5Crawfords

Today we finally had a nice day on a Saturday, so we headed to Ashland with our good friends 'The Sampsons' to hang out at Lithia park. The boys had a great time swinging and climbing and hiking. The rock you see us perched atop in the pictures was actually several stories high - it's just an optical illusion that makes it appear 6 to 8 feet above ground in the pictures! Alisha and Emilie plotted ahead of time to dress the boys in their matching shirts so they could take pictures. Matt and Emilie's boys are: Andrew (6), Brennan (4) and Parker (1.75) and our boys love them. As is usual whenever we hang out with the Sampsons, a fun time was had by all. At one point, Matt and I stopped talking/quoting lines from 'The Office' for long enough to notice that our families were there too! ;) The low point in the day (for me) was when Alisha tried to climb the rock, lost her hand-hold and punched me right in the eye on her way to the ground (not intentional, her hand jus...

Four weeks to the day after we met in Colorado, we received an email from Karen, the HR rep at the eMi-usa office in Colorado Springs. It read: "Hello Crawford’s! We have been discussing your application with our executive staff and with Chad . We are currently working on a letter of invitation, job description and training schedule to send to you. After approval from all parties, I will be mailing that out to you. I hope to get that to you next week. Karen" We were very excited to get that email. It looks like maybe the ball will begin rolling soon! We are both feeling very good about things. Alisha's reaction was one of feeling honored that it appears we are actually going to have the opportunity to do this. My reaction was more of relief that it seemed to answer some of the confusion I was feeling (i.e. feeling strongly now that God is calling us to this, yet confused as to why eMi could possibly be having reservations about it). Anyway, obviously they haven't sai...

Sorry for the lack of entries, but virtually nothing has happened on the Africa front since we've returned from Colorado. We thought we'd hear back from them last week (the week after Easter), but so far we haven't heard a word. It's a little puzzling I must admit. I did email Chad (Director in Uganda) a couple of weeks ago, and he responded a week or so ago saying that he'd talked to Karen (the HR person in Colorado) and his impression was that everything seemed very promising (though he isn't a party in the final meeting and decision process). So what are we thinking?? Well, we still feel very strongly about what God is calling us to do, so that hasn't changed at all. In fact, a couple things have happened that have been encouraging. First, we ran into a former assitant pastor at our church who now has his own church. When he learned of our plans, he told us that his church dedicates a sizable chunk of their budget for missions and that he wanted us to kee...