RHM Newsletter 41: Looking Back on 2023
Posted by Dion Todd January 4th, 2024 1,480 Views 0 Comments
2023 Year-end Wrapup from Refreshing Hope Ministries on Vimeo.
Dear wonderful Refreshing Hope Family,
As we close out another year and look back on 2023, I want to extend my heartfelt gratitude to each of you for being an integral part of our journey here at Refreshing Hope Ministries. Whether you've joined us through reading our devotionals, watching our videos, or listening to our music, your presence and support are deeply valued. It is beautiful to see the community the Lord is building at RHM! I pray this message finds you warm, safe, and happy, covered by the presence of the Lord wherever you happen to be.
2023 has been full of obstacles and growing pains, though nothing has stopped us, for if the Lord brings you to it, He will bring you through it. The Lord doesn’t need someone smart, just obedient. He will bring the smarts as they are needed. That’s the story of my life in a nutshell.
(Proverbs 3:5–10 NKJV) Trust in the LORD with all your heart, And lean not on your own understanding; In all your ways acknowledge Him, And He shall direct your paths. Do not be wise in your own eyes; Fear the LORD and depart from evil. It will be health to your flesh, And strength to your bones. Honor the LORD with your possessions, And with the firstfruits of all your increase; So your barns will be filled with plenty, And your vats will overflow with new wine.
We have been working behind the scenes on a new website that adapts to the screen it is displayed on. Whether it is a desktop computer, a tablet, or a smartphone, it will adjust to best fit your display.
Up to now, we have been using three separate control panels to manage RHM, patched together with scripts I wrote to make them work with each other. Emails are sent over here, accounts are managed over there, and devotionals are queued up somewhere else. The new site will be one integrated site where we manage everything in one place. It will be a tremendous load off of our minds and allow us to focus on creating quality content instead of just maintaining it, and we are nearly there. I wrote it to be modular and easily expandable so it will grow with us.
We started RHM using leftover parts from our computer business, and over the years, we have been upgrading as the Lord allows to more modern energy efficient equipment. We have micro-sized most of our network to use smartphone technology.
The hardware for our new website will be a vast improvement in speed and much more energy efficient as well. The current site runs on a 4-core Intel with 8 GB of RAM and a 512GB NVMe drive. The new site will run on a 64-core AMD EPYC system with 256GB of RAM and 7 x NVMe solid-state drives in a RAID.
Instead of spending $10,000 on a new server, I cherry-picked only the internal parts I wanted and built it here without paying for all the things we didn’t need for 1/5th of the cost. The Lord had me spend twenty years working on computers before He put us in ministry, and we couldn’t do what we do here today without having done that first. He can truly see the end from the beginning.
Another thing we have been working on is storage. We are just plain out of room here.
We have a three bedroom house that is about 1,300 SQF. RHM uses two of the bedrooms. Don’t worry about the handicap ramp; We are fine. We use it to roll equipment in and out.
One bedroom is this studio, where we record all of our videos and music.
The other bedroom is our office, where we do our programming, render videos, control streaming, work on the website, and keep our network equipment.
Our daughter, Summer, lives beside us, and her bedroom has served as the RHM data center for several years. It has been piled to the ceiling with server racks, spare parts, keyboard cases, network switches, you name it.
I am not complaining because God has been good to us, and it’s typical growing pains, but we needed a long-term storage solution. After researching buildings, which are crazy expensive, we came across shipping containers. Being we live near Charleston harbor, we can get those for a song. So we did, and as you can see in the upcoming video, Sylvia and I had a lot of fun turning three of them into a storage barn. Then we managed to clear all the computer equipment out of Summer’s bedroom, which made her very happy.
Most of the year, Sylvia and I worked on writing, creating, and programming Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, then construction on Thursday and Friday, taking Saturday off as our Sabbath day, and starting again on Sunday with our live Church service and doing it all again. That was 2023 in a nutshell, and it sure went fast.
Moving into 2024, we hope to have the new website live during the first quarter, Lord willing. This will open the way for us to add phone and tablet apps for the devotional, notify you when a new one is posted, and do so many things we have wanted to do with the site.
Also, I believe the Lord has given me a dream and a desire to build a small studio, a place to write and record our devotionals, Bible studies, music, etc… The current room here is about 9’ x 9’, 81 SQF, and we cannot get the camera far enough away to properly render. It is also noisy at times because our area is growing fast, and so is the traffic. When recording audio, I sometimes have to re-record it or pause it while trucks go by.
I would love to see RHM have a small studio, about 400 square feet, with some soundproofing. A quiet sanctuary to pray, listen, write, stream, and record without traffic noise. We could get the camera far enough away that we could use a green screen for the background and change it according to the season or message. I would also move our servers and networking equipment there and create a server closet to house it all. There would be enough room to have occasional guests appear with me when streaming and a small live audience to sit when RHM members stop in to see us. It would also give us back our guest bedroom.
So those are some things that are on my heart today. We have put together a slideshow for you, in the video at the top, with pictures taken throughout 2023. We spend hundreds of hours working at a computer, but that isn’t much to look at, so here are photos that capture the moments of our life when not in front of a screen. These are the days of our lives. We hope you enjoy it. We love you. God loves you, and He put us here for such a time as this!