How do you take heartbreak, loss, and life’s unexpected struggles and turn them into purpose, healing, and impact?

In this powerful episode of the Collide Podcast, we sit down with Mike McEvoy to talk about finding purpose in pain and using your gifts to serve others. Mike shares about starting Construction for Change in college, building schools and hospitals around the world, and navigating the heartbreak of losing a child while growing his family. He offers insights on faith, grief, service, and living a life that truly makes a difference. Whether you’re navigating hardship, seeking purpose, or longing to serve, this episode will remind you that your pain can be purposed for good.

Meet Mike McEvoy

Mike McEvoy is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of Construction for Change, a nonprofit that has built over 130 schools and hospitals in 23 countries. He has spent nearly 20 years combining his construction expertise with a heart for global service. Mike is passionate about empowering communities, walking alongside partners, and showing that even the most difficult life experiences can be transformed into purpose and impact.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn

• How Mike turned his college passion and skills into a global nonprofit serving communities worldwide
• Lessons from navigating personal heartbreak and grief while trusting God’s plan
• The importance of integrating faith with action—living both vertically with God and horizontally with others
• Practical ways to use your unique gifts and experiences to make a meaningful impact

How This Episode Will Encourage You

This episode will inspire you to see your struggles and losses not as the end of your story, but as opportunities to create purpose, hope, and transformation. You’ll gain practical insights, renewed faith, and encouragement to live a life that truly matters—right where you are.

Learn more about Construction for Change on thier website: constructionforchange.org

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Mentioned in this episode:

New Book Release! Collide: Running into Healing When Life Hands You Hurt

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Hey there. Welcome to the Collide Podcast. This is Willow Weston, and I'm so glad that I get to hang out with you today. What a bright spot in my day.

This has been a crazy day. I don't know how your day's been, but I have gone from one thing to the next to the next to the next, and it's all good stuff.

And yet just to pause and take in a breath and realize that we're about to receive, that's always a good thing to do.

I absolutely love being able to hand you stories of people who are experiencing the living God showing up and actively getting a hold of their life in such amazing ways that it radically takes them from going one direction to another direction and brings absolute purpose into their life. And this next interview that I'm going to hand you is with Mike McEvoy.

He's the executive director and co founder of something called Construction for Change. And we talk about this global organization and what it's doing to impact others.

But we really spend a good chunk of our time talking about Mike's personal journey that includes both profound loss and unexpected blessings. And he shares what it's like, what it was like for him and his wife to go through such profound loss.

And I think you're going to be inspired to hear his heart, what fuels his passion, and how the Lord has shown up in his life in blessings and in hardship and what God has done in the midst of all of that. So I hope that this story inspires you and encourages you. Mike, this is so fun to have you on the podcast. You and I have met.

We met at a conference, but we have. I know your family, I know your parents, and we have sort of mutual friends and connections. So to have you on today is super fun.

Well, thank you. I'm honored to be here. And I actually got to hear you speak a couple years ago when I was on Young Life staff and you spoke at our regional.

I gotta say, I rarely have taken as many notes as I as I took that day. So really appreciate what you're doing on here.

Thank you. Thank you. I mean, I love a good note taker in the crowd. I mean, come on, come on.

You are the executive director and co founder for Construction for Change. You've been a part of this, it sounds like for almost 20 years. I'd love to hear about it. And also take us back to what made you found this?

What made you start it? Why is it a passion of yours?

Yeah.

So me and two friends studied construction management at University of Washington, as we were graduating, as we're moving toward graduation and looking at kind of the industry and how we wanted to do good in the world.

The three of us had had a lot of experience kind of throughout college being involved in campus ministries, kind of your standard kind of global mission experiences, seeing the need in the world and really kind of going, hey, what could our place be in using the gifts that God has put in us and the desires to do good in the construction world and just kind of start out of college. Just started this organization and we didn't know exactly where it was going to go. We had no clue, honestly.

But we said, hey, we want to do good in the construction world. I wonder if we can help. We've worked with these nonprofits around the world that are doing great work.

So we said, hey, what if we could support some of these grassroots organizations that are doing really good work, things like education and healthcare, economic development, people that know their community and know the needs of their community. What if we could come alongside them and assist them as they grow with those, with. With kind of helping to manage their construction projects?

Because that's what we know now.

We didn't know that how to do that in a lot of different countries around the world, but we thought, hey, we could learn and go in and try not to be this American savior coming in, but go, hey, you know what you're doing, man? I wonder if we can, we can assist you and support you. So took a couple years to get off the ground. Most good things take a while.

