A Day in the Life...
Introduction
We just had family come to visit as well as someone from our home church in Roseville, CA. It was a great time of encouragement and blessing to our family. However, the entire country was on holiday so they didn't get a chance to see a "normal" day. So, we decided to recreate a somewhat typical day from Chad's perspective...
Morning Our office has devotions every day at 8:30. Each day is different with either prayer, Bible study or worship. We all rotate through who is leading morning devotions and currently we are praying through the Psalms and studying Exodus and Numbers. It is so great to wrestle with some of the questions as we dig into the lives of Abraham, Moses and the wanderings of the nation of Israel after being released from slavery in Egypt. A construction meeting with a local pastor and our design team follows on the heels of morning devotions. Recently we have been making decisions about door locations, window bar designs and location of sewer pipes! The project is a new church in a neighborhood in Phnom Penh and our young staff are seeing first hand their design on paper being constructed in the field. Many lessons have been learned through this project and it is exciting to see those lessons being applied to other current projects!
Lunch Time To build a sense of community, our office has lunch together most days of the week. We order local food which can be fried rice, beef with rice, noodles with vegetables, BBQ pork, curry, etc. Lunch time is always a mixture of Khmer and English with lots of joking and learning from one another. Recently, I was taught the difference between រុះ (ruh) - to break and រើស (rueh) - to be picky. Recently, we have been learning about leadership from a John Maxwell video series. In his talk he regularly refers to American Football. Since many in our office are not familiar with it, I ordered in some pizza and we watched a half of football game during lunch! The white board was full of X's and O's - I didn't realize how difficult a game it is to explain! It is wonderful to be able to learn from one another, not just about design and construction, but about one another's lives, culture and family! Afternoon Training is a key part of every day. Some afternoons I sit with one of our young staff to go through the fundamentals of a good topographic survey, other days I help provide direction and encouragement to a young project manager. Recently, I have had regular meetings with the incoming Office Director. We discuss staffing, workload and finances to maintain our ability to serve the local church needs. One recent discussion focused on the 2020 annual budget. It was amazing to see how God provided for our office needs in 2019. We were blessed in ways that we could not have imagined! Now we are looking forward to what the Lord has in store for the coming year. Evenings
Every couple of weeks there is a conference call that I get to participate in. These are typically with people from North America, so with the time zone differences it means starting the call at 8 or 9 pm. A few weeks ago I was discussing how to best serve a growing Christian business/ministry in a remote part of SE Asia. I was able to connect with experienced engineers who have spent their lives solving technical problems similar to what this business is facing. We ended the call near 11pm, but I was excited to hear their thoughts and ideas and eager to pass these along to the ministry!
| 
No comments:
Post a Comment