Karen Barber on Relying on God to Guide Us Toward Solutions

Hi Guideposts, Karen Barber here, and today I want to tell you about my very worst online disaster.

I started a website—it’s called PrayerIdeas.org—and it was a great idea. The idea was that it was to be a place where people could come and connect with good prayers on any subject that they needed prayers on.

So I had this great idea, but I’m just not technical. I hate technology; in fact it scares me. I’m incompetent at it, really. And so I prayed this prayer; I prayed, “Please, God, send me a computer geek or increase my geekiness.” Well, of course I hoped that God was going to send me a computer geek to take care of this problem.

So I did find one who was a programmer and he was going to make a website, which he did. In 2011, we went online with this PrayerIdeas website, and pretty soon we found out that people were coming to articles that could help them, one being Final Exam Prayer with Bible Verses; another one was Prayer for Adult Children with Problems. All of us can find prayer in those kind of situations.

So anyhow, we were doing great; we were getting 500 visitors a week and everything was going great, and then all of a sudden, technology changes. You have to be mobile-friendly now and my website’s not mobile-friendly. I go to another computer geek, and he says, “Just redo the whole website—same content, same name, but we’ll just redo it.” So I say, “Great!”

So we get that all done, it goes online last January, next thing I know, boom—all our visitors are gone. I don’t know what’s happened to them. I look online, we had, like, two visitors that day, and I was one of them. It was just, like, a disaster.

So I get out my journal and I start writing down, “Help, God! Everything’s gone wrong. I’ve destroyed my website. I don’t know anything about technology. What am I going to do? God, why did You call me to do this thing?” And as I’m writing in my journal, I’m writing, writing, writing, and all these terrible things have happened to me, and all of a sudden I write down, “I wonder if the URLs are different?”

And I wonder, is that me? I actually know something? URL—that means Universal Resource Locater. I didn’t even know that title; I looked it up. And you know, it’s just your web address. Like your street address, you’ve got have exactly everything in there. So I say, “A-ha!” I look at my old website—different URLs than the new one.

So I call up my computer geek and I tell him that, and he says, “Oh, ok. Redirect” and he does some kind of geek magic, I don’t know what it is. He redirects, and whoosh, our visitors go right back up.

And so what I learned from that is that sometimes we may not be competent in things and yet God can help us increase our competence—and confidence, because I think really that’s the whole key here is that there are things that we don’t feel confident in doing. But if God has called you to do it, He can send you an expert to help you a little bit. But He can also send His expert help to your life, so that you can dare new things.

Thanks so much for joining me!