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God’s Hand Miracles Tender Mercy

Salesforce Expert Appears

At work, I’ve been working on InMoment’s Salesforce managed package. In particular, I’ve been working to resolve security issues that have been identified be a static code analyzer.

The people we have on the team, me include, just aren’t skilled and experienced enough to solve these issues. It’s been really frustrating to try to resolve things way out of my league.

I’d been praying for help for days and on 7 March 2024, Ryan Milyard reached out to me on Slack. Ryan is a Salesforce admin & developer that works in the revenue operations group of the InMoment Review Trackers business; he is not part of Engineering. Ryan had been given my name from someone and was reaching out to see if I knew anything about a new user he was working with.

I didn’t know anything about the new user Ryan was asking about, and when it was clear I couldn’t help, I asked Ryan if he knew anything about the particular error I was looking at. Within 6 minutes, Ryan came back with a brief explanation and 5 bulleted ideas of the root cause. I was super impressed and asked if Ryan would be open to helping me more formally. He agreed.

The next day we met and brainstormed some more solution ideas. None of them worked, but it got Ryan involved.

I’ve spent the last couple weeks working with Ryan and a couple days ago we cracked the code on the last remaining big security issue. It was a miracle. On Monday evening, I was ready to give up. I was so frustrated. Before I went to bed, I left Ryan a note with my most recent findings and struggles. Tuesday, mid-morning, Ryan replied. At that point, I had already decided I was moving to other things. Something about the reply inspired me to try one more time. Ryan’s thoughts spurred some ideas. We chatted back and forth a bit, and within a few hours we had a solution that maintained functionality and produced a clean security scan.

Heavenly Father answered my prayers. He orchestrated whatever he needed to to have Ryan reach out to me. Without Ryan’s help, my team would still be stuck.

Categories
Miracles Tender Mercy

Unbearable Back

My back had been hurting for weeks; 9 weeks actually. The issue has gotten progressive worse and today I found the pain unbearable. I went to Walmart to pick up some things and I started to have a panic attack because I wasn’t sure I could drive myself home. I’ve never felt like that before. It was quite scary. As I was making my way out of the parking lot I remembered that Vitamin B5 was recommended to help with my health problems. I turned around, went back into Walmart, bought the vitamins, and made my way home in excruciating pain. At home I slid out of my truck trying to minimize the negative impact of landing on my feet.

I made it I the house and showed Willy the new plastic line I’d found for the weed wacker. I then shut myself in my room and fell to my knees and begged Heavenly Father to relieve me. I also commanded by the Melchizedek priesthood and in the name of Jesus Christ that any evil spirit or curse or whatever might be causing my pain to be cast out and be replaced with light. That’s what I felt I should do. I then lifted the bedroom and I iced my back immediately as that had numbed me from some of the pain earlier. I then went outside to replace the 4 sprinkler valves in the front yard.

Digging was required, but I couldn’t do it very well. So, I asked Willy to help me. He was awesome. We stumbled a fair bit, but we nailed it. We replaced 4 valves and installed a new manifold so repairs like this will be quick in the future and we don’t have to dig up the lawn. It was tough work, but we persevered. After a while I didn’t realize my back wasn’t hurting. It was great. I still felt some pain at time, but my state of hysteria from before had disappeared. Willy and I worked until 12:30am until our work was done and cleaned up. My back is felling quite good. It’s a miracle from the Lord. I think he’s trying to show me he has power to do his work and work miracles in my life.

A cool side tender mercy came as Willy and I were working. I had to Home Depot to get more fitting as I’d made too many mistakes and ran out. While there I asked about water proof wire nuts and the specialist recommended I save my money. So, I bought less expensive standard nuts, additional fittings, and returned home to finish the job. As Willy and I dug to reveal more pipe that we’d have to cut to fix our last issue, we hit a plastic bag. It was as buried in the dirt and contained about ten waterproof nuts. I assumed they’d been lost and buried years ago when then home was first built. They were just what we needed to make the wiring look nice. I could have completed the work without those special nuts and everything would have worked fine, but the Lord provided them anyway. I think the Lord is showing me that he’s willing to provide more than just the basic needs in life, but also preferences and desires.

Maybe the biggest miracle of all is that when we were done everything worked like we need it to. I couldn’t be happier.

Categories
Tender Mercy

Triple

The Lord blessed us with 3 tender mercies today:

  1. Paula and I went to the specialist ultrasound this afternoon. The special visit was necessary because the baby’s kidneys were dilated. After the tech and doctor did the scans, they indicated that the baby was fine and the kidneys were within normal size. What a blessing! They did find that the placenta was attached a little off, but it wasn’t a big concern.
  2. We stopped by the lock smith on the way home from the doctor. They didn’t have the piece I needed in stock, but they did find one on a unit they were returning to the manufacturer. They sold it to me.
  3. I spent all day racking my brain over a bug in the code for an Amex dashboard. I had to pause to take the YM & YW to UVU for a special missionary activity. I returned home and almost immediately found the big and fixed it. I believe the Lord blessed me for serving.
Categories
Tender Mercy

God Cares About Our Everyday Lives

My team engaged with Adobe Analytics Marketing to create an engaging experience for Summit attendees. It was decided to track arcade basketball hoops (6x), aggregate the statistics for individuals and the collective group, and send emails.

I worked with marketing and a design agency to solidify the concepts for dashboards, emails, and a website. Coming up with the concept was relatively easy compared to implementing it.

With only a week left before Summit, our team was still facing some serious, show-stopper technical challenges:

  1. Badge scanners weren’t working.
  2. No Adobe Campaign instance or someone to implement email designs.
  3. Orange PI mini computers that wouldn’t rotate the screen for our displays.

We were also running out of time to implement the things we already knew how to do:

  • Complete Adobe Campaign triggers.
  • Implement game achievements.
  • Simulate multiple players playing.
  • Create a personalized website for any players.
  • Complete the games screen.
  • Complete the aggregate dashboard screen.
  • No Campaign design and dashboard.
  • No Audience Manager design and dashboard.

With all this still in flight 1 week before Summit, I began to question if we could really get it all figured out and completed. I then started to pray more earnestly. In my heart I knew that Heavenly Father cared about me and my team and our success. I knew that what we were pursuing was good and right. And, therefore, merited a blessing from Heavenly Father. I prayed morning and night. I fasted the Sunday before Summit. Miraculously, the blessings came. On Monday, we figured out the screen rotation on the PI. On Tuesday, we figured out the badge scanners. On Wednesday, our Campaign instance finally got setup and a couple of individuals from Paris surfaced to configure it and implement our emails. Heavenly Father enlightened our minds, led us to answers to figure out what we needed to, and brought people to us that could help do things we couldn’t. We had a very long week and everyone pushed very hard. We finished coding the major pieces of the experience Saturday night at 11:55pm. It felt so good.

At Summit the experience was called Metrics Madness. It was very engaging and extremely successful. The Analytics Marketing team expressed that they had never been a part of something so compelling.