RHM Newsletter 34: 2019 Year-end Wrap-up
Posted by Dion Todd December 18th, 2019 4,809 Views 0 Comments
And Mordecai told them to answer Esther: “Do not think in your heart that you will escape in the king’s palace any more than all the other Jews. For if you remain completely silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. Yet who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” Esther 4:13–14 NKJV
For such a time as this…that is why we are here. For such a time as this…
Thank you for reading the Daily Word of Hope devotional and for being a part of our online church here at Refreshing Hope Ministries. I hope that this message finds you blessed, healthy, and happy. Merry Christmas to you and may you have a Happy New Year!
I just wanted to touch base with you, our readers and supporters, and let you know what has been going on here and some things that are coming. These days we include most of the news in the footer of the devotional but I like to do a summary at the end of the year and reflect on where we are headed.
As I prayed over what to write about, I heard “For such a time as this…”. I thought back on the journey to this time, and how it was completely guided by His hand. When I was much younger, He had told me that I would be in ministry one day and to prepare myself for it. So when I graduated from seminary and was ordained over twenty years ago, I expected to go into ministry then. Instead I ended up in information technology, working on more complicated computer systems each year.
It began with things like simply reinstalling the operating system, but eventually I found myself dealing with racks of load balancing Linux mail server clusters, behind layers of firewalls. Each time I would get comfortable, He would increase the difficulty. He had a plan that I did not know about. After years of working with computers instead of ministry, I felt that I had missed Him. Then suddenly our computer business dried up, I had a vision of myself climbing into a boxing ring, and 48 hours later I was in full-time ministry.
Now we use the skills that we learned along the way to spread His gospel around the world using computers, over the internet. It was for such a time as this. The days here are full of obstacles: a load balancer fails, a hard drive dies, a network switch begins chattering, a database query hangs randomly. That is in addition to the daily work of ministering and praying for the flock at RHM. Leading a church over the Internet with people from all over the world, has truly been a blessing to us, as we pray it has been for all of you. Naturally, it comes with its own unique challenges, both technical and personal. Sometimes communications may be difficult to get through, at other times intentions may be misunderstood. He has prepared us for all of it and we will overcome.
The Lord is efficient and He wastes nothing. The time that I spent playing music in bands, prepared me for writing and recording songs for Him to use during our live church services over the internet. If you are like me, then you probably will not even see what He has prepared you for until you are doing it and looking backwards.
Enough about the past, let’s talk about the future. The Lord has brought us here for such a time as this and He has put the skills in our life to do some exciting things at Refreshing Hope Ministries. The online church features have grown over the years, with services like the prayer network, the music player, live video streaming, groups and Bible quizzes. To this point, we have been using a variety of technologies all bandaged together to make Refreshing Hope work. What I mean is that the website is standalone, the live streaming is standalone, the chat system is standalone, the mail system is standalone, the audio recording is standalone, and it all works together only because of scripts that we wrote.
It has worked well enough to get us where we are, but I feel that it is time to create our own mobile friendly ecosystem so our possibilities are not limited by others’ design. It would allow us to do so much more, like integrate the entire Bible into the website with searches and references, take a randomly generated Bible quiz on any chapter of the Bible, as well as streamline things like creating accounts, subscribing, messaging and submitting prayer requests. It would also do away with maintaining and monitoring a dozen different systems. We believe this will all also make the website easier to use and navigate, and help the devotionals get received more reliably.
To do this will take a good bit of time in the background, designing, writing, coding, testing, as well as keeping up with the things that we are already doing, but when launched it could be so worth it. The idea came to me at the end of our last fast, and I believe that this is the right path for us over the next season.
Other news:
Bible Studies: We have completed detailed chapter by chapter Bible studies with accompanying videos and quizzes for the books of Luke and Acts for those that have not seen them. We plan to continue on with the Gospel of John next.
Video Devotionals: Adding to our written devotionals, we now have over 60 short (10 minutes or less) video devotionals. Some prefer those so we are working on new ones each week.
Live Meetings: We have live interactive church meetings over the internet each week, currently on Sunday mornings at 10 AM Eastern time. There is a chat room where you can type prayer requests and I can pray for you over live video. People are making friends, a church family is developing and it is a real blessing to those who do not currently have a church, or are disabled.
New Music CD: “I Choose You” We are very close to releasing our second praise and worship CD called: “I Choose You” which is based on Joshua 24:15: “And if it seems evil to you to serve the LORD, choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.” (Joshua 24:15 NKJV).
The CD will have twelve songs on it written, recorded, mixed, and mastered by me here in our little home studio. It began when I was praying and researching on how we could legally stream praise over the internet during our church services, and I suddenly heard a song playing in my head. Then I realized that: A) I had never heard the song before, B) It was me singing it, and C) If it was ours then we could use it any way that we liked without any legal drama. So I began to write it down and figure the chords out on my guitar, and it became a song. That has now happened over 30 times, and this is our second CD of them. For such a time as this…
Devotional Books: Someone asked me recently about where they could find our books: We put them on Amazon and we currently have four on there. Here is a link to my author page: https://www.amazon.com/Dion-Todd/e/B00NY59B9E If you have our enjoyed our devotionals, please leave us a review when you have time.
I just want to take a moment and say thank you so very much to each of you that have prayed for us, supported us, and just took a moment to encourage us to keep going. We would not be here without your help. Please remember us in your year-end giving. Your gifts, no matter how small, and your prayers and words of encouragement, make all the difference to us here.
May the Lord fulfill His will in Your life, open the right doors for you and your family, protect, provide, comfort, and guide you throughout this coming year, in the name of Jesus Christ I pray. Amen.
Pastor Dion