Dear wonderful Refreshing Hope Family,

As we close out another year and look back on 2025, I want to extend my heartfelt gratitude to each of you for being an integral part of our journey here at Refreshing Hope Ministries. Whether you've joined us through reading our devotionals, watching our videos, or listening to our music, your presence and support are deeply valued. It is beautiful to see the community the Lord is building at RHM! I pray this message finds you warm, safe, and happy, covered by the presence of the Lord wherever you happen to be.

We have continued developing the Refreshing Hope website, our "ecosystem," and have pushed over 250 updates live during 2025. I designed two "mirrored" servers where I can use one for development and testing, then, when features are ready, push them to the live server with no downtime. The next time you load the page, the changes appear. With this system, we have 100% uptime.

* We now have an extremely powerful web server capable of supporting thousands of simultaneous users. I hand-picked the parts, buying only what was necessary, and built two for 1/5 of what we would have spent on comparable Dells: 64-Core AMD EPYC, 256GB RAM, 7 x NVMe drives in RAID 10, 10GB network connection. No bottlenecks.

* RHM currently gets about 15,000 unique guests a day with about 70,000 page views. About 90% of traffic is from guests, and it is not uncommon to see 500+ users active on the site while only 20 are logged in. We see about 350 logins a day.

* We added a new multi-stage hourly backup system with local, off-site, and cloud backup so we can recover all in an emergency. We have invested years in our content, and we need to protect it.

* We added a new portable propane generator that can run for several days in the event of a hurricane or extended power outage. We still have to flip the transfer switches manually, but it only takes a few minutes to switch over. One day, we hope to install an automated Generac, but it keeps getting pushed to the back of our to-do list, as those events are pretty rare here.

* We finally got fiber optic internet installed! I have waited for years for fiber to be available here, and we got it installed this summer. It took our upload speed from 20 Mbps to 2,000 Mbps. 100 times faster, for such a time as this.

* We upgraded to a new firewall and network switches to fully utilize the new internet connection. We now have our internal network and servers running at 10 Gbps. We can support many more simultaneous users and live-stream without bottlenecks.

* One big update we made is adding weekly Bible Quizzes with a scoreboard. We have about a hundred Bible Quizzes now and are adding new ones weekly. They are paired with a devotion, and it is a great way to reinforce what you learn. Many new members are finding us through the quizzes.

* We added an Audio Library that contains our original music and a live service archive. There is a pop-out audio player so you can build your own playlist and listen even while browsing other sites. You can also download them to listen to later.

* We created an RHM Web App that you can install on most devices, which is cleaner and faster. It turns the site into an installable Progressive Web App, and you can enable notifications in your profile settings.

* We added themes so you can customize the website to be light or dark, blue, purple, green, pink, silver, gold, or a combination of colors. You can find those under "Theme Settings."

* We added the ASV, KJV, and WEB Bible translations, which you can set in your profile settings. When you click a Bible reference, it will be shown in that format. There is also a basic Bible search page.

* We now offer a weekly digest of the devotionals if one per day is too much. You can find that under your profile -> subscriptions.

* We added SMS Text notifications so you can get the devotional sent to your phone.

* We have added geo-fencing to block shady locations from creating accounts or logging in. They can still read the devotionals and take quizzes, but not post or message members.

* We added a "Read Aloud" button to devotionals to help the vision impaired and those on the go.

* We have recently started a Refreshing Hope YouTube channel and are uploading our video devotionals there: https://www.youtube.com/@refreshinghope. If the videos have ads, they are not ours but put on there by YouTube. We try to keep our website, emails, and channels ad-free.

Of course, there are so many other changes and features like our small groups, prayer network, live streams, and chat, but those are some highlights of what has been happening behind the scenes. We have made over 600 updates since launch, with new features arriving weekly: https://www.refreshinghope.org/changes.

We have put together a slideshow for you with pictures taken throughout 2025. We spend hundreds of hours working at computers, but that isn’t much to look at, so here are some photos that capture the moments of our lives when we are not in front of a computer screen. These are the days of our lives. We hope you enjoy it. We love you. God loves you, and He put us here for such a time as this!