I got to go over there twice to go be a part of the construction of this first school. Took us almost a year to build. Probably it was way over budget and behind schedule, but it was a good learning experience for us.

And then we started to connect, connect with these other organizations, seeing, hey, can we, can we help with the social infrastructure we call it, which is. We got a couple more schools.

Our second one was in Cambodia and then this organization out of India called Hospitals for Hope reached out to us, seeing if we would assist them and in building the hospital out there.

And so we did a couple fundraisers around the country with them in New York and the Bay Area and raised the money for this hospital and built that and, and things kind of slowly, slowly grew and we got better, you know, over time.

I think some of the big changes in the last 17 years we've been an organization are that when we started we were training a project manager that was right out of college here, maybe at UW or locally in Seattle, and then sending them over and having them hire like local, you know, local labor and use local materials. We wanted to be really equitable for the community and we would funnel kind of the money through them into the community.

But as time went on and we started to build more of a reputation, we thought, hey, how can we be more ethical?

And we started hiring locally, actually project managers from these different regions that we wanted to build and around the country where now all of our staff on the ground, our regional directors, our project managers are all local to the areas they come from. And we don't send people over to run projects anymore.

But we do have a team that really tries to empower locally and keep as much of the resources from these projects in the communities as possible. So yeah, I've been involved for 17 years. I will say that after those first few years of being volunteer led, I moved to California.

My wife and I moved to Orange county. And professionally I've been in campus ministry the last 16, 17 years.

And so it was just kind of a side thing for me that I watched as some really good people helped to grow this organization to the place it's at today, where we've now built 131 different schools and hospitals around the world in 23 different countries. So about a year ago I got the chance to get back involved as the executive director.

And it just seemed like a really a good time for me to be back involved on more of a professional level as well.

Wow. I think what's striking me about your story, and a lot of people do this where they share their story and maybe I do this too.

But you're like, oh yeah, I was starting a thing in college, became a thing now. It's like impacting all these people globally, 131 hospitals and schools, like no big deal.

But what's interesting to me is and I have two young adults and young adults are great. And there's a lot of young adults asking like really meaningful, purposeful questions.

But not every college kid is going into construction or going into business or going to school to be a lawyer asking, how can I use this for good? A lot of us, I mean, I'll throw myself under a bus.

I Wasn't following Jesus, but my whole thing was like, what's the major that I can choose to make the most money? And it was business. And that's what I chose.

So what was fueling this desire in you and your friends to want to do construction but do it in a meaningful way that would bring about good and change in the world? What was the underlying passion behind that?

Yeah, that's good. You know, I grew up, I got the privilege of growing up in a Christian family and was raised with really good values and morals.

But when I got to college too, you know, there's a lot of self discovery.

And this is why I've been in campus ministry for so long, is the self discovery that happens while you are in college away from your family for the first time. You know, if you grew up going to church, you get to college, nobody's forcing you to go to church anymore.

And you know, you have to decide what's important to you.

And I like to say I've been a Christian my whole life, but my junior year of college, I really discovered who Jesus really was and who he was on a really personal level to me. And that transformed my life. That took me in a place of going, man, this Christianity thing, I hope it helps me get to heaven.

I hope it's a nice add on in my life to man. I think a life lived kind of following Jesus and where he's guiding me. That's a life I want. And so it didn't feel like this giant sacrifice.

It felt like as I just started to experience some of that internal transformation in my life, I still liked the construction piece of things. It took me five years to graduate college.

In those last three years, it just had a lot of question marks as I interned in the industry and saw things where I was like, man, these people I'm working with, they can't wait to be done with their job at the end of the day and go do something else. They can't wait for the weekend or something. And I was like, man, I really want to do something.

I want my life not just to matter, but I want to do something where I get every day. I'm excited to like wake up every day. I'm excited to, you know, to get to contribute to the world.

And you know, not only did Jesus get ahold of my life at that time, but my faith really grew into this place too. That was very intersectional for me of understanding this vertical relationship that I have with God.

And the intimacy of finding with God has got to intersect with this horizontal reality for the people around me. Like, it can't just be about getting to heaven one day. We've got to look at how do we make the world more kingdom ish.

And for us it was like, look, I can't do everything and I don't have the skills to do a lot of things. But here's something, here's something that's in our hands right now.

And we kind of just kept going one step at a time of we think this is following Jesus into trying to do some good in the world. But we evaluated that a lot, especially the first five or six years.

You know, we'd be on a project, we'd be trying to get to know the partners, we'd be asking, is it worth it? Is it worth it?

