“A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit saps a person’s strength.”

General Electric announced this week that by 2020 they would be a top 10 global software company. Think about that for moment.  This is 2016, or nearly, and in four years they will be transformed into a top 10 software company?  How, and why, one might ask?  Well, because everything that they now produce and all things going forward will have data sensors attached.  If you wear any kind of health monitor, like a FitBit you will get what these sensors can do.  Put them on a jet engine turbine or the tub of a washing machine and there will be more data and information than they have ever had before.  Thus, the transformation.  This also means that GE will demand more data scientists than there are data scientists available, a cry that I continue to make to the universities and education systems where I get some small voice of involvement.  The world is changing right in front of us and if we didn’t think we needed to understand software and what goes into the creation and deployment of it before, then now would be the time to start catching up.

Consider that there is no greater set of data sensors and emitters for God than each and everyone of us who are believers and are trying our best to bring glory to God through our work.  With each conversation, contact, meeting and expression, we become the lens by which a person will or won’t see our God.  I was in a meeting yesterday with a company where we opened the meeting in prayer.  The CEO was a little shy of praying in a conference room where the glass walls allowed people to see in.  I joked, “It’s San Francisco, they will think we we are meditating”, but in reality if someone did see us praying, it might have reminded them that there are believers among them, that they might need to be reminded that they too should and could pray over their work, that they need to return to God.  Or of course, they might have thought it was a bunch of crazy people.  Regardless, we are the  emitters of God’s love and He is the great Data Scientist who makes it all work together.  So, let’s close this week, and let’s be at a minimum cheerful to others, and as we say Merry Christmas to many who won’t be in the office next week or not until 2016, let’s be sure that their last impression of us is one of Him!

Reference:  Proverbs 17:22 (New Living Translation)