I was hoping I wouldn't have to do this, because it's largely personal, but it's impossible for me to ignore issues when someone attacks my faith and beliefs.

We have a client who's disgruntled, to say the least. Not that she's the only one, we're not perfect, but she is the most vocal. We've had a pretty rough time over the past few months, and we've had an insane amount of pressure to deliver with very limited staff resources. It's mostly web design related. The hosting services are running very smoothly.

The details are complex, and I know we are largely at fault because we made promises that we failed to deliver, due to circumstances beyond our control. But in the end, we delivered a functional site that was unfortunately rejected a few weeks later.

It was the most unfortunate of circumstances, we made a lot of presumptions right from the beginning, and yes, we made a lot of mistakes as well. I personally made promises I failed to deliver despite the countless hours I spent working overnight to get my workload cleared.

In brief, over the past 5 months, we've had two designers leaving us, leaving us with effectively one designer. You may have seen the job ads we've been posting. We had equipment breaking down, like expensive computers and our trusty power generator leaving us at the mercy of Umeme with constant blackouts. Then I had one massive project I'd committed to very early at our church, Miracle Center Cathedral, the Christmas Cantata which took away a very large chunk of my days and nights during the Christmas season. My world was turned upside down as I lost one dear person after another, I was away from the firm for weeks on end upcountry. We're still recovering from the effects of all that.

In essence, to sum it all up, there is an african proverb, african i think, if I can paraphrase, "When misfortune comes visiting, and you tell him there are no seats for him in your home, he says, don't worry, I brought my own stool". But God has been faithul to us in all this and has kept us going strong.

Many other clients have suffered, but thankfully they understood and stayed with us.

I will wait until the said client has finished blogging about it so that I can know where to start.

My comments on her blog are being moderated, so people have no idea of our side of the saga. She is choosing only specific sections of my email and comments that work to her benefit, essentially, my hands are tied.

Now, the issue that's hurting me most is the direct attack on our faith and our christianity. We're being labelled non christians, we're being accused of being ashamed of Christ.

The same person who, during the Kenyan crisis, asked me as a christian to make for her "Please pray for Kenya" banners, of which I put one prominently on our site for a month, the same person who has asked me, as a christian to keep her several times in prayer. Does that make me/us righteous? Not in the least, our works do not make us righteous, but only His grace. What it does show, is where I stand. And she knows that.

At Node Six, we are not ashamed of Jesus Christ.

I will repeat that, we are not ashamed of Christ.

Almost all our clients know my story, how God helped me start this firm 5 years back with nothing but a borrowed flash disk. Through all the trials, starting and closing one firm after another, now we're an 8 man dedicated Node Six team with two other sister firms.

My friends and the Node Six team all know the story of how God guided me, then us, brought the right people into my life, caused some people to leave, however painful that was.

Node Six is a Christian family.

We hold fellowship every Tuesday morning, we pray every morning and evening. Sometimes we fast, we tithe company money every single time we get paid, individuals tithe as well, on their own. In the process, we're always running broke, but we never complain. We've had clients frustrated because we can't come for meetings on Tuesdays since we keep that time aside for fellowship. We have middle men frustrated because we don't handle work for beer companies or cigarette firms, we don't bribe, we don't give kickbacks, we don't overcharge, we don't pad invoices for a middle man's benefit.

As Christians, we are not perfect, we do not claim to be so and we most definitely do not go around accusing other people of being non-christians or trashing their faith. What kind of example would we be if we were to point fingers? Who are we to judge what they are and what they are not? We have our flaws, like everyone else, and it is only by God's grace that we can wake up everyday and call ourselves children of God.

I'm not trying to justify our faith or rightousness here, far from it, only God can make us righteous. I'm just saying we try our best to live as Christians, and if what we do is not good enough for you, then I'm truly sorry.

To be frank, I absolutely do not care whether someone thinks we are born again/christians or not. Who are we supposed to please in our works? Man or God? What I care about is someone telling the whole world things about us that are obviously a lie. Spreading facts that you cannot even verify. Accuse me/us of anything else, but do not attack our faith as though you spend every single waking hour with us.

God looks at man's heart, not at the outward appearances. We know where our faith lies, and we know who our God is, and we know who our saviour is. The entire team at Node Six can testify to that.

She is most likely going to pick some stuff from here and use it on her blog. Feel free, there is nothing I have said that I am ashamed of. In fact, I only wish after reading this that she stops moderating her blog to remove my comments.

I won't talk about this anymore, but let God be our witness.

I'll wait for her to raise all her professional and business grievances and then handle that side of the story.

God bless.

Comments (4)

1. Written by This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , on 17-04-2008 10:26 Well your story is really touching but ley me tell you one thing in life brother, for every thing that happens to you its all under God's awareness. Just keep going son. I really love your attitude your worth a gentleman.

4. Written by This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , on 18-07-2008 09:17 Hi Solomon,    I guess I would be doing a diservice if I didn't respond to the comments made about you and your company.     Personally, I really don't care wether the story is true or false (from the client's perspective).    Being in the same industry (web solutions), I am in a good position to analyse this situation.     I read the client's claims up to the point when they started going religious and attacking beliefs and quoting the bible. At that poinnt I stopped reading because I realised that the argument was going off topic.     From a business point of view, I think Node Six's major shortcoming was not delivering on time.     In terms of wether Node six used Joomla or Mambo or "emyooga",I can that just one way of doing the job. That what business is about; finding solutions for customers'/clients' problems.     It has never been a crime to solve problems in a particular way.    I belive all the money received from the client was justly earned. It really doesnt matter wether you write your own code or use open source. The bottomline is that the client wanted a website and they got one. And that Node Six invested time and other resources to do the job.     By claiming that they (client)would have developed the website themselves, to me, is rubbish. That is what they should have done in the first place. Obviously, the client didnt have the TIME to develop their website hence the need to hire some one.     that said, I guess the urgument ceases to hold any water.

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