Physician, Heal Thyself!

A story of staring down fear

To say that the last two weeks have been challenging would be a gross understatement!

I started 2021 with the goal to “level up” the Just As I Am website. I had personally built the first site using the straightforward Wix platform and I knew that there was plenty of room for improvement. Having tried unsuccessfully to make certain changes to the site, I had concluded that I needed to enlist the help of professionals. But, as we say in Nigeria, “Na money kill am!” i.e. “I best get my cash ready!”

Fast forward to the beginning of this month, I decided to also do a short online course on blogging. I had literally stumbled into being a blogger and really wanted to raise my game as best as possible.

From the course I determined that the Wix platform was really not optimal for what I was trying to achieve and, more importantly, my plans for the coming months (watch that space! 😊). I decided that I had to move to the more robust WordPress platform. There was the small matter of my Wix subscription expiring on the 17^th of the month (this past Saturday). That left me with barely two weeks to have a new website up and running if I wanted to avoid incurring another year’s subscription cost. 

I registered with a new hosting company and went onto WordPress. Yepa! This was nothing like Wix! Nevertheless, I purposed to press on (do bear in mind that I have four children and April is school fees month – not the time for unbudgeted spend on a website developer). However, when I came to selecting a design theme for the new site, I hit a wall. There were so many different themes available I felt completely overwhelmed and had no clue where to start. I threw the towel in. I called a friend who runs a technology company (“Madame Techie”) with whom I was already in discussions regarding them developing my new site. I told her what I wanted, the timelines and my budget and, let’s just say, she politely told me where to go. 😊 We agreed that I should develop the site as best as I could and they would tidy it up once done.

As I reflected on the matter that night it hit home what my real challenge was. Fear! I had an underlying belief that I couldn’t build the site and that manifested in the form of fear of failure. I was petrified that I wouldn’t be able to get the new site completed on time and the end product would be terrible and completely unfit for purpose. I knew I had no idea how to go about building a WordPress site and I was also scared of wasting money paying for the wrong or unnecessary things. 

Those fears wouldn’t have felt so unpalatable had I then not remembered that I had published a blog post on dealing with fear just the day before! 😊 How could I be sharing about addressing fear one day and then succumbing to it the next? The words “Physician, heal thyself!” came to my mind and I resolved to “face the site”.

Here’s the thing though, I had a “big birthday” for one of my children coming up the following week that I needed to prepare for. I also had to make final arrangements for a member of my household who was  traveling the week after. Not to talk of my day job! 😀

A week passed and zero progress was made on the site. Those wretched themes were still waiting for me to make a decision. I had to get on with it. With six days to D-Day, I settled into choosing a design. Of course, not without first praying. 😊 I committed the project to God and asked the Holy Spirit to come and take control. I then went through the themes calmly – one by one – ascertaining what I liked, what I didn’t like, which ones had the sections I required and which didn’t; until I narrowed down to about six. I mentally short-listed a couple and got my husband’s second opinion. One challenge overcome with an unknown number to go!

I took Monday off work to spend time with the family and progress the site. When I came to customizing the theme I had chosen and paid for, I couldn’t. I mean, I simply did not know where to start. I clicked backwards and forwards but made no headway whatsoever!

As any educated self-respecting 21st century global citizen would, I went online to get help. Within a few minutes of watching several of the YouTube videos that came up it would become clear that they were all pointing me to other themes. I couldn’t readily find any videos on customising my chosen theme so I resorted to ditching it and proceeding with a video that promised to help me (as clueless as I was) to build a website from end to end within a reasonable period of time. I got cracking. I worked on the site every day last week, often well into the night.

At various times waves of fear would come crashing over me as I hit roadblocks and the limiting mindset of “I can’t!” resurfaced. On each occasion I would invite the Holy Spirit, my Helper, to take control and help me scale the hurdle. Not once did He fail!

I would watch a YouTube video, pause, go to my site, implement, go back to YouTube, watch some more, rewind, watch again, etc…. and so I developed a “rough draft” of my site – 2 days to the end of my Wix subscription. 

I was now faced with a list of changes I had been struggling to implement but absolutely necessary to render the site half-decent.  I was stuck on these issues and I was timing out. I reached out to Madame Techie again and she was happy to help. I gave her access to the site and allowed her a day or so to get on with it. She had informed me that she had prior commitments on the said day and had therefore delegated the assignment to her colleague.

Saturday, the big day, arrives! The Wix subscription would be expiring and I absolutely had to migrate to the new site if “shame and disgrace were not to fall upon me”. I eagerly waited to hear from Madame Techie but nothing… I left it until a respectable 11:30am before reaching out to her. 

You guessed it! Her colleague had “fallen her hand”! He had not yet made the changes and had promised to get them done over the weekend. Over the weekend, ke?! I barely had twelve hours left! I knew it wasn’t her fault so, without much ado, I told her I would handle things.

Back to “Bros Google and YouTube”! By fire by force, I need to have a decent-looking working site migrated onto my URL today, I ruminated. There was another complication. I had a training session starting at 5pm and going on till 1am (don’t ask!) so I didn’t exactly have 12 hours. The class was also a “no-cheating” Zoom session where all cameras must be turned on and I had to be completely engaged. Hmmm….

