Be sure to order your Day of Prayer & Fasting resources from the IMB in time for Sunday, June 4 (less than eleven weeks). This year’s focus is on Egypt. Be sure to find the Day of Prayer website.

“Good things come to those who wait,” they say. After almost four years comes the job description for the “assistant” director of the IPCJ since, after all, God is the Director:

Job Description for Director of International Prayer Center of Jerusalem

Mission: To create a place of prayer that draws people to pray for the nations.

The director of the International Prayer Center will be first of all a pray-er, who begins by spending time praying throughout the facility each week as he/she develops areas conducive to prayer both inside and outside the center.

(Until the Center is widely known and used, the director should be in place three days a week with specified hours. One of these days should be a day when people are more likely to have time to use the facility. I’m not sure what day that would be in that country—Friday, Sat. or Sunday?)

Strategic Goals: March 1, 2006-February 28, 2007
1. Bathe facility in prayer.
2. Develop a plan and carry out five specific days of prayer during the year for NAME (one for the people groups of that country as well as one for each of the other cluster areas.)
3. Develop one day silent prayer retreats for any who wish to come alone or in groups to retreat.
4. Develop a prayer walk guide for tourists for the area of Jerusalem near the prayer center.
5. Develop the research center into a house of prayer with various interest centers. (This means that indoors—not just outdoors should primarily be a place of prayer and secondarily a research center. If more room is needed within the Jerusalem House for this, then more room can be allocated.)
6. Facilitate teams in the country having day retreats at the center.
7. Advertise (within the country to NAME teams and GCC people-) services offered (team retreats or days of prayer, silent retreats, etc) and hours when center is open.

Relationship
1. Strategic Goals: reports to Name Prayer Advocate
2. Operation and Administration Goals related to the strategy: report and coordinate with Is BSM. (Example: If room needs developing to make more conducive to prayer, BSM needs to be involved in the decisions.)

FWIW, I’ll be away from an Internet connection next week and (ironically) helping fix computers.

After a local tech guy got me back to where I could manage the South America computer, I invested about twenty-hours setting it up to “ferpection.” Now that we have a Volume License Key, I can clone that setup on the other systems. Whoo hoo!!

I can only imagine what these machines will do when intercessors get in front of them

Or should that be Network News? Either way, getting the IPCJ computers to recognize one another is getting rough. I have, however, shortened things thanks in part to previous volunteers! I just “run out of time.”

First, I checked each computer’s IP Address by clicking on the “two computer” icon in the Taskbar near the clock and clicking on the Support tab.

I then access the ZoneAlarm Firewall-Zones settings to make sure each computer has all of the IP Addresses of the other computers.

I decided to run the Network Setup Wizard from Control Panel, ensuring each computer went through the same clicks and had the same Workgroup name.

After a reboot, I opened ‘My Network Places,’ expecting each window to show five workgroup computers but, nah, not this time… maybe tomorrow!

Well, all this talk about computer maintenance paid off… Saturday afternoon my home desktop was caught in a constant rebooting stage and, ugh, things looked ugly! Even my once-proven fool-proof backup of Drive Image didn’t pull through the first time.

We had dinner guests on their way in about an hour, so all I knew to do was to try a reinstall of XP. I thought I’d get it started and then entertain our guests. After they left, I was faced with an error message about a missing or corrupt hal.dll file.

Anyway, things looked bleak so I figured I’d better let my co-workers know I’d be out of commission until I could solve my own computer problems. Well, within about two hours, I finally found the answer on a Microsoft Support site.

No doubt, somebody was praying!

I have learned a lot taking care of the computers donated to the IPCJ. Here’s part of my clean up routine:

(1) Clean up unused files with “c”cleaner
(2) Check for rogue/unneeded software through the Add/Remove Program applet in Control Panel (in case junk got installed without my permission)
(3) Update and run Spybot
(4) Update and run Ad-Aware
(5) Update and run ewido
(6) Run Windows Update and Office Update
(7) Run Disk Defrag in Safe Mode by disconnecting from the Internet and tapping F8 during boot-up
(8) After shutting down, I insert a Drive Image floppy disk to run an old program called Drive Image 5.0 that makes an image of the hard drive in a separate partition. If the computer goes wonky, i can usually revert back to that once-upon-a-time state of perfection.

Feedback on the CD is coming in slowly, so that may have a double meaning: either the CD is fine or it’s not being viewed as closely as I’d like (?) Wanna see for yourself? Click here.

One recently added link is A Story for All, a site where you can read and/or hear His Story in the language of your choice.

The CD is in another stage of progress and, eventually we’ll get the CD Update Site “up to date” with what I have on the Jerusalem hard drive. Remember to make use of the “Improve our CD” link!

Those responsible for property in Jerusalem will be here by next week so I hope to have an even better “progress” update next week!

Seventeen seminary students aresupposed to visit the IPCJ either today or tomorrow. Hmm, we’ll see…

After meeting with the architect, I have been so excited I can hardly contain myself!

As you’ll recall, the architect reluctantly provided a 12-17 line item breakdown of the $220,000 estimated costs for the Garden; unfortunately, most of those line items were five-figure costs, hardly manageable (?) to potential donors. I’ve been after the architect to give us a more detailed description and even do a breakdown per region to make the ‘donation’ possibilities in smaller amounts.

Well, the architect has agreed to come up with such a breakdown by the middle of January! I also received from him a drawing of the Garden with each regional area specified. I have taken this and made a new page on our soon-to-be available web based CD that allows the user to get a bird’s eye view of the Garden while pointing out descriptions of each region and what will the estimated costs will be per section! This is definitely something you have to see to believe!

This breakthrough in the CD has given me a boost of adrenalin, almost making me want to dance in a “Bapticostal” fashion . I also pressed the architect for a more specific cost to finish the ‘uttermost walls’ and he quoted me the original $20,000 on the sheet. I then asked if he would consider allowing us to do one wall when we had $10,000, and he agreed. Good news! The IPCJ account has about half available for that first wall.

The rain has come to Jerusalem and, brrr, is it cold and wet! I dread going out to the Garden knowing the weeds are aplenty despite all the roundup that was used

Well, at any rate, I find myself in Room 16 tinkering with the CD version of the IPCJ. I think I’ve done about all I can to it and will start responding to feedback as it comes in.