My Tech Miracle
Pressing on Toward the Goal
For the past year, I’ve been working toward doing design full time. I’ve been building up some passive income sources designing for print-on-demand and selling my designs as digital downloads on my other website, SuziQ Creations. I recently launched a line of therapeutic coloring pages for adults, which I love doing. I also do some custom design and copy-editing. I’ve really been enjoying it and feeling fulfilled, even though the income build-up has been slow.
Lately, I seemed to really find my groove and things have been going well enough that I was feeling like it would be a good time to invest back into the business. So, after much deliberation, my husband and I treated ourselves to a pair of Microsoft Surface Pro 3s to replace our aging laptops a little more than a week ago. I also signed back up for Adobe Creative Cloud after a year without it.
Progress Halted
Well, this display of confidence in my future brought everything to a screeching halt. The moment we brought home those machines was the end of my productivity. The laptop/tablet combo had a learning curve, Windows 10 had a learning curve, all the Adobe apps I was using in CS6 seemed to have changed significantly when I switched to the new versions–more learning curve. On top of that, I had my husband interrupting me often to ask questions about his new computer since I am the technology person in the household. I had a digital download customer open a PayPal dispute for non-receipt of a purchase (since resolved), which took the better part of a day to work out.
I was unable to concentrate or make progress on anything. All the momentum I had going in the weeks before was gone. Another issue was with the Windows Home Server 2011 machine we run for file storage and automated backups of our home computers. For some reason it kept failing on the backups of the new Surface Pro 3 computers. This was a major contributor to my distraction and lack of productivity. I won’t go into details because it’s not relevant to the point, but after a week, all my efforts to fix this issue only succeeded in making more trouble. By the end of that week, the server was unable to backup any of our computers, not just the new ones, I was unable to get backup to run at all, and all the stored backups on my server had gone missing.
I’d had it! I was out of ideas, frustrated, and in tears over this nonsense. I told my husband that I was done. I quit as household IT manager. Bless him… Despite knowing very little about the server, he said he’d try to take it on.
Questioning my Choices
I began questioning all my decisions to take this direction in my life. Was God trying to send me a message that this isn’t what I should be doing, or was it the devil whispering in my ear? I had a good cry and unloaded to my husband and my small support group of friends before taking two Valerian root extract pills and going to bed.
I slept well, but woke up Sunday knowing it was not fair to dump this on my husband, and thinking I would need to tackle it myself. My support group of friends (many of whom are believers and prayer warriors) gave me encouragement and good advice to take some time off from everything and recharge. I determined that I would step away from the problem for the day. It was one of the first sunny days we’d had had in weeks and I decided I would pack my soft cooler with a bottle of wine and spend the day poolside.
But before I made it out there, my husband insisted on logging onto the server to try to address “The Problem.” Ugh. I knew he would be dragging me back into it.
High Tech Miracle: Healing My Server
He logged onto the server dashboard to find… Everything as it should be! All computers backed up, all the old backups intact, and even the new computers backed up. I didn’t believe it until I logged in and saw it for myself. He was right. And there was no evidence of the server rebooting overnight nor any of the client computers. It was a miracle! A techie miracle. Praise the Lord!
I don’t often speak about my faith, preferring that my actions speak louder than my words, but this was such a confirmation of what I am doing now that I felt I had to write about it and give the glory to God. He still does perform miracles, even on something as insignificant as a home server.
I had a glorious day in the pool that day, with full sun, no bugs, no rain, and no worries about having to fix the server weighing on my mind. And the day came to a close with my husband showing me a beautiful double rainbow in the sky in the midst of a lightning storm at dusk… further confirmation to me that I’m on the right path for my life now.
Thank you, Jesus, for my techie miracle!
I am excited about getting back to my work and being productive once again.
