Nathan Diehl

Last night I met with my brother in law Jon to help him figure out a couple problems he was having in designing a website for his church. Jon’s a really cool artist who’s got a sweet MacBook and works at a cool coffeehouse in Fort Wayne (Old Crown Coffee Roasters).

He was using one of those custom-solutions designed for churches, to make things more simple for the end-user and non-programmer. It is E-Zekiel, probably the most popular all-in-one content management and web hosting solution for churches.
I thought it would be a simple solution for me. Working with code often, i took one look and knew what the problem was. It was working fine in the Firefox browser but looked horrible in Internet Explorer. (side note: Internet Explorer is a horrible browser!)
Although I knew exactly what needed to be done, because of the program ‘to make things more simple for the end-user,’ i didn’t know how to do it.
I was used to full control. (Joomla! and WordPress stand-alone (as opposed to hosted WordPress.com sites) both offer full, complete line-by-line editing) E-Zekiel only gave partial control through the use of drop-down choices. I didn’t like it. It was a pretty large learning curve. We finally got it figured out after a couple hours.

So that got me thinking about how this relates to my faith in God. Something that works fine for others–even something that is very popular–may not be of any benefit to me at all. It may be a lot of work trying to figure it out. The tools a younger, more inexperienced Christian needs may be very beneficial and necessary for them, but it does nothing for you as a more mature believer, but that does not mean we can’t use the more simple tools to teach more complex truths to further their understanding.
I hope i taught Jon some details about the code (CSS), how to read it and how to assign it. I think he left with a better understanding of CSS and how to read and interpret it.
I didn’t learn much (other than about the E-Zekiel system), but it wasn’t about me learning. it was well worth my time.

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