed.
And that excites me. The same way it should excite the guy who makes the bolts and screws to hold together the antenna tower. OR the electrician who powers the whole thing. Or the radio technician who makes sure we are experiencing low interference.
There are things we know, feats we are capable of, that we can employ to serve God and enable the feats that OTHERS are capable of to see fruition.
So this job excites me, and I'm honored to be doing it.
