Saturday, October 1, 2011

The Already and the Not Yet...

I promise I am not making any of this up. I couldn't. I'm guessing if you're reading our blog, you want to know the answer to the question, "Did we make it?" Well, the answer is: Already and Not yet. Yes and no. We're not sure. How can we be "Not sure"? I am so glad you asked, because it's a rather long story.

As you know, Richard Rector was composing our music, and doing a wonderful job. Well his time got cut (WAY) short because of our mistakes. He worked so hard to get as much done as possible, then he asked the Horners from our sister church to help with the editing and electronically adding more instruments. Zachary Horner is a gifted composer, so we were going to use some of his music and John Urback's as well. They worked so hard, up until the wee hours on several nights. On Thursday, we had much of the soundtrack and began to add it to the movie. We went to bed about 3 am on Friday morning, having a "finished product" that we weren't quite happy with, so we went over to the H's house on Friday for a final run through, and possibly a little editing. We finish editing (we want to do a little more fine tuning in color and sound, but the movie is edited) about 4:00 pm, plenty of time to get it to the post office, right?

Yes and no... First, our movie is 50GB, and our DVDs were 8GB, so we had to compress the files. That took over 2 hours. Finally, we're done compressing; now we can burn the DVDs. No problem, right? Before you burn the DVDs, they have to be formatted. Who knew that formatting a DVD would take another 2 hours? Meanwhile, we've downloaded the compressed file to a second computer to start it burning a DVD as well. Guess how long it takes to format? Over 3 hours! By now we're at 9:00, with only one DVD burned. You have to have 6 DVDs to enter the festival, and we have one. We continue to pray through this whole thing that God would somehow work this out. Our tech-savvy children tell us that once a DVD is formatted, it doesn't take as long the second time. I'm used to 5 minutes to burn a CD, so I think there's still hope... We put the second DVD in the computer estimates 19 minutes to burn. Great. The Post Office is about 30 minutes away. We think, we'll get 2 done, the men can go to the post office and get in line, while the women stay at the house, burn another DVD; the second computer will keep burning its DVD. Then the women will follow in a second car to the post office, with the desk top (plugged into a converter for power) and the laptop in the car, with the desk top, so we can burn DVDs on the trip to the post office. Armed with another burned DVD, the women get into the car and plug in not one , but 2 converter boxes, both of which worked 5 minutes ago when Jenny Horner started her car. Neither one of them will work with the computer plugged in. But by this time, we're already driving. Jenny is driving, I have a powerless desk top on my lap in the front seat, and the girls are in the back seat of the truck with the lap top, running on quickly dwindling battery power. While we're racing (well, our hearts were, anyway) to the post office we get a call from the men: They were able to mail 2 copies of our DVD and the soundtrack CD. YEAH!!!!! But, it's 10 pm and the post office workers won't wait for us to bring any more DVDs, but Randy has another idea.

Some businesses have their own mail meters, so they can stamp their own outgoing mail, which includes a postmark. Randy knows someone who has one of these meters. SO, we all head back to the house hoping to finish burning the DVDs and get to this friend's by 12 MN (Thank you Mrs. C for being willing to meet us!!), then send these other DVDs in a separate package. Are you getting tired yet?

 We get back to the house, plug the laptop in as it's dying to keep that burn going. We plug the desktop in to burn 2 more DVDs, only to find out that, since we turned off the computer, we now have to reformat the disk. Another 2-3 hours! The laptop is almost finished formatting and burning its first DVD , and we're getting close to midnight, so we have to leave to try to get the envelope stamped. We figured we'd send what we could with a letter explaining that the others would follow, and hope that they would accept the entry. We were hoping that it would at least be accepted to be considered for a showing at the festival even if it wasn't accepted to be in competition for a Jubilee award. For us, to glorify God through sharing the message about adoption has always been our goal. Earthly awards are affirmation, and certainly a great encouragement, especially to young film makers, but they are hay and stubble (pretty cool hay and stubble, but still...).

While we are driving to the friend's, at 11:50, the laptop comes up with an error message: "Formatting error." So we start another disk burning. We arrive at the friend's and get the precious timed postmark. It is five minutes until midnight; we have 2 DVDs and the soundtrack mailed in, and another DVD that can go into our envelope with the postmark. That is the best that could be done. We could not control the computer time. Next time we will know, and Lord willing, not cut it so close, but, providentially, we were only able to get 3 DVDs burned. Since then, we've tried to burn 3 more DVDs, 1 on the laptop and 2 on the same desk top that successfully burned the first 3. ALL had formatting errors. How does that happen? In the providence of God, we didn't start earlier, and even late, we haven't yet been able to get more DVDs burned. so God obviously has other plans that have not yet been revealed. We wait on His will in His timing, and we praise Him for His sovereignty.

So, did we make the deadline? Yes and no. The already and not yet... We don't know. Will they accept the entry because some of the DVDs and the application were on time, and the rest follow? We'll keep you posted. But the next post, after we all wake up for real (I couldn't sleep while this story was rattling in my head), AND after we go see Courageous, which we've been waiting to see since we saw sneak clips at last year's SAICFF academy, I'll write about how God changed our mourning into dancing over how all this turned out.

God is good, especially when His plan differ from ours, because it reminds us that we are adopted and our heavenly Father is He is doing what's best for us, because we can't see what's best for us.

2 comments: