Interested and Never Bored

In January of 2017, I was invited to speak at a leadership event for a partner church of The Ember Cast, a church we love that was started by a dear friend. While there, I shared some pictures from the Italy Ember team from the previous summer, 2016. Someone in the audience, R, came up to meet me and said that those pictures looked amazingly similar to ones his stepson, C, had taken recently. C and his family were considering an invitation to move to Italy to run a community garden as part of a refugee project. Interesting.

R was an engineer by day, working in the power and infrastructure industry. He and his wife had been involved in a church in the northern part of the state, and he had done lots of stuff with projects around clean water and agriculture in developing countries, specifically with a thing called aquaponics [yeah I had to look it up too]. When we talked, he hadn't quite seen things be fruitful yet.

Fast forward two years. C and his family did move to Italy, joining the same team that Ember has worked with the past three years. Although I had emailed and talked on the phone with C a few times, we met face to face for the first time this past summer. And R and his wife just returned from visiting them a few weeks ago, visiting, seeing the sights, lots of quality time with their grandkids and…. starting an aquaponics project. How interesting.

In finding people doing incredible things, our efforts to 'throw fire', the passion to connect young people with immensely creative and innovative people running projects that serve a world in need, I am constantly interested and never bored.