This past Saturday my church partnered with Stop Hunger Now

with the goal of packaging 10,000 nutritious meals for distribution to some of the world’s most vulnerable people.  What an amazing experience it was!  Stop Hunger Now has developed a process of bringing raw materials and volunteers together to accomplish the “moving of the mountain” of hunger in a way that energizes a spirit of service among the participants.

In the weeks leading up to the big day we promoted the event in our neighborhood and raised the necessary funds to pay for the food we would be packaging.  We had hoped to have about 50 volunteers for the event.  When we gathered in the fellowship hall at Forest Hills United Methodist Church just before 10:00 am, we had over 100 volunteers!  Groups had come from Temple Terrace UMC, Lake Magdalene UMC, First UMC of Lutz, Saint Timothy Catholic Church, Lake Carroll Baptist Church, Oak Grove UMC, and neighbors from all around us.

Robert Samuels, the Stop Hunger Now program manager for Orlando, FL instructed us in forming teams to perform the necessary steps and we went to work.  It was like a perfectly orchestrated symphony of human effort striving toward a goal that was larger than life. (more…)

How did I end up in cyber hell and how do I get out?

I imagine you have heard that when you are on the path God wants and doing the work to build His kingdom, that the devil will come after you with all he has got to impede and discourage you. Well my friends, I have been in preparation for a mission trip these past few weeks, and each and every thing I have needed to do, the enemy has showed up to test my resolve.

This is how I ended up in cyber hell.

It all started with the discovery of over 7000 system errors on my computer, which prevented my antivirus from running. I had already acquired a larger computer that I planned to migrate to after the trip, so at least I was not at the center of cyber hell, only on the fringes. So began the migration project with a computer on either side of me, downloading files to an external drive on my right, and deleting all of the unnecessary files on the “new” computer on my left – about 170 GB of them. I brought that computer back to its pristine state without the aid of those convenient system discs. Then moved on to about 100 GB of stuff on the old computer to move to the new one, including passwords, bookmarks, address books and such. That was my first 2 days in cyber hell, and the enemy was pretty p – o’d that I came through it so well.

The “new” computer had precious little RAM for my multitasking, and of course the extra memory card I had in my old computer was not the correct one, so I ordered a 2G set from Crucial, and got back to my mission trip preparations while I waited for the memory cads to arrive.  That was when I started setting up a new laptop computer to be taken to a pastor overseas.  This laptop replaced the old computer to my right, and as I tried to install a few things while catching up on 3 days of email I was behind from my previous adventures in cyber hell, it took me to cyber hell again. Every time I turned around, that little notebook was rebooting… critical updates, more on that later.

What should have taken just an hour or two was dragging into the wee hours of the night again. I was feeling pretty lucky if I got 6 hours of sleep a night through those several days of cyber hell.  Fast forward to Wednesday and my RAM has arrived. I am so pumped knowing how awesome the computer will be once I get that RAM installed!  So I crawl up under my desk to open the box and pop in the cards, and to my amazement everything goes perfectly (except some funkiness with the connector latches) I slide the panel back in to close up the box and get ready to get back online. I push the start button and… black screen with blue box says no signal… back in cyber hell! .

I was convinced it must have something to do with all of the trouble those pesky latches gave me, and so I opened the box up to remove and reinstalled the cards a bunch of times with no success getting the computer to run.  By now I am freaking out.  All that work to move the files and now this computer is dead!  This, I am convinced, is the deepest center of cyber hell.  Next I called the IT manager where I work on his cell phone even though I knew he was probably cooking Wednesday night dinner for his church.  He walked me through some troubleshooting steps and determined it was probably the video card and told me to bring it in in the morning and he would take a look at it.   I was devastated.

As I was closing up the case to pack it into the car, my hand brushed by a yellow plastic button with a black arrow on it and it moved.  Hmmmm, I wonder what that thing is… so I pushed it to see how far it would move.  Click, buzz, hum, the system fired up and worked flawlessly!  Thank you Jesus!  Imagine that, a reset button.  I was free from cyber hell… but not for long.  It was time to get back to the pastor’s computer.

