5Crawfords

Walking to an EMI Construction site in Phnom Penh, Cambodia during my recent trip in September (more on that trip in the next blog!) It’s that time of year again…the tinsel and lights on the trees have already overpowered the scant remaining turkeys in the shopping malls, and in our mailboxes, ‘secret’ deals granting early access to Black Friday sales have been trickling in for days (I give it 3 years before we’re just calling it ‘Black November’), and are only kept from completely monopolizing our mailboxes by the also steadily increasing number of year-end-appeals from mission and non-profit groups. Yep, it’s the Hallo-Thanks-Mas holiday season! The world that missions groups operate it is changing fast, maybe faster than ever before, so if we in missions don’t see the changes coming and adapt our approach and messaging style, then we too may find ourselves in a similar place as the turkeys in the mall - smack dab in the middle of the purgatory of irrelevance. Why do I ...

An EMI Staff architect and engineer consult with  the construction site manager during a routine inspection on a project in Cambodia The Jordan at Jericho ministry plans to be a sustainable  organic farm whose profits will be fed back into the Cambodia church. (photo cred. Anna Seeley, EMI) An EMI team in the Tunduru province of Tanzania last month working at the KIUMA ministry center – the only resource for education and medical care in this remote and underserved part of the country. (photo cred. Jenni Keiter, EMI) For the first time in our 37 year history, EMI sent a team of  engineers  into the country of Iraq  last month to begin designing a new community to permanently house a group of Yazidi refugees whose homes and communities were devastated by the recent war in N. Iraq & Syria. Please  pray for the Iraqi church, which was hit especially hard. (photo cred. Randy Larsen, EMI) Things slow down a ...

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...