Midsummer Update

Summer is already past halfway over?! Say it isn't so!


      It's been a great summer so far and I wanted to give you an update on what I've been doing and what I'll be doing before long.

      This summer I've been really blessed to intern with the college ministry at Journey Church. I love this church, love the people, love the leaders, and love the opportunities they have to serve and connect with the community, both locally and globally. Adam, the College Pastor, has given me some awesome projects and challenges along the way and it's been a lot of fun and really encouraging. My prayer each week is just that God would take the work out of my hands and just use me however he chooses so that the college ministry would grow inwardly and outwardly. Pray along with me in that. Let's be Spirit-led.

      Come mid-August I will go to Colorado Springs for a 4 month internship with Engineering Ministries International (check out their website at http://www.emiusa.org/). I'll be living with a host family and working as an engineering intern on a project based out of Thailand (check out the details at http://www.emiusa.org/projects/projectprofile_5550.php). I'll also be working with the company TSC Global, helping better design and fabricate their already awesome roof designs (check them out at http://tscglobal.org/).

      The vision of the project in Thailand is to use sustainable earth-based materials to design and build a primary care hospital and medical training facility. When I say primary, I mean primary – this facility will service a dozen remote villages that we won't even be able to travel to. We will incorporate the TSC roof into the design and then travel to Thailand for 2-3 weeks at the end of September. While we are in Thailand we will build a smaller facility and teach the locals how to construct the structure safely and strongly. After we leave the locals should take the designs and materials for the main facility and then construct it according to our instruction. Once completed, the facility will provide basic medical care to communities who have none. It will also be a place of education and medical training. It will ALSO be Christian faith-centered – a place where people can come to know Jesus through community, Bible studies, and prayer. This is a really incredible project for a number of reasons, but the two that excite me most are the provision of health services and the proclamation of the Gospel! Thailand, being a predominately rural and Buddhist nation, is in great need of both.

      When I return from Thailand I will spend the rest of the semester working on the TSC roof designs. Our focus will be to improve the design for withstanding seismic and earthquake activity. We will also work on the design to improve its connectability with other structural systems while also designing a rain-water collection system. It will be a lot of lab tests with trial and error – hands on stuff that I love to do!

I am so excited for where God has me now and where He's taking me. Pray with me that I will be faithful to follow everywhere He leads, trusting He will enable me in all things.