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It’s 4:30 a.m. here in Orange County, California, but my body thinks it’s in Orange County, Florida, where it’s 7:30 a.m.! I’ve been fighting a losing battle for the past hour, so I decided to get up. Ahhh, jet lag is one of the results of crossing time zones. But this morning, it feels
more like jet lead, since by body is leading the actual time! A college friend who spent his career in the Army introduced me to melatonin to help with jet lag, but I forgot mine this trip!

I’m in southern California to meet with Jesus Film Project leaders and others who want to find ways to combine the Jesus Film Project tools and resources with new methods of delivering via the internet. In October, the Jesus film made it’s internet debut. Although the film has been available on the internet for several years, the Jesus Film Project recently acquired total rights for the film which means they can now develop new ways to present it, ways that are more effective in the internet communications media.

We are spending today discussing how to capitalize on the new opportunities available.

Last night over dinner, Jim Green (the new executive director of the Jesus Film Project) and I were reminiscing about our shared experiences during many years together on the African continent. Mike Waid, a more recent friend although a long-term Campus Crusade staff, is giving leadership to the development of internet use of Jesus Film Project tools and resources.

The Jesus film is probably the most effective evangelistic tool in the history of the world. It is available in in 887 languages, as of January 1, 2005. The number changes every month as they continue to add new translations. The cumulative viewing and listening audience is nearing 6
billion people! Almost 200 million people have indicated decisions for Christ. Over 1,500 denominations and mission agencies are using the film. I know of nothing in recorded history that has been used this widely by God to introduce people to new life in Christ.

Rev. 7:9-10 is becoming even more true:

After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice:
“Salvation belongs to our God,
who sits on the throne,
and to the Lamb.”

I’ve been using the Yahoo Desktop Search beta for a few days now. Over the past few months, I’ve tried desktop search tools from Copernic, Lookout, and Google. As you might expect, each has nice benefits and limitations. But all are far better than the paltry native Windows Search tool.

Sometime I may write a more comprehensive comparison. But the web is already full of them. Read and make your own selection.

My first impressions of Yahoo Desktop Search (YDS):

• Like Copernic and Google, it operates outside Outlook (unlike Lookout).
• Like Lookout, it integrates with Outlook giving me a new toolbar that I can use for searches.
• Like Copernic, it allows me a richer set of fields to guide me through crafting more specific searches. For email, fields like From, To, Subject, Date, and others. For file searches, fields like Name, Type, Path, Date. I know that Google has excelled at simple searches, even on the desktop. But unlike web searches, I usually know a little more about the information I’m seeking on my own computer desktop. I usually can remember that it was in a Powerpoint file, or in a Word document. Google Desktop Search allows these more specific searches also, but I have to remember search parameters like filetype:ppt. DOS was simple also, but most of us preferred Windows so we would have to remember command line parameters. (Although, my occasional forays into Linux/Unix remind me how powerful command lines can be!)
• My big beef with YDS is that it takes a l—o—n—g time to start up when I reboot my computer. The splash screen stays up forever loading this and initializing that. Of course, that is better than Copernic which caused Outlook to crash more frequently (I think, of course it’s harder to be sure in a multi-tasking operating system!).

If there were only one desktop search tool, I would be happy with any of them. Google, Copernic, Lookout, Yahoo. Any of them would satisfy me if there were only one. But in the world of user choices, I like them all, each for it’s own reasons.

Which do you like? Why?

I read an interesting devo in My Utmost for His Highest (J Oswald
Sanders) this morning. It’s online here. Some thoughts:

The call of God is not a call to serve Him in any particular way. My
contact with the nature of God will shape my understanding of His call
and will help me realize what I truly desire to do for Him.

Service is the overflow which pours from a life filled with love and
devotion.

Service is what I bring to the relationship and is the reflection of my
identification with the nature of God.

The Son of God reveals Himself in me, and out of devotion to Him service
becomes my everyday way of life.

It provoked my thoughts that my service is all about my relationship
with Him, my contact with His nature. A few months ago, a friend gave a
powerful devotional in which he explored service as worship. His focus
was on Romans 12:1, and connecting “living sacrifices” with “act/service
of worship.” The Greek actually uses one word which is translated into
the New American phrase “service of worship”. My service is very
inextricably tied to my worship.

Our drive from Florida to Texas for Christmas we unusual. We normally
stop in Mobile, which is the halfway point. We couldn’t find “room in
the inn” in Mobile and drove to Magee, MS. We planned to stay in Mobile
which is the half-way point, but there was a bowl game and all rooms
were sold out. We drove 2 hours to Hattiesburg, the next big town, and
found that the military camp 11 miles out of town had a big ceremony
preparing to deploy to Iraq and all rooms were sold out.

Then an unusual snow storm hit yesterday and we drove over frozen
bridges the last half-hour or so.

God was with us.

In my previous ministry life at Christian Leadership Ministries, I was very involved in implementing Lotus Notes and seeing the resulting corporate shift in how knowledge was shared. It took a while, but the result was a much more knowledge-aware group through the use of Notes’ collaborative environment. Creation of simple online applications using Notes’ rapid application development gave new capabilities. Working together on virtual teams became not only possible, but embraced by many of the the CLM staff members scattered around the U.S.

Now I’m in our corporate Exchange environment. The Exchange client, Outlook, is very user-friendly. But I miss the collaborative environment and it’s new ways of working together and the simple but rapid application development environment of Notes. I have an ongoing feeling of being less effective than in the Notes environment.

So I read with interest several articles as Lotus Notes celebrated its 15th birthday last week. I recommend an interview with Ray Ozzie, the innovative software designer behind Lotus Notes and now Groove. What I appreciate about Ozzie is that he starts from observations about current realities, processes those through philosophical foundations about how people work well together, and then creates solutions that embed this philosophy. The result is software solutions that are both innovative and helpful but also philosophical consistent. They encourage users to collaborate without being overbearing. These solutions guide you in best practices without being heavy-handed.

Some of Ozzie’s comments that might shake us up (but I agree with):

• The concept behind Groove came from an assumption, or belief, that the fundamental nature of business was changing from a centralized model with large companies that were firmly integrated to essentially a separation of corporations, working in a more distributed fashion. Notes, essentially, was built for a large global enterprise environment, not necessarily for the task of flowing data in an inter-enterprise manner.
• E-mail is showing its age and limitations.
• And really, this [email] concept that we will be managing as individuals, all of the projects and all of the relationships that we’re dealing with from within one inbox, just doesn’t scale. We’re in a world of information overload and it will be perpetually that way. There is nothing that is going to slow down the fact that we are working electronically with many people. Individuals are feeling that overload, and they’re experimenting with different tools such as instant messaging, blogs … things that are alternatives to doing work with one another online but outside of e-mail.

I hope you find Ozzie’s thoughts as interesting as I do.