In the Jewish Scriptures, ‘Meribah’ refers to a place in the wilderness where the Israelites began to protest and complain to God over the lack of water: “But the people thirsted there for water, and the people grumbled against Moses and said, ‘Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?’ (Ex 17:3)
So Moses cries out to the Lord, and the Lord instructs Moses to gather a few of the elders and with them, take his staff to the rock of Horeb, strike the rock, and from it water would flow for the people to drink. And he did so, and they drank, and the place was thus named “Massah and Meribah, because of the quarrelling of the people of Israel, and because they tested the LORD by saying, “Is the LORD among us or not?”
It was in the very place “where the people of Israel quarrelled with the LORD” that “through them he showed himself holy” (Num 20:13).
As a team experienced working behind the scenes both in large ecclesial and corporate contexts, we are well acquainted with tensions, complaints, and even quarrels that can arise in daily life. We are also well acquainted with the crisis of credibility that religious institutions increasingly face in a secularized, postmodern context.
Yet in this biblical narrative (as in many others, it was in the very place “where the people of Israel quarrelled with the LORD” that “through them he showed himself holy” (Num 20:13), sustaining them with life-giving water. Sometimes it is in the darkest hour, when our hope in external situations and institutions fails, when all we can do is cry out from our place of agony, frustration, or disillusionment, that God makes himself known to us, returns hope to us, and provides hidden sustenance for the journey.
People (and the data associated with them) are in constant flow - they are alive, moving, ever changing - and the technology platforms we use to serve our people to be able to adapt to those constant changes.
We chose the word ‘Flow’ because the narrative is about how God provided a single source of living water around which the people gathered, which provided them what they needed to continue on their journey. Things that flow are not stagnant, they are alive, moving, interacting, changing. People (and the data associated with them) are in constant flow - they are alive, moving, ever changing - and the technology platforms we use to serve our people to be able to adapt to those constant changes. Finally, at the heart of the Salesforce Platform lays its automation engine, ‘Flow Builder,’ so we felt the word was fitting.