Well this blog will not have any eye candy but maybe a little something to warm the heart and the spirit.

We had an all hands meeting for Work (LDS Church ICS department, 700 engineering geeks LOL)

Elder D. Todd Chrstofferson presided over the meeting ( link to eye candy   ). http://www.newsroom.lds.org/ldsnewsroom/eng/background-information/leader-biographies/elder-d-todd-christofferson

It was a very spiritual and inlightening meeting in which we were give a glimpse of the future of the church over the next 5 years on the internet.  It is amazing at what happens when the spirit guides those who work at and for the Church, in planning and carrying out the Lords work.

Some of the things that are being worked on are:

1. One central church web site which will then navigate to all the different aspects of the church, i.e. family history, lessons, Temples, missionary sites (for non members, kind of a Mormon.org)

2. On line interaction for church callings and positions.  For example if you are a Bishop and use your lds account (the same user name and password that you log into your ward web site), the web site knows your calling as a bishop and gives you access to Bishop related material, ward members, information you add, the church handbook, and other things to make the bishops job easier.  If you are a primary teacher, materials for your calling will be available and taylored for you.

3.  You will get web access based on your geographical location around the world.  The web site will know who you are and where you are located and provide News information and helps for you in from the Church based on your location.

4. More tools for help those who are not members understand the church and ask questions.

5. If President Monson wants to communicate with the youth of the church he can send a text message which will be send to the youths cell phones. (or if a Bishop wants to comunicate with a youth that he is working with, say to go on a mission he can do the same thing through his phone and the web site.

All of the things we saw today were demos of ideas that are being worked on and developed.

I am excited to be working in such a great time when the Gospel is not only here on the Earth but we have the technology to reach such a great majority of the people.

Elder Christofferson said that the Internet was inspired and invented for the Geneology work that needs to be done and we are going to leverage that technology to reach out to the members and non-members and bring them closer to Christ.

So I got back to the Orem office at about 2:00 and started working on a problem I am having with an application I manage.  In the process of doing this I had to call tech support for the company the writes the product I am using.  As I talked to Emalie (the tech rep) about my issues and explained that this product was going live this weekend and I had aproxiately 100 to 200 engineers testing the product now and needed a problem resolve, an enteresting thing happened.

First understand the LDS Church has a contract for support with this company and I have called before.

Now When I started talking about the church and 700 plus software engineers and testers that where developing products for the Church she said, ” the LDS Church? what church is that?, We can’t beleive there are 100 people testing this before it goes live!!!!!”.  Ah the light clicked on and everything about the internet and the church came rushing to the forfront in my mind. “Oh, you might know us as the Mormon Church or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints” I said.   And of course she walked right into the missionary moment for me.  “What kind of applications do you write”, she asked, to which I responded well you know Web applications for one, have you every been out to lds.org or mormon.org?”  As I explained a little bit about what we did she went out to mormon.org and started looking at the site.  Then she exclaimed “Wow you have a better support site than we do and you have a chat site, Wow this is amazing, what software to you use for the chat it a lot better than our support chat.”

Well, I probably spend 15 minutes on a call that should have taken two, and most of it was talking about the Church.  The exciting thing is that she now knows a little bit about the church and maybe she will go back out and visit the sites with no pressure and learn more.

We are so blessed to live in such a time that even the little things we do may affect the lives of people that we my only pass through talking on a phone or chatting on line.

I hope and pray that we may all think about who we are chatting with and what influence for good we may have based on our content that we provide.  We never ever truly know the effect we have on others by our actions.  Keep the faith and forgive my waxing philosophical.

Love you all, Ray