It was a tough month for me as my grandfather passed away just a couple weeks ago. Though he rarely seemed it, the man was actually 100 years old. His passing was peacefully and pain free, so in that I can rest easier. His health had diminished and it was simply his time. Unfortunatly, I didn’t get to go back for the funeral, but when I called home I heard what sounded to be a party going on in the background. My dad went on to explain that everyone had got together to have a part to celebrate my grandfathers life. I thought that was pretty freakin’ cool.

Back when I was in college and working at my dad’s machine shop there was Pop in his late 80’s at that point, working right along side me, elbow to elbow, just about every day. The times he wasn’t working the man was usually out back with a cigar in his mouth making fishing lures for his annual fishing trips to Canada. It’s hard to believe that not too many years ago he was still driving from Florida to Canada on his own to do some ice fishing for months at a time.

Every time I was back home visiting he would always invite me into his house and want to hear stories. So there we sat, eating Entenmann’s cookies sharing stories with one another.

I will miss the cookies Pop. I will miss the conversations.

Last year I had one intern working in my department helping me out with a lot of design work and just about anything else I might have needed a hand with. This year is a little different story. Not only do I have two interns in my department this year, but each of them have specific skill sets that I think will be hugely beneficial to myself and the ministry.

It’s almost too good to be true really. One of the guys loves doing video and the other has a lot of experience doing web work. I have been praying for someone to come in and help with videos, so really just that one person would have been a blessing by himself. But with another web guy, like myself, I’m thinking he’ll be able to run with some of the web stuff going on here which will free me up to do other responsibilities I have around this place.

All in all this is shaping up to be a great year and it looks like I’m going to have a lot of help along the way.

The ministry has been open for about 3 weeks now and I’m already having trouble remembering what Christmas was like when I had so much free time on my hands.
With the launch of the new website, printing our village discipleship class curriculums, and redesigning the ministry newsletter I’ve had no problem keeping myself busy around here as of late. I actually had to stop myself from staying in the office well after business hours the other day because of something I’m falling behind on.

I know it sounds like these are bad things, but ultimately it’s what keeps me going. If I wasn’t pressured to get things done on tight deadlines I would probably just lolly-gag around and not get much done around here. Luckily, there are plenty of people around here to light a fire under my you know what.

Tense times… that’s what I was thinking on January 1st when the new Thrive Africa website finally went live. I say finally, because that was the word most people were thinking. It took right around 1 year from when we first started working serious on the website until it launched early this month. Granted, during that time the web site had to get put on hold a few times because other project got priority, but having one year of ideas, meetings, designing, and lots of time it was crucial that the website actually worked.

It’s been almost a full month since the site went live and the questions are out there. Is the website working? Are we accomplishing the goals we set? Was it worth it? Well, according to the stats the answers to those questions is a resounding YES! Not that it’s all about the numbers, and I do enjoy hearing from people that it “looks” great, but it’s the numbers that really tell you if a site is truly working… and the numbers look good!

Along with myself a majority of the credit goes to Alece and Becca (intern from last year) for writing just about every line of copy on the website. If it wasn’t for them there wouldn’t be much there but pretty pictures and lots of misspellings. Thanks ladies!

Be sure to check out the newly desgined 10 Years of Ministry page telling the story of how Thrive Africa got started.

Tomorrow is going to be quite the interesting day. I somehow have to try and manage to stay off the internet for just about the entire day.

You see, the Superbowl doesn’t play here until 1 AM early Monday morning and we’ve got this tradition here at Thrive that we watch the “tape-delay” version at 7 PM Monday night. That means just about every website cnn, espn, etc, will be showing the outcome that I need to stay away from. It’s going to be tough, especially since a lot of the work I do is online, but hopefully I can pull it off.

I’ve already turned off all my news RSS feeds so I don’t skim over them and blow it.