Anyway sha, I worked furiously for the next few hours trying to implement what I considered to be the most critical changes required for the site to go live. At about 4:55pm I called Madame Techie again (they also manage my domain name) to give her the instruction to re-point my URL from the Wix to the WordPress platform. There was another small matter of me not knowing what I needed to do on my side to ensure the new site would be up and running. 😀 Kai!

Periodically during my class, I would “pop” into the WordPress and my hosting company’s websites to see whether I could figure it out. At some point, the hosting company’s site kept trying to get me to make some selections regarding what sort of site I wanted to build. After several attempts of escaping that loop, I resigned myself to going all the way through in the hope that it would eventually tell me what I needed to do to take my site live.

At about 9pm, my class went for an hour’s break and I jumped onto my site to finalise the migration. I could not believe what my eyes were seeing! My carefully and lovingly created design was gone! My hosting company had converted everything to their template and it was all one big mess! My Wix site was about to go down and I had lost my new site! I clicked backwards and forwards! No show! Eehh God!

I called Madame Techie but it rang off. I found the customer service number for the (US) hosting company to see what could be done. I just kept telling myself, I wouldn’t cry… No, I wouldn’t cry! 😀 (I was not laughing at the time o!) I was, however, extremely calm. I rationalised that the worst that could happen was that my site would be down for a few hours and I would have to work through the night to fix things. Worse things could happen…. We had just been discussing the importance of looking for God’s hand in difficult situations in my class so I concluded that there was no better time to put what I had learnt into practice. 😀 “Oh God, what are You doing through this situation? Oh God, what is the eternal perspective on this [debacle]?!”, I muttered. 😀

After a good hour on the phone the representative had only managed to partially recover my site which, thankfully, was already pointed to the URL. Of course, as he worked I was praying in the spirit in between mouthfuls of my supper. He eventually gave up and offered to report the issue, assuring me that I would hear back from them in about 24 to 48 hours. By this time it was 10pm! 2 hours to go! I didn’t even shout at him. I thanked him for his help but told him that I would handle things from there. It was time to go back to class.

As I jumped back onto the Zoom call I made my apologies to the trainer explaining the situation and forewarning him that I was likely to be a bit distracted until I resolved the matter. He was understanding and mentioned it to the other participants, soliciting their prayers for me.

However, at the very start of the class we had done an exercise of asking Jesus what He had in store for us for the session and I had sensed the Lord saying that I should pay close attention in the class as there were some things He wanted to reveal to me. I was already wondering whether it had been my earlier disobedience that had gotten me into hot pepper soup so was keen to avoid further disobedience. 😀 I prepared myself for the worst and settled into the class. About 30 minutes later an idea popped into my head – “Go check the themes setting and change it to your original template”. I did…. And I recovered 90-95% of my site! Hallelujah!!! I went on to resolve the remaining issues and more, working until 5am the next morning.

The rest, as they say, is history!

Welcome to my new site! To you, it may seem basic; amateur even. For me, it a story of triumphing over fear. 😊 Before leaving, permit me to share some of my key learnings from that experience with you…who knows, you may find it useful someday.

Key learnings

1. With God, nothing shall be impossible! Just tap into the Holy Spirit and allow Him to lead you.
2. Google and YouTube are your friends! Hold them near and hold them dear! Together, they can take you very far in life! (unless of course they don’t understand your question, which occurred on several occasions.) 😊
3. Whenever you are faced with a seemingly impossible task, take things one step at a time. Break the giant project into bite size pieces so you are not overwhelmed.
4. Typically, getting things wrong will not kill you. As painful as it may be, with the right mental approach to adversity you even learn and grow from the process. 
5. Whatever the situation, stay calm! You are almost always better off staying calm than not (unless of course you are faced with circumstances where you have to “pick race” and you would fare better if you have some panic juices flowing through your body). 😊
6. Sometimes you have to proactively create time for the things that are important. For example, taking time off work or deprioritising other activities for a period.
7. Just keep at it! You’re unlikely to achieve your desired end result at first pass but just keep going.
8. It’s ok if things aren’t perfect on day 1. Determine what is absolutely essential at any one given time and don’t sweat the rest. Again, deal with things one at a time. Like me, my website remains work in progress but that doesn’t stop it from serving you and I today.
9. For brief periods of time, lack of sleeping wouldn’t kill you! It’s torturous, for sure, but death is unlikely to come knocking because you burnt the candles at both ends for a week. 😊
10. It’s amazing what you can achieve if you simply try! When faced with a challenge, you can either choose to be overcome by fear or purpose to overcome the fear. We need to just trust God and lean on the Holy Spirit. Jesus is right there, walking alongside us every step of the way.

Reflections

• What desire have you not pursued simply because of fear?
• Ask the Holy Spirit to reveal the underlying belief set.
• Ask Him where you learnt the lie(s) from and who you need to forgive.
• Forgive.
• Hand the lie(s) over to the Lord and ask Him what His truth is regarding that situation.