You know, every time anybody who raises money for their profession, even if we love what we do, there's always times of going, man, is this, is this worth it? I'd really rather not be asking for donations right now. I'd rather do something different.

But we just kept seeing the good and we kept getting to know. For us, it's a real partnership.

When we take on a partnership with an organization that's in healthcare, education, economic development, that becomes a real partnership.

We look for ways to be a blessing beyond just managing a construction project for them, but visiting the site, getting to know who the people are, what the community is like, and looking for ways to connect them to more potential resources and growth opportunities.

So I think it's that, I think it's the fact that I've been able to visit so many of the projects we've done and see the impact on the community that keeps us going. Hey, this is a really good thing. And we think the impact is just getting started too.

So I certainly, I'm just as excited, if not a whole lot more excited about what we get to do now than when we started the thing.

I love that the way that you talk about Jesus's absolute transformation in your life fueled this and led to this. And it wasn't like a must, like he was like obligating you with some sort of like guilt ridden charge. But it was actually an invitation.

That's kind of what you laid out. It feels like it was an invitation to live a life that actually brought meaning and, and help and healing to the world.

That almost like, you know, when we think about him teaching us to pray and. Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, they will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Like he invited you to bring a little bit of heaven down on earth instead of just looking at, like, getting there. And I love that so much. You talk about the importance of the intersection of horizontal and vertical.

Can you lean into that a little bit for people listening on what, what you mean, why it's so important in your advice for people who. Maybe the intersection isn't happening for them?

Yeah, and that's, you know, that's. That's a little bit of who I am, just so I'd let you know. And, you know, my faith is, is, is. It's. I like to call.

It's kind of gritty, it's earthy, it's, you know, I think some people are really good about going into the room and praying for hours and feeling this, you know, really feeling the spiritual connection of, hey, I'm going to spend more time, you know, praying for the world and what's happening around.

And I've kind of always felt like with me and God, it's like God, fill me up today with who I am, help me understand my identity, and then give me the strength to go walk into the world and go do it and get out the door and go, go make an impact in the world and don't just stay. Don't just stay in that room all day long. I think we can easily swing the other end. I mean, so I think both are important.

But, you know, it's easy to swing the other way where all of a sudden, you know, we're just trying to do something impactful in the world and we've totally lost the reason why and we've lost our source of strength and, and, but for me, it's. It's, you know, kind of understanding. I have a chance to go make a real.

Make a real difference and, and, you know, wanting to do that, especially for those living on the margin that haven't, you know, I, I do feel very privileged to come from the life and the background that I come from. And then I also felt too, with getting into. With, you know, with what we're doing with construction for change.

I think at one point in life, I remember, I think I was in college when I, When I kind of like, watched these Christians get up, you know, in ministry, in church and be like, following, you know, I think the subconscious for me was following Jesus means leaving all the things that give me life and going doing something that I hate doing, because that's the sacrifice that is required. You just do something that you hate and it's for the kingdom and that Makes you a better Christian and a better person.

And that just hasn't been my belief. It transformed into. There are certain things God has put in me. He's put in certain things. Gifts and talents and passions.

Man, if I get to use those things every day, I don't have to abandon them. I don't have to throw out construction management to go do something totally different, But I get to use those things the same way.

No matter what your profession or if you're at home raising kids and you think, oh, I need to leave these kids with a sitter so I can go impact the world for Jesus somewhere else, you miss the mission that's right in front of you. You know that God has blessed you to make an impact wherever you're at.

So, you know, I think for me, you know, I was a campus pastor for 17 years through both the church and parachurch ministries like Young Life.

And this has been a pretty big transition for me professionally back into leading kind of this nonprofit, this construction nonprofit, which is very different than, you know, preaching and teaching and walking alongside pastorally guiding college students that I've been doing for so long.

And I think there was part of me that even in this transition over the last two years, thought, is what I'm doing as impactful as what I was doing before, where I got to talk about Jesus at least once a week up front, but kind of an everyday conversation?

And I think the term I've been using is I have an opportunity right now to pastor in real life, like outside of the church, like with our staff around the world or our partners that we come across, or I'm meeting all these people in the construction industry and from very working class on the ground to office leadership and everything in between, where people don't really expect you to walk in and have a heart, to care pastorally for them in this world.

And I get the chance to do that in a different way with a different audience, but perhaps make an impact outside of the church building that I. I take really seriously.

I love that you're reminding us that ministry is right in front of us, no matter where we are. I mean, you can. My husband's in real estate. Like, he gets to wake up every single day. And it's not just about selling stuff.

