Prayers Being Answered
There are many examples where Jesus has shown me his love and grace all throughout my life.

Texaco
My first job as a programmer was with Texaco as a COBOL programmer working on what is now Legacy IBM systems. My first assignment was to babysit a daily credit card batch application called S14s.The S14 application produced tons of printed output. I simply was required to understand the application and guarantee it ran successfully every night M-F. If there was ever a problem I would be called at home and I was expected to fix what was wrong. I kept a set of error code manuals under my bed for quick reference. Many times a problem meant driving to downtown Houston in the middle of the night. If the application did not spit out its tons of paper, then all the S14 clerks that came to work the next day to work the paper would have nothing to do and S14s would not be processed and large sums of money would be either wasted or not realized. I did have a senior programmer as my backup. However, getting him involved stated I could not do the job. There was more than my ego involved. My performance was tied to handling issues on my own. Having backup involved too many times or failing to have S14s out on time would result in loosing my job.

I was 21 years old or so.

Of course, one night S14s crashed in a horrible way, which would require a complete restart to fix. S14s ran for 4 hours, and the clerks showed up at 8 AM, this meant if the application needed to be rerun it must start before 4 AM, which usually meant one shot at a fix. So there I was, wading through a system core dump (a huge dump of printed output designed to help debug a problem) at 3 AM, knowing I had to have a solution that worked before 4 am in order to have enough time to restart the application. I laid my head on the core dump and asked Jesus to help me. I came up with an idea and restarted the app. It blew up immediately, this time the symptoms were different, so I tried something different. I prayed again and restarted the app. This time it ran to completion. Had the app not blown up after my first attempt to fix it, I probably would have never figured it out. I can remember thinking when the app blew up after my first attempt to fix it that my prayer had gone unanswered. I was not mad, just sad. What I didn’t realize was the crash was needed so that I could fix the problem properly. After the app ran and I had a few hours to reflect on what had actually happened, I couldn’t say Thank you Jesus enough. I learned a tiny bit about prayer, faith and grace that night.

Another Example of the Power of Prayer

When I left SFA I became an independent contract programmer. One of my customers was a small development company in Dallas. I can’t recall their name, so l'll call them the Cgroup. The Cgroup consisted of all COBOL programmers. One of their customers was a company named One-Hour Delivery. One-Hour took orders over the phone and dispatched drivers in the field to pick and deliver packages. The Cgroup had sold them all their accounting software and built interfaces between invoicing and dispatch. The dispatch system was written by their system admin and was very simplified but functional. One day the system admin and the owner got very mad at each other. The system admin deleted the dispatch system and all backups of it, including the source code. One-Hour was out of business. The Cgroup made an attempt to build a quick and simple temporary dispatch system written in COBOL, which worked until the transaction volume got too high, then it would fail. I was brought in to rewrite the dispatch system in ‘C’, make it faster and scale to a large number of transactions, as well as support the existing interface to the Cgroup accounting system. I met with the owner, assured him this could be done and all would be OK. He must have trusted me because he was visibly relieved.

I assured him everything would be fixed. I took one week to build the new system at home and test it in a simulated environment. During that week, One-Hour’s business took a beating from the temp system crashing and poor performance. They lost some customers and were on the brink of losing their bigger customer foundation. I arrived with the new system, ready to install. At first all went well, then 5pm approached (the max load time) and the transaction rate began to shoot up. My new system rolled over. The owner looked like someone had shot him in the belly. I began to investigate, but saw no clue why things should not be running perfectly. I was scared and stressed. I went to the bathroom, got on my knees and asked Jesus to help me fix the problem. I asked for wisdom to fix the problem. I was quick to explain to Jesus, I needed a fix for the One-Hour owner and not for me. I had no interest in saving face or my reputation, I asked Jesus to help me help the owner of One-Hour to save his business. I returned to the computer and saw the problem immediately and fixed the issue. The system was restarted and everything worked fine. This incident stuck with me for a long time because when I went to the bathroom to pray, I was convinced a much bigger design problem was involved that could not be easily fixed and yet it turned out to be something so simple, I couldn't believe it. I felt a miracle had occurred. I often think back upon this event as an amazing demonstration of prayer.