Printing in the Name of the Lord!!!
I burst out laughing when I heard the expression. On that particular day I happened to be winging my way down to Region 9. The day before Ryan Moore (our new Media Tech) and I had spent a fruitless day of troubleshooting with one of our new printers. We had given it our best shot, but because I ran out of time, I had to devote my full attention to flying the airplane. But on the way to the airport, I thought of a couple of solutions, and called Ryan's cell phone to tell him of my ideas. Later as I levelled off at 8,500 feet I called Ryan on the HF Radio and asked him whether it had worked or not. He joyfully replied. "Yes!!! It worked!!! We're printing in the Name of the Lord!"
Our media ministry has been one of the most exciting recent developments of GAMAS. Over the last couple months we've been trying to work out the kinks in our new equipment.
As some of you know, I'd originally tried to do this work in my "spare" time and to "multi-task" on the days that I was in Georgetown. Well... Lets just say that the idea in principle seemed good, but in reality it didn't work too well. I was finding myself increasingly stressed out as the requests for literature began to roll in, and I hadn't enough hours in a day to fulfill them. I realized very quickly that I would need some help.
At the same time I was arriving at this conclusion, the Lord was working on Ryan Moore's heart that he needed to quit his job. Ryan used to work 12 hours a day, six days a week as a manager for a bulk foods store here in Georgetown. But the hard work, and long hours were beginning to wear him down. God was also convicting him that he needed to do something more with his life than sell food. When we offered him a stipend amounting to less than half his old salary, he jumped at the opportunity and hasn't looked back.
Over the last two months we've been quietly working out the kinks in our new equipment to try and bring it up to full production capability.
One of the first tasks that we tackled was the laser printers themselves. We started with the HP 4600hdn color laser printer. At first the printer started spitting out copies that were very dark, using excessive amounts of toner. This was alarming to me since the cost of toner wasn't cheap. But after playing around with the settings we were able to get it sufficiently "lightened" so that it looked more normal. Once we sorted this out, I had Ryan Moore immediately start scanning and printing some "Native New Day" bible lessons. Since the North American Indians have many similarities to the indigenous Amerindians down here in Guyana, we've decided to try these lessons to see whether they are effective or not. After a couple days of frustrating effort we finally figured out the nuances of how to make it print well in color. Then it was time to turn our attention to the big Laserjet HP 9000 printer (pictured above). This presented another set of problems to sort out since it didn't seem to want to communicate with any computer we hooked up to it. I knew from the person who sent it down to us, that the printer did in fact work, but for some reason it didn't want to communicate with the three computers we tried. Finally at long last we were able to get it to talk to one of our MacBooks.
Ryan is a very hard worker, and although he doesn't know a lot about computers, he's willing to try, and is a very quick learner. More and more, I'm giving him an increased number of tasks to do on his own. This afternoon we're going to sit down and chart out some of the future direction for this ministry. We have big plans for this ministry. At full capacity we can print up to 300,000 black and white copies and 75,000 color copies every single month. That's enough paper to hand every adult in Guyana one sheet of Christ filled literature every single month!
Every new ministry has "growing pains", and that's what we're going through right now. At this moment our big printer is down for repairs. It worked perfectly for about three weeks, but evidently the fuser now seems to be defective and needs replacing. But just when it seems like everything is stopped up, God opens the way for us to keep going. A volunteer teacher who is traveling down from the States has offered to purchase and hand carry the parts down to Guyana. So we can be back up and rolling in three days. God is so good!
Now we need to get the folding machine to work, organize volunteer helpers to come assist with the busy work, purchase and ship a steady stream of printer toner and supplies from the States, and then turn up the production.
"Printing in the name of the Lord" is lots of fun. You should try it! If you know of any person who would be willing to come to Guyana and help work with this ministry, please contact me at ashjam7@yahoo.com
