Audrey and Justin

We are excited that Audrey got engaged! Justin is his name, and we’re so happy for them and for having Justin join our family. The wedding project planning is now underway.

Audrey met Justin shortly after he finished his service in the Marine Corps four years ago. She has lived near him in Athens, Georgia the last year or so while he finishes his degree at University of Georgia. (We are Bulldog fans, now, too.) He plans a career in golf course management after graduation next May with a Turfgrass Science degree.

Christmas 2017

This is as good as we could manage for a family Christmas picture this year! Justin, Audrey’s boyfriend, and Sadie, Audrey’s black lab, were also here with us. This was the first year in a long time that Annie was not with us. Shortly after Christmas last year she went to dog heaven. She is survived by Mama Cat.

Our house AFTER the hurricane

Thank you for your prayers for our safety and that we would have minimum damage. For us this was true, so we are very grateful. We also had no anxiety during the storm, despite the whole things being like… a hurricane. We got a good night’s sleep (and kept an eye on how things developed during the night).

Today was clean up day, checking on the neighbors, and getting ready to get back to our regular work tomorrow.

Thanks again for your concern for us and for your prayers!

The picture here is AFTER the hurricane. You’ll have to look hard to see the difference between the BEFORE pic; a few less leaves on the tree.

Boarded up and ready for Irma

We are staying in Orlando for Hurricane Irma. Our option to leave probably expired two days ago when Miami had a mandatory evacuation and filled all the northbound highways and used all the gasoline. They certainly needed those things more than we did! The risk of running out of gas on the highway and then getting hit by a hurricane while on the side of the road seemed worse than staying home and getting one of our windows broken. And now the forecasts say the winds in Orlando should be 100 mph or less, so this is better news.

Earlier in the week making this decision was pretty stressful. Canceling all your life’s plans based on uncertain forecasts that always change at the last minute is difficult. And when Irma was Category 5 and might have traveled up the east coastline and kept its energy, that could be dangerous for us.

In the end, we asked God to give us wisdom, and we made a decision to stay. Now we depend on God’s protection, and we are at peace with this. But tomorrow when hurricane winds are blowing around our house we might not feel so peaceful!

We would appreciate your prayers for safety, of course. And that God would dissipate the storm, minimize damage, etc.

CCCI Deployment Planning Team

This is the team which did the initial planning for our new global financial software.

This will be a long project: planning and configuration should be complete by July 2018 when we will begin migrating our country ministries onto the new platform. By the end of 2018 we plan to have over 150 country ministries moved onto the new system.

Andrew and Audrey at graduation

Andrew has been working full time in Orlando rebuilding antique Japanese sports cars (Nissan Skylines), and Audrey plans to finish the summer in Tallahassee then move to Georgia for a year before pursuing a graduate degree.

We are so proud of our kids!

Originally we had expected to have a new accounting software package, appropriate for our small and medium sized ministries, selected, tested, and installed in three locations. Instead we decided to consider changing our entire global financial service structure and select an accounting software package which could handle all our global financial needs, including things which require systems typically outside the realm of accounting (payroll and donations processing).

The project got much larger in scope along the way, and the range of people involved in the project widened as well.

In the next couple weeks our regional leaders from Asia and the Europe/Africa corridor will meet to decide how we should proceed. Ultimately they will be the ones to select which financial package we use and what financial service structure we build.

Hopefully the process we ran with this project yielded the information they will need to make a good decision. I think so.

The next phase of the overall project will be deploying the systems needed to support the global financial structure we decide on. That phase will likely take a year – to install, configure, and write all the modified software to make a new global system work. And I don’t yet know exactly what my role in this part of the process will be.

MOFEM Group

This is the group of financial experts from around the CCCI world which met in Orlando recently to rank several financial products. The meeting was the culmination of a year of product research, requirements gathering, and user interviews. It was just a few minutes before this picture was taken that I experienced a significant sense of accomplishment – when the last person wrote their name and their product preference “vote” on the board!

Oh ya, MOFEM stands for March Orlando Financial Experts Meeting. I couldn’t come up with any better name.

This point really just marked the end of a phase of the overall project I have been leading to replace CCCI’s global financial software. There is still some additional research to complete, a contract to negotiate, an implementation consulting firm to hire, and a several-year project to migrate our 150+ country ministries to this new financial platform.

This was a really fun group, and the good thing is that I have the next few years to look forward to working with them as we get this project completed!

Feel free to drop me a line using the Contact Us form or find us on Facebook.