When I asked May how she feels about her ministry she said, “There's too much going on. Things are moving too fast.” May carries a lot of responsibility, both for French technology and for the global Make Giving Easy project. You don't need to be technical to read on and appreciate the complexities of May's ministry. In France she's been heavily involved in revamping the processes when staff members are bought on and also when they leave. Many of the steps are being shifted over to human resources to take care of themselves, streamlining and hopefully making things more effective. One of the next projects is helping the sports ministry process payments for their camps online.

With the Make Giving Easy project, they're in the thick of things for three countries right now: Kenya, Guatemala, and Moldova. What makes these especially challenging is that the payment gateways have to be custom coded. No out of the box solution exists, so they have to go the time intensive route of making everything work. Custom solutions are higher maintenance in the long term. Every time PHP or Wordpress are upgraded they have to test to make sure everything still functions, and custom solutions are more likely to break. May hopes to improve the automated testing for all of the sites, which raises a red flag if anything isn't working properly. Similar like the temperature, oil pressure or check engine lights in your car, automated testing would monitor and catch problems before the user encounters them. Because the processes are complex many things can go wrong, so it's important to keep a close eye. With these ambitious goals, it's easy to see why May works so hard.

We took a few days of vacation to visit Efrem in London right as his school year finished. It was delightful to see him in that context, meet his friends and tour his school. We even stayed together in his dorm room, since his roommate had moved out. He took us to Euston Church where he attends, built one hundred and seventy years ago near the University College. They have an afternoon service specifically for students, and Efrem was involved in a midweek bible study. He had some free time to show us around, doing the tourist thing. London is much more spread out than Paris, more airy with lower buildings. It was fun to see the newly redone Big Ben and wonder at the brush strokes of Van Gogh's Sunflowers in the National Gallery. We wandered Hyde and Regents Parks and crossed the famous cross-walk at Abbey Road. Sorry, but we didn't take a picture. We're thankful he's thriving, progressing in flute, making good friends and growing spiritually.