The Phil Files

A month.

30 days.

Sometimes a month can take forever — like when you are six and it’s Thanksgiving and you can’t wait till Christmas comes.

Sometimes a month seems like the blink of an eye — when you are a parent of a child home on a missions furlough or visiting a friend overseas on a month vacation or you are in the service home with your family for a month on leave.

For us, one month has seemed a bit of both. Donna and I are home tonight after a whirlwind visit to a medical center three hours away. A “routine” visit to a specialist. The interesting twist to all of this, however, is that there was awful weather — at least 3 tornadoes, high wends, hail, and flooding rains — between us and our destination and it all parted like the Red Sea for Moses. After all is said and done today … and after all that has gone on over the last month … all is well.

You see, starting a month ago, our family (either one of our parents, our children, or us) has experienced a knee replacement surgery, four separate sets of X-rays, an ultrasound, an MRI, two sets of blood work, a colonoscopy, ankle surgery, emergency trip to the hospital by ambulance, a heart cath, an arterial splint, and today’s trip to Lubbock.

So when I say it’s good to be home tonight … you understand.

When I say God has been good to us because all of this has turned out well … you understand.

In some ways, the last month has passed so quickly. In some ways, however, 30 days seems like forever ago when we started down this path.

But … we have never felt alone, singled out, or abandoned. And when Sunday, shortly after finishing my sermon and while we sang and our Shepherds prayed over the church, three of my elders encircled me and prayed thanksgiving and God’s grace on our family, I was reminded the blessing of faith and family and friends. Not a bad lesson to learn in a just a month.

“Are you guys OK?”

“Where did you go?”

“I didn’t get my daily email devotionals?”

“Our links to you didn’t work. What’s going on?”

To answer your questions with one answer, I will simply say, “Things are crazy here!” I’m in Austin and we moved our servers — 11 of them and several other key parts of our Internet services — from one side of Austin to the other. Things went very well for the early part of the move, although some of you noticed we weren’t available.

After about six hours working on things, we left our set up running just fine. Then, in the middle of the night when our email devotionals were going out, our servers overloaded the circuit they were on and all of Heartlight’s servers went down along with several church web sites, several sites we support in other countries, and all of our email services.

When we awoke this morning, it was like juggling jello — the faster and harder we worked, the messier it got. We believe everything is up and going fine, now, but not without the incredible work of John Kirkland, our chief technical guy. (John’s in the top picture looking calm, cool, and collected as he does his stuff. I’m in the bottom picture looking like a crazed unkempt maniac turned loose in the server farm.)

Anyway, we apologize for the inconvenience and the craziness and we are working to prevent this from happening again. We hope to get all the email for today out, although it will be many hours late.

Please keep us in your prayers. We have a few steps more to complete this move, including moving heartlight.org to a new, faster server. In the interim, things are crazy here … but that is kinda normal!

By His grace,

Phil