When Things Don’t Go Right

My head was pounding. My eyes hurt. My stomach didn’t feel so hot either.

I marvel at the creativity of human beings and how—even in our off hours—we tackle difficult challenges.

There were still gobbledygook lines showing very prominently on the site of “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit,” which looked very much like Latin. But I’m told it is actually nonsense, used as fill-in lines that a designer uses to illustrate a typestyle, or “font,” until a writer writes the real thing.

A writer like me, not a Web guru. So what was a 60-something woman, a writer by trade, doing at ground zero of a website launch? As I told someone else, this is not my preferred line of work—the actual tweaking and nuts and bolts in the back end of a website. The part that Joe Blow Public never sees. I’m so not a techy.

But I was doing the work because I’d been asked to do it, and almost anyone can be a Web guru now, or at least navigate the back end of simple websites. And no matter what you do, when there’s a deadline or quota to be met, patients to attend, messes to clean up, customers to keep happy, your farmer husband frustrated because the corn planter has broken down again: all of us have times when we are ready to pack up and go home.

I had to think back to when the Third Way website, www.thirdway.com, was first launched in 1998. My then partners in crime at the office, Jerry L. Holsopple and Wayne Gehman, did the dirty work, spearheaded by team leader Sheri Hartzler. Jerry had taken a year or so of classes, commuting two hours to classes near Washington, D.C., to learn HTML coding. It was hard, tedious, brainy work—much, much harder than anything I did in this relaunch. HTML is like a language, all geek-speak. A website design firm, 427 Design in Akron, Ohio, did much of the heavy lifting for our website this time around. I wrote grants and helped to line up funding.

I was newly grateful that about two years ago, in January 2013, I had personally taken the plunge into blogging, which taught me the nuts and bolts. I launched my own blog/website, www.findingharmonyblog.com. My new hobby. To be a writer in 2015, you gotta keep up with technology. Of course, I had spent the last 17 years posting articles on websites (and turning to Webmasters when things got hairy). I have no doubt these experiences helped tremendously as I worked feverishly on our new site.

Whatever your field, and no matter how old you are, it’s fun to master a new skill or join a new group, whatever it is. Or even just dabble in it.

As I write this, my mother is gathering energy and anticipating being on stage to perform at 6 p.m. in a fun, crazy play put on by seniors at her retirement complex in a group they call “The Curtain Raisers.” She is 91 and LOVES THIS. I’m so happy she has found something that is a creative outlet, keeps her involved socially, and provides an opportunity to read scripts (not memorized at this age) and dress up in crazy costumes.

Another woman I know has been blown away by acting in a local theater group, and her daughter in turn has had a blast learning to be props manager for the group (her daughter and other children are homeschooled). Others have enjoyed learning to play handbells in church groups, or taking up piano lessons they quit years ago.

My husband keeps carting stuff home to tinker with and gets real satisfaction out of coming up with new creations on his welder.

Whatever you get into, there are always challenges to face: the stitch lost off your knitting needle; the book rewrite so that the murder can happen up front; the seam you have to rip out while sewing; the flowers that don’t hold up in a wilting bouquet; the weld that comes apart and you have to start over; the mismeasured 2×4 for your deck project.

I marvel at the creativity of human beings and how—even in our off-hours—we tackle difficult challenges. In that, we’re like God. That’s not original with me. It’s right there in Genesis 1: “Let us make humans in our image and likeness . . . so God created male and female in the image of God.”

So the fact that I can now mess around in the guts of a website and post pictures and stories with bigger type and smaller type feels, on my good days, pretty cool.

On the Friday in question, my dear husband brought home a pizza, and after we ate our supper I popped two ibuprofen, headed for a nap, and woke an hour later feeling much better. Unwind. God did that too, on the seventh day. Ahhhh.

Comment on the website at www.thirdway.com/category/another-way/  or write to me at Another Way, 1251 Virginia Ave., Harrisonburg, VA 22802 or email me at MelodieD@MennoMedia.org. You can also request a free booklet, “Struggling to Balance Work and Family.”