5Crawfords

Easter Sunday Design In the next couple of weeks, the 20 design projects EMI teams engaged in this semester will see their design reports finalized. Each of these projects represent a multi-disciplinary team of 8 to 14 engineers and architects and surveyors from all over the world who traveled to a project site in the developing world to help another ministry plan out the vision God's given them. These projects included hospitals, schools, ministry training centers, and water projects in 14 different countries. One of these teams was a multi-national group that traveled to a rural area near Lusitu, Zambia to work with a well-known ministry called Living Water to help them rehabilitate a water system installed years ago that was struggling to provide water to 25,000 people in the area. This project turned out to be one of the largest EMI projects in our history. The EMI Zambia team Lake Kariba - the largest man-made lake there is. In the 1950's, the Kariba ...

In San Diego over the holidays - our boys would probably vote for every family picture being the sill one. What God’s been teaching me lately (If this doesn’t interest you, skip down below to the EMI update to hear about some of the cool things we’ve been up to at EMI lately.) In recent months, it seems that my devotion times and bible reading have centered on the same theme – the renewing of our minds as Christ followers. As a young kid, that usually meant trying not to think about the next toy or ‘thing’ I wanted. As a teenager, it was more about trying to keep my mind pure amidst a backdrop of indecency and promiscuity promoted by Hollywood (if you don’t believe me, go watch any PG movie from the 80’s –shocking!). But as an adult, it’s taken me years, I should say decades, to begin to understand that the battlefront in my mind subtly shifted to the area of self-reliance and the fight for my ‘right’ to myself. How does this play out? The general pattern is, something...

The EMI Nicaragua Office (with John, Gala, and I) Arriving into Managua early last month, if I hadn’t know any better, I’d have thought the country was just as normal and stable as I’d ever seen it. There were no outward signs at all of the political tensions that had erupted earlier in the year. We did pass a couple of pro-government rallies en route from the airport, but that was just a small group of people standing in the traffic circles waving flags and large posters of the President’s face. Fortunately, the political situation in the country isn’t for us to sort out. Instead, we were coming down to try to help the office chart the way forward given a number of challenges in the past year: the loss of three (of 6) ex-pat staff families, loss of the majority of project work due to the unrest in the country, the loss of the office director who departed in August to help his wife’s ministry in the country, some internal struggles in the office related to the challenge of wo...

The worldwide EMI Directors, gathered in Woking, England In September, Brad attended EMI's annual Director's Conference held this year in the United Kingdom. Each year, EMI's worldwide office directors come together at one of our office locations to have a week's worth of meetings on a wide variety of important topics, ranging from vision casting and goal setting, to dreaming and brainstorming about how we might expand and grow, to practical discussions on how to better carry out the calling God's given our ministry, to praying for each other and the world and church we serve. God began leading EMI into a variety of new areas several years ago and some of those visions are just now being explored - expanding our services to help ministries all the way through construction, as well as figuring out how we might serve communities and the church in all places, including the United States. We also have been sensing God's direction in having us explore all sorts ...