It's actually about humans. And you can minister to whoever's right in front of you. If you love to cook, you can cook for God. It doesn't have to look a certain way.

And I think it's interesting because you mentioned how you evaluate you Know, am I making as much of a difference now as I did before when I was this? And I think we're so hard on ourselves when in actuality, God wants us to be faithful with what he's put and who he's put right in front of us.

So I love that you're bringing that up, because it's a struggle for everyone.

Another interesting thing about your story is you were building this nonprofit, and you started building it as a college student, and then you had these other ministry jobs that you were doing for your vocation, and at the same time, you were building your family. Can you tell us a little bit about building your family and kind of the journey of what you and your wife went through?

Yeah, yeah, it's. Yeah, it's. You know, we. Let's see, I've been married almost 15 years now, and we had moved to California.

We moved back to Seattle about eight years ago, hoping to continue to build our family, have kids and our journey. You know, it was so funny.

I think, you know, I grew up in this world where you're like, hey, you know, don't sleep with anyone or you will automatically get pregnant. And then all of a sudden, it came for, you know, for us, it was really hard.

It took, you know, there were years of going, you know, how come we're not getting pregnant when we're trying? I thought this was just going to be so easy. And so, you know, a big part of our story is, so we were.

After a couple years of not getting pregnant, we did fertility testing, and the doctor. Okay, the doctor comes into the room after our testing and says, hey, it's not great. He goes, I'm.

He goes, you guys have less than a 1% chance of ever getting pregnant. And I said, let me ask you this. Would you ever tell somebody that they have less than a half percent? And he's like, no.

And I'm like, so what you're telling me is the same thing you would tell the worst case scenario? And he's like, I don't like to put it that way, but yeah. And so we actually signed up for IVF treatment.

And a week before our first IVF surgery treatment, which is when we had to pay the money and start it, we actually found out we were pregnant, and we were pregnant with our first daughter. And it was really this. This miracle and this.

This joyous thing, and we had so many people praying for us and a community supporting us, and the whole process was just, you know, it was the greatest season of my life. Really trusting and Believing God to come through and something like that in our life. And.

And then at 28 weeks pregnant, we actually found out that our daughter Mira, her kidneys weren't functioning. And so they immediately. We were inpatient at Swedish Hospital in Seattle. And for five weeks we were inpatient, hoping that something would turn.

And she ended up being born at 33 weeks and ended up passing away after about a day just with a lack of kidney functioning and her vital organs just not really working super well because of that. And that was a really, really tough. I mean, anytime you lose someone you love, especially a baby, and it was tough for a number of reasons. Okay.

It's tough for the obvious, I will say, which you can figure out.

But it also was really tough on me as a pastor and as someone who had followed Jesus for so long and had seen God show up faithfully so many times for me, every time I chose to trust him. And I'm not going to be about the money profession. I'm going to trust God. And then I really believe. Man, this was this miracle that happened.

And people's faith. I can't tell you how many college students were like, my faith is growing because your faithfulness around getting pregnant. And I was just.

I wrestled, you know, for a long time after she passed away about, where's God in this? And that was a really, really hard part for us. And, you know, even in the midst of how hard that was, though, I will say that, you know, it didn't.

It made me wrestle with a lot of things like. Like. But it didn't make me wrestle with what the goodness of God is.

And that, I think, is a struggle in the world is that when we tie the blessing of God in our life to the presence of God and say, God is present in my life, if I am blessed, if good things are happening in my life, then God is at work. What I can say is that my relationship with God was deep enough at that point. That has always been tied to the heart of God. Like, I know God's heart.

And if our relationship with God is tied to knowing the heart of God, even when we don't have the earthly blessings that we would want, you know, we still can choose to lean into that knowing.

Like, man, there's a God that is weeping with us in the loss of our baby, you know, and this is not God's intention or design for pain to happen in this way. And so, yeah, it was. It was shaky for a while, but it never really shook our relationship.

You know, you see the statistics around, you know, divorce and other things, around families that lose a baby.

And it's not good, but it never really shook us just in that way because of understanding, look, God is still at work here, and there's ways to continue to lead and teach and preach. And I had to take about six months off preaching at that time just because it was just a little more confusing for me.

But I've seen God show up in faithful ways. Faithful ways that don't negate that. They don't take that away and they don't make up for her life in any way. But in addition, kind of putting the.

And on the end there. We've also watched God show up really faithfully and continue to build our family while we mourn and honor our daughter Mira as well.

And part of that is we always wanted to know. We always knew we wanted to adopt and we wanted to grow our family through adoption as well.