Hands to Work, Hearts to God: A Day at the Office

Having two weeks under my belt at the eMi office here, I'm starting to feel a little more at home. Just in time to get ready to leave for my project trip. We leave for Thailand on Saturday morning, less than a week away! Most of my work lately has involved frantically trying to finish design drawings for the construction training part of the project, making travel arrangements, and preparing trip details for our team. Needless to say my project leader, Rex, has kept me busy.

The flags show locations of sending
offices, field offices, and countries
eMi has worked in

The office is a pretty nice place, an older building in downtown Colorado Springs. My desk is located in "The Fishbowl" which is the open area in the middle where everyone upstairs can look over the railing and watch what I'm doing. It keeps me accountable I guess. Actually it's great because I'm not stuck in a cubicle - I can only sit so long in a little box.

The staff has been really great to work with, these people know what they're doing and have fun doing it. It is a laid back environment but everyone is very invested in their work and the many projects going on at once. We have professional engineers, architects, accountants, and people in administration who are all strong Christians with very different stories and backgrounds. It's a great picture of the body of Christ working together.

Every morning we have a time of prayer and devotions with all of the staff. This is a good way to start the day because we get updated on what is going on with projects and in people's lives. I especially like Fridays at the office. At the start of the day is worship time (utilizing the piano right by my desk, or a guitar) and then during lunch the interns go to the local soup kitchen called the Marian House. This gives us an opportunity to serve the community by literally serving food to the poor and homeless in the area. We also have a chance to talk and eat with these people who are going through some rough times.

Hard at work, as always

The Fishbowl

Forcing a smile through the pain

While I've been pretty busy with work, I've had a chance to get out and enjoy the great outdoors. The interns haven't gotten sick of each other yet so we've been hanging out quite a bit. We've found some good disc golf courses, plenty of rocks to climb on, and a small treasure from geocaching. Yesterday a group of us made the trek up to the top of Pikes Peak. I'm still recovering and my legs are a little sore. But it was worth it because now when I'm walking around Colorado Springs I can see that big mountain on the horizon and say, "I was up there!" It took us about four hours to hike up 4200 ft from the Crags trailhead. And then three hours back down. So with the combination of waking up at 4:00 in the morning, walking up steep slopes, climbing over boulders, temperatures in the 30's, and the lack of oxygen at 14,000 ft it was a tiring day. I took a few pictures along the way. All in all not bad for my first 14er (I'm learning mountain talk). Hopefully I'll have a chance to do some more hikes like this.