I’ve been working on a technical problem for a long time. Yesterday I finally achieved success at making a web login work with Unix authentication. I’ve got a lot more to do, get logging on failures to work right so we can block repeated guesses, get it tied into WordPress so I can make use of it from within WordPress for more than controlling access, also for knowing identity so I can do things like adjust a persons spam filters based upon a web form.
In the past anxiety has prevented me from thinking the issues through, when things didn’t work easily I’d tense up and get flustered.
It has been the presence of God in my life that has allowed me to not do that, keep trudging, sometimes step back and do something else for a while, then return to the problem.
It is the knowledge from Romans 8:28, that all things work to the good of those who love God and are called to his purposes, so even when something is frustrating and unpleasant, I can know there is some positive purpose for it.
Yesterday when nobody showed up to a church based men’s group meeting that I attend Friday mornings, before leaving I sat and read the whole book of Haggai. It was significant to me in that moment because Haggai deals with people whose lives were unproductive because God wasn’t at the center of their lives, and when they turned back they were blessed.
I actually started by randomly opening the Bible and reading a verse and it just happened to be right where God was blessing them, so then I went back and read from the beginning of the book to understand how they got there.
Anyway, I always believe in giving credit where credit is due, and I’d like to think gee, I’m such a clever person for figuring this out but the truth is I’ve always had the intellect but in the past could not apply it because of the lack of inner peace which resulted from the lack of God in my life. So I want to publicly thank God for that.
Not like life is perfect, still a long ways but I do feel like I’ve gone from a 40 year down hill slide to an upward trajectory.