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Be a Pray-er

IT-Focused Prayer Support

“….we pray for you all the time – pray that our God will make you fit for what He’s called you to be, pray that He’ll fill your good ideas and acts of faith with His own energy so that it all amounts to something….”

( 2 Thessalonians 1:11, The Message)

We Need IT, and in Great Measure!

You might be working as an IT professional in industry. Maybe you even have opportunities at work to be a light for Christ among your co-workers. The salary you earn most likely permits you to be able to resource the work of the Kingdom and allows you to be involved in a ministry. However, the actual IT work you do, does not directly affect the spiritual realm. Consequently, Satan does not focus much of his attention on your job, except using its natural pressures and difficulties to possibly weaken your spiritual impact in life.

Imagine now, that as an IT missionary, your professional life and IT skills produce products which are foundations upon which so much Kingdom activity and functionality rests. The IT missionary suddenly becomes a strategic target for Satan, because now, at the very least, the ministries of whole groups of Kingdom workers (even thousands of them) can have their income streams or something else blocked by spiritually-induced "outages" in a sending country.

In "field" locations, final checking and draft typesetting of the completed Scriptures halts when a computer suddenly will not boot. A translator loses months of work with a hard-disk crash because the backup was not properly done. A training class is scuttled when the instructor's demonstration cannot be reached over the LAN that went down just as the workshop started. Many times there are visible reasons why a critical IT element dies, but sometimes nobody can explain either the cause or the timing of the problem, and the only fruitful reaction to the situation is prayer.

Here Are Some Ongoing IT-Focused Prayer Needs

Under Funded

Many Wycliffe IT specialists, particularly those on furlough or doing critical IT work from home-country locations, are seriously under funded. Pray that God will lead these workers to Christian IT professionals and other people who have been given His vision for completing the Bible translation task sooner (using IT) than later.

Researching & Purchasing

Decisions are always needing to be made regarding what equipment, software and new technologies should be researched and purchased to further Bible translation. Pray that God would give wisdom and insight to those in the decision making process.

Harmony

As is true in any situation where many people are working intimately together on major enterprise-level projects, team members can disagree on work issues. Satan would love to get us all disagreeing over platforms, methods, functionality and personalities because then Bible translation could be hindered. Pray that God's Spirit would constantly move among us, and that we would all be sensitive to what He would have us do.

Leave Issues

When Wycliffe workers are receiving less than their prescribed monthly "quota," they must leave their offices and travel to find new partners. When it is time for their furlough, co-workers are left to handle the extra load of work. Pray that those experiencing overwork will be encouraged and given new strength by the Lord of the Harvest.

Prioritizing Tasks

An IT professional has heavy responsibilities on the field and has to reprioritize their daily tasks constantly and accomplish tasks with limited resources. Pray for wisdom, patience and endurance.

Personnel

Wycliffe's world-wide need for full-time IT missionaries is approaching 250 open positions. Please ask God to raise up the hundreds of new IT missionaries we need, as well as the thousands of new supporting partners required.

Hardware

Workers on the field need the latest rugged, portable computers or “laptops” with many more capabilities than the average user would need. These come at a much higher cost than the standard 0-0 computer. Pray for God's provision of hardware that helps staff connect and work with the latest tools in a world of rapidly changing technology.

IT Support

Pray for the knowledgeable staff who regularly rotate and replace out-of-date equipment. In addition, they facilitate computer training, repair computers and solve problems for staff.

Pray for IT Help Desks that troubleshoot software problems and manage the hardware for PCs used by staff in the centers, as well as remote staff throughout the world. Pray for ever-deepening listening and diagnostic skill for these much-in-demand experts.

Ask the Lord to provide more IT staff to support workers.

Pray for wisdom when making decisions about how to repair hardware for remote staff. We want to be good stewards and also meet the needs of these staff who can sometimes feel isolated.

Software

Wycliffe uses computers to receipt funds, communicate to donors, track work and personnel, manage finances, and a host of other necessary functions. Each of these require specialized software.

Pray for our highly skilled software development staff who design and write these computer programs and then fix software problems that support the Bible translation process.

Pray for God’s wisdom for leadership on current projects, while at the same time evaluating future needs. Diligence is required in order to stay current as changes in technology accelerate.

Pray for good communication with staff as the software development team makes application design changes that help meet the specialized needs of translators in difficult language projects.

Pray for continual development of a single, integrated database (a way to store and easily access information) for supporting our worldwide personnel needs.

Networking and the Internet

Pray for wisdom in maintaining the security of information on our networks. With many people writing destructive programs to sabotage or steal information, this is a top prayer priority.

Pray for the worldwide IT technical service departments that handle networking, email administration, and database administration.

Pray for internal networking software that helps us share how we do our work, how our work relates to others, and provides information and collabration. All staff, including remote staff, have access to the same tools, information, in this unique environment.

Ask God to give an extra portion of His grace and encouragement to all technical services staff. Some are “on call” 24 hours a day to respond to network issues that may hinder or even stop our work, Pray that they will sense God’s presence as they use logic and experience to solve complex and critical computer problems.

Many of our new operational systems are Web-based. Pray for God’s protection over the data. Also, pray for our relationships with many of these outside vendors of computer systems. May our witness glorify the Lord.

Project Management Office

Pray for the project management departments. They oversee a variety of projects that are crucial to our work today. Ask the Lord to give wisdom in prioritizing projects, and creativity and discernment as they work alongside various departments analyzing needs.

If we hope “to see a Bible translation program in progress in every language still needing one by 2025,” information needs to travel around the globe at lightning speed every day. Email is a powerful tool that allows this to happen 24 hours a day. Messages are sent and received across a network at little cost – no postage necessary!

Pray for the staff that are helping users having trouble with their email used worldwide for daily work.

Additional Prayer Opportunities

Even with a non-IT-specific focus, YOU can impact any place on the planet right now from where you are. We invite you to use these links to general-issue prayer information (which includes occasional IT-related needs) on various Wycliffe-family web sites:

The JAARS PrayerLine.
The Wycliffe Associates USA prayer page.
The Wycliffe Canada Prayer Partners List.
The Wycliffe New Zealand Pray with Us page.
The Bibleless Peoples Prayer Project (BPPP).

Provided by www.jaars.org