From a baptism service in an Anglican church and the Canons of Dort in English, to a new server strategy and a finance server acting up during a worldwide training week.
These past few days were a great mix of new impressions, familiar encounters, and plenty of troubleshooting in the server room.
On Sunday morning, I attended an Anglican church here in Singapore. They happened to have a baptism service. It was special to experience, yet very different from what I am used to in the Netherlands. The liturgy, the style, and the entire structure felt completely new, but it was encouraging to see how faith is lived out here.
In the evening, I went to the First Evangelical Reformed Church. That felt remarkably familiar and was almost identical to my home church. The interesting part: they use the Heidelberg Catechism and the Canons of Dort, translated into English. Hearing those familiar texts on the other side of the world was quite an experience. After the service, I even met a few fellow Dutch people to chat with.
Monday was all about servers again. In my previous post, I mentioned that we might power on the retired physical servers. Today we made a decision: we are keeping those ten old machines turned off for now. Instead, we are setting up one powerful, modern server to restore all those backups onto. That way, the original systems remain untouched, we verify our backups right away, and we save a lot of electricity. Running three or four virtual systems inside a single server uses far less power than ten old machines humming away in the tropical heat.
Meanwhile, our current finance server also demanded attention today. For an organization like OMF, financial administration is critical to support missionaries worldwide. The central finance administration has already transitioned to the new system, but several regional offices are currently still operating through the old server, with both systems synchronizing in the background. This entire week, finance staff from all over the world are gathered in Singapore for training and hands-on experience with the new package. The goal is for everyone to work independently with the new system after this week, so the old server can be retired in a few weeks. But right on cue today, that old server started acting up, resulting in a striking Windows critical error (see photo).
Please pray along for all the finance workers being trained in Singapore this week, and for stability on the servers during this transition period. It is exciting to see everything coming together and to feel the work gaining momentum.
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Written from Singapore