Part 5 – Giving Hope and Healing — in Spreadsheets

If you’ve been following along in this series, we’ve talked about my first steps into the hospital, the value of building good habits, caring for the Finance team, and learning to leave space in conversation. All of those threads lead here: giving hope and healing through spreadsheets.

Mercy Ships’ tagline is “bringing hope and healing to the world’s forgotten poor.” We mostly think of surgeries — a child with bowed legs walking straight for the first time, a person blind from cataracts seeing their family again, a patient with a massive tumor finally lifting their head without shame. That’s the heart of what Mercy Ships does. Healing, restoring hope, giving dignity.

But this post is about something different and nerdier: how God used a finance/software operations guy to help bring hope and healing not through scalpels or pharmaceuticals, but through spreadsheets and process optimization.

The Doorway In

When Jackie and I joined, my role as Finance Director made it possible for our family to serve onboard. My “job” was numbers, not patients: budgets, bills, day crew stipends, crew bank operations, cash forecasts. Jackie worked on Deck 4 with patients in Rehab. She had patient stories; I had account reconciliations on deck 8. And that was fine — Finance keeps the ship running.

That changed when I started working with the Pre‑Op team in August 2025. They had a massive spreadsheet problem: 71 tabs, one tab per patient cohort. Every reschedule meant cutting and pasting data between tabs. It was inefficient, and long days — 10 to 12 hours — were the norm.

Taming 71 Tabs

We consolidated everything into one structured sheet, added error checks, built filters and reports, and created a single place to manage patient flow instead of a spaghetti mess of copy‑paste.

• Admin assistant: saved ~30 minutes every day on reporting.
• Driver coordination: ~4 weeks of work down to ~1 week.
• Immediate detection of 80+ duplicate errors.
• Patient lookups: ~2 minutes down to <30 seconds.

Now, printing for other teams is a filter, not a manual paste. Rescheduling patients means picking from visible open slots because for the first time. you can see all available slots for the full field service. Planning for buses from up‑country uses projections, not guesswork. And more teams can finally see the same data: one source of truth. 

Lest it sound amazing, it’s not — there is still a lot of manual work, too many spreadsheets, and many opportunities to do more. This is not a story about “how great it now is” but a story of small incremental changes and the journey of getting there.

Why It Matters

Yes, it’s nerdy. But it’s also about people: an admin assistant goes home 30 minutes earlier; a coordinator plans instead of reacts; managers answer with confidence. When help is needed, it is less on feelings — “We’re underwater and have too much” — and starts running on data: “Here’s our caseload, here’s our capacity, here’s what’s next.”

That clarity changes leadership decisions, reduces the cognitive tax, and builds trust. It gives patients a better experience because the hospital isn’t scrambling behind the scenes.

God’s Irony

Here’s the part that makes me smile: God brought this finance/software operations person halfway around the world to help a hospital team in Africa by… fixing improving processes. Not performing surgery. Not running rehab. Spreadsheets. And yet they reduced stress, saved time, caught errors, built trust, and created margin. That margin creates rest, energy, sustainability.

From “We’re Underwater” to “Here’s the Data”

Before: “We have too much and the field service just began. We can’t imagine later when there are even more patients.” After: “Here’s how many patients we have. Here’s our capacity. Here’s what’s coming. Here are the obstacles that need to be resolved.” That shift turns frustration into information — something leaders and teams can act on.

Closing the Series

From open eyes and listening ears, to good habits, to caring for the team, to leaving space, to spreadsheets — this journey is teaching me that no act of service is too small. Spreadsheets or surgeries, what matters is that we are a team and we act like one. We are one and are all here for the mission. And in this season, God found a way to use the work of the Finance team to serve the mission of Mercy Ships.