Back to a computer on my right and another on my left.  As I was organizing my “new” computer I was setting up the one for the pastor, loading some programs he wanted and getting all those windows updates that you need when you fire up a new one out of the box.  I was back in restart cyber hell.  I would be in the middle of loading software, and while I stepped away for just a second, windows would do it’s automatic restart and I would have to start my install over gain. I don’t know how many times that happened, but it was 2:oo am when I finally got out of cyber hell and off to bed that night.

Finally I was ready to start on the last computer… another one that was being sent overseas to a pastor in need.  I thought I was done with cyber hell, but noooooo… after the easiest setup of all on a quite old Dell netbook, I thought I was done.  I was doing a final run through of settings and such, and navigated to the mic and speakers to set the volume levels.  You will never guess what happened… I was right back in cyber hell again!  The system could not see the sound components.  I wrestled with it for another couple of hours, finding drivers and updates and troubleshooting tools, all to no avail, and at midnight, I packed it up to take to a pro I know the next morning, to see if he could make it behave.  Long story short, I had a perfectly running deaf mute computer and that would not do.  Would my time in cyber hell never end?

On my way home from work that day I started making calls to find another laptop donation.  I scored!  This one was even older, windows 2000.  I was told it had some bumps and bruises, but ran fine and everything worked, so I ran to meet my friend that had it and brought it home to get started. I had less than 24 hours to get it done and delivered to the gal that would be taking it overseas… and the lions share of that 24 hours would be needed for sleep and work the next day.

I was getting used to cyber hell by now, so I checked the obvious stuff first.  It took me 10 minutes and a frustrated phone call for help just to find out where the power button was.  Within about 15 minutes of powering it up I discovered that the right hand side of the qwerty keyboard (that doubled as the calculator on those dinosaurs), was frozen on numbers and would not release back to letters. I could not expect the pastor to get much use out of a computer that only supported half of the alphabet, and there I was in cyber hell again, and running out of time.

Did I mention that with all of this going on, I had not made a blog post in close to two weeks and my rankings were visibly sliding lower.  The time had come for drastic action, so I did what we Americans do best.  I got out my WalMart card and I went shopping!  If Satan was that dead set on this pastor not having a computer, then I knew I had to make sure he got one.

After I got home with a new Compaq and set it up, I started downloading updates  hoping to correct a little glitch on the new computer.  I had set it for the correct time zone, U.S. Eastern time, but it was four hours ahead of the correct time for reasons I could not begin to understand.  Maybe that’s what time it was in cyber hell.  I was ready for bed as it was well past a working woman’s bed time yet again.  I stopped at the refrigerator to get a glass of water only to find the bread dough that I had gotten out and put back several times over the evening as my plans had changed… (I know what you are thinking, who in their right mind would try to bake bread in cyber hell) the bread dough had swollen to well past the limits of the pan it was in, for the second time.  My choices were clear, throw it out, or stay up and bake it.

So, I am completing this post as the bread bakes.  I am just too stubborn to let Satan steal my bread.  The pastors will have their computers, and while I eat a fat sandwich on fresh baked bread, Satan can eat my dust!

Blessings & Adventure,

Lynn “lynnibug” Rios

I have been to cyber hell and with God’s help I have conquered it!

Most of us think of community as the group we hang with at school, at church, or in the city or town where we live.

We may, if we are church goers, consider ourselves part of the community of believers, which is a broader world vision, but still a community in which we do not personally know those we “commune” with.  Over the past several months, I have experienced a much broader sense of community as I have ventured into internet ministry.

Just for kicks, I decided to search this term I had come up with, ‘World Collage‘, and to my surprise I found artwork and even puzzles based on this phrase.  Photographer Guy Shachar has created a beautiful collage from pieces of photos from Israel, Vietnam, Thailand, Nepal, India, Austria, France, England, Mexico, United States and Canada.

Since launching One Month of Wisdom, I have connected to a beautiful mosaic of precious people throughout the world.

What was once just a big blue marble, is now, in my mind, a World Collage…a smattering of this and that from across the globe, that is, in every sense of the word, my community.  I have chatted online with them, I have prayed with them, and I have even taken a walk down their street in Google® street view maps.  Oh how the world has changed! (more…)