Back in my college days, I used to celebrate the month of November by writing as much as possibly as frantically as I could in the hope of finishing the next great American novel in 30 days.
It's called NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month. And you don't really have to write a novel. Not even a very good one. You just have to write 50,000 words of something. The idea is not to self-edit along the way. That slows the process down.
I can't honestly say that I've ever successfully completed a NaNo novel. I came close my first year, but I was in direct competition with someone else then. I only did it for about five years, and I always had the same problem - I couldn't stop editing as I wrote. I don't really compete anymore, but I kinda wish I did. I could use some motivation to finish one of my books.
Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Some people write books in November. Some people don't shave. To each their own. What's your November activity?
This week was pretty full. It was also an odd one. We don't usually have chapels and a prayer rally in the same week, but we had a chapel on Tuesday with Sasha, our guy in Russia. Sasha has a great story, one that has to be told in person because it can be a little unbelievable. I always enjoy listening to his reports. We also had a webinar on Thursday when we would have had a normal chapel. They are hosted by our retirement planning people, and they are all about financial stuff, budgeting and whatnot. It's good information, and Lord knows, I'm not good with money.
Our prayer rally on Wednesday reinforced the need to be good stewards with the money we have, especially as a mission organization. It was presented by our Development team. Their job is to raise money for OMS, especially specific projects. They have to account for every dollar that comes in, and OMS tries really hard to make sure that all money that comes in is used responsibly. That sometimes means not funding certain projects if they don't align with our principles.
One of the things we did was pray specifically for our donors. I would hope that all of our missionaries do that regularly, but I want to assure you that I pray for you every week. I'm not always able to interact with all donors, but if you ever need prayer for anything, please let me know. We have a whole network of prayer warriors that we can bring to bear.
I've also been doing a little more retreat planning this week. It's my job to moderate the Secret Santa gift exchange, which means I got to choose who buys for whom. Don't assume that I cheated, either. I found a scientific method for true randomness in assigning names to people on YouTube. (Full disclosure: I may have offered preferential treatment to certain people, but they declined.) The system worked really well. I would recommend it to any office or church environment looking to do any kind of random selection. But it takes a lot of time to compile information and send it out and make sure you're not sending the wrong info to the wrong person.
One side project that took some serious time this week was fixing some old files. For some reason, the Bengali files couldn't be printed. So I had to remove security from 64 files and then put new security on the same 64 files. It's tedious and repetitive work. I feel like I use those words a lot for what I do. I don't mean to sound like I don't enjoy it. My personality is well suited to the tedious and repetitive tasks. Just not all the time.
So with all of this going on, you might be led to believe that I wasn't able to finish the four groups of Portuguese files I had left over from last week.
You would be wrong.
I finished all booklets, even the extra stuff that we've changed along the way. This is something that kind of drives me crazy. We spent more than a year getting the English books updated and polished, and we're still finding all kinds of crap that needs to be fixed. Some of it is a must, some of it is okay to leave for a while, but I am keeping a running list of things to change for the next edition.
Ugh.
Whatever. Portuguese is done. I'm ready for the next project.
It's called NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month. And you don't really have to write a novel. Not even a very good one. You just have to write 50,000 words of something. The idea is not to self-edit along the way. That slows the process down.
I can't honestly say that I've ever successfully completed a NaNo novel. I came close my first year, but I was in direct competition with someone else then. I only did it for about five years, and I always had the same problem - I couldn't stop editing as I wrote. I don't really compete anymore, but I kinda wish I did. I could use some motivation to finish one of my books.
Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Some people write books in November. Some people don't shave. To each their own. What's your November activity?
This week was pretty full. It was also an odd one. We don't usually have chapels and a prayer rally in the same week, but we had a chapel on Tuesday with Sasha, our guy in Russia. Sasha has a great story, one that has to be told in person because it can be a little unbelievable. I always enjoy listening to his reports. We also had a webinar on Thursday when we would have had a normal chapel. They are hosted by our retirement planning people, and they are all about financial stuff, budgeting and whatnot. It's good information, and Lord knows, I'm not good with money.
Our prayer rally on Wednesday reinforced the need to be good stewards with the money we have, especially as a mission organization. It was presented by our Development team. Their job is to raise money for OMS, especially specific projects. They have to account for every dollar that comes in, and OMS tries really hard to make sure that all money that comes in is used responsibly. That sometimes means not funding certain projects if they don't align with our principles.
One of the things we did was pray specifically for our donors. I would hope that all of our missionaries do that regularly, but I want to assure you that I pray for you every week. I'm not always able to interact with all donors, but if you ever need prayer for anything, please let me know. We have a whole network of prayer warriors that we can bring to bear.
I've also been doing a little more retreat planning this week. It's my job to moderate the Secret Santa gift exchange, which means I got to choose who buys for whom. Don't assume that I cheated, either. I found a scientific method for true randomness in assigning names to people on YouTube. (Full disclosure: I may have offered preferential treatment to certain people, but they declined.) The system worked really well. I would recommend it to any office or church environment looking to do any kind of random selection. But it takes a lot of time to compile information and send it out and make sure you're not sending the wrong info to the wrong person.
One side project that took some serious time this week was fixing some old files. For some reason, the Bengali files couldn't be printed. So I had to remove security from 64 files and then put new security on the same 64 files. It's tedious and repetitive work. I feel like I use those words a lot for what I do. I don't mean to sound like I don't enjoy it. My personality is well suited to the tedious and repetitive tasks. Just not all the time.
So with all of this going on, you might be led to believe that I wasn't able to finish the four groups of Portuguese files I had left over from last week.
You would be wrong.
I finished all booklets, even the extra stuff that we've changed along the way. This is something that kind of drives me crazy. We spent more than a year getting the English books updated and polished, and we're still finding all kinds of crap that needs to be fixed. Some of it is a must, some of it is okay to leave for a while, but I am keeping a running list of things to change for the next edition.
Ugh.
Whatever. Portuguese is done. I'm ready for the next project.
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