I think a little testimony is in order. It’s about something that happened to me during the recent lemonstograpes.com website problem (which is now solved). I am putting it here on our prayer thread because it is about a very specific prayer God answered for me near the end of the very long process of getting the website restored.
First let me say that I had a lot of conversations with the Lord while the site was down. (I knew how serious the situation was and that sometimes you cannot recover a crashed site.) During one conversation, I told the Lord (again) that the website was His. If He wanted it to function, He could restore it. If He didn’t, although it would really hurt to lose so suddenly the product of so many years of work, I would accept this from Him and do my best to say “the Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Two days after the site crashed, (Sunday, 6/19) several necessary things dovetailed. Support people were able to get the connection between the website’s backup service and the website’s hosting service re-established so that we could attempt a site restore of the most recent backup. Restoring the site took a number of hours, but finally I got a notice that it was done. I typed in “lemontograpes.com” and, wallah, it was back!! I was so relieved and grateful to the Lord!
But then (while happily testing everything and seeing that all was well), I discovered a problem, and it was major. (What a let down!) Knowing how difficult troubleshooting is, I braced myself for maybe needing to spend a few more days in back and forth email communication with three different sets of interrelated support people (with long waits in between emails)!
Two days later, still no one had been able to figure out the site’s problem: Why was a user who tried to log-in to the website thrown out of it and given the message “there has been a critical error on this site”?
Yesterday (6/22), sitting in front of my computer feeling very discouraged, I said, “Lord, no one knows what is causing this problem … but You know. Couldn’t you please just tell me?” Immediately this word came into my mind: “Wordfence.”
Wordfence is a plugin on my website that performs security functions such as stopping hackers. I had the thought to temporarily deactivate that plugin and then see if I could log in without an error. When I tried to deactivate Wordfence (click one key that says deactivate), I was thrown out of the website and given the same critical error message.
I instantly knew I that I had the culprit, and that Wordfence support would be able to help me. God had answered my very specific prayer. (He has been trying to teach me to pray specifically, so I can see His specific answers, but I am a slow learner.) I felt a wonderful wave of relief. It was as if the problem was already fixed, and I told John so. I was in awe of how God had answered my prayer so simply and quickly.
Then, what was even more amazing was this: I received an email from one of the support people that said he had good news for me: He had found the culprit: He said it was the Wordfence plugin! Wow. What a confirmation!
I subsequently followed the Wordfence support person’s instructions and bingo, all went back to normal! I wrote the following to that support person (a fitting closing to this testimony):
I followed your suggestion and well-written steps this morning and … all is well on my website again! It looks like this was the last step back to normal–after my website crash and long/difficult restore! Glory be to God (who has heard my prayers) and thanks be to Phil who provided the last piece of the puzzle. Hope that doesn’t offend, just felt I had to say it because it is true!