Darkness won’t stop us!

It was Halloween on Monday and we were determined that the website would be made available to the public on that day.

The main pages were ready and we were ready but unfortunately Squarespace wasn’t ready!

Picture Simon’s face as he started to load up Squarespace. Bless, he was so excited that he was finally ready to push the button that said ‘Publish’. He really was not prepared for what would happen next! This should have been the easy bit; I mean come on how hard can it be to press one button?

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! We learnt that actually it was impossible to press that button! It would have helped if we could actually see it. As the main page loaded, Simon literally gasped! Apart from the pictures everything was black. Our light background was completely dark so much so that no writing could be seen, no buttons could be seen and worst of all there were no editing tools that could be seen!

All I could hear were the words “What have I done?” I have never seen anybody shut a website down as quick and I have seen some things working in a College! It actually took him all his time to reopen it as he was so worried! Again it was the same and we had no idea of why this had happened. It was just bizarre! Me being me had to ask the question; you know the one that says “What did you touch?” Simon really did question himself so I wasn’t asking anything that he wasn’t already asking himself. There was just no reasoning for what we were seeing.

Simon finally plucked up the courage to speak to Squarespace with the hope that somehow they could put the website back to an earlier version. He felt embarrassed because how do you tell someone that is an expert that somehow you have completely destroyed what you’ve spent so much time building! He took the easier option of talking through online chat, that way they wouldn’t see how embarrassed he actually was. It seemed strange that he was number 526 in the queue but still we never put two and two together. I wish we had because it would have saved a lot of time waiting for an advisor to get to our call! When Simon finally spoke to someone, the fault we were experiencing was a fault on their side. They had been hacked for Halloween! Not everybody had been affected but the majority of those building their sites were all suffering the same darkness!

The advisor could not even tell us when it would go back to normal! Literally they had no idea and all they could do was mark down our website to let the engineers know that our website was one of those affected. There were thousands in the same boat as us, we were just unfortunate and had to wait.

It was pointless being annoyed as it would not change anything but we knew that we could change some things for some people so we decided that the darkness we were experiencing on Halloween would not stop us making a difference! Weeks before our Chair of Trustees Sarah Duerden had said that she believed that we should tithe on all big gifts that come into the Church. That had touched our hearts as this is something that we personally both believe we should do. We had received a big gift and had money to one side and we had talked to the Trustees about several different Churches that were dear to our hearts and so we used that day to bless them financially or with gifts knowing that they would be gratefully received.

It felt good to bless others especially on a day that was so challenging to us! I don’t ever want us to lose that spirit of generosity; it is one of our core values as a Church and we will do all we can to be a blessing to others.

By the way the website is still not fixed but hopefully we will be able to press that button soon!

Simon & Valda

November 3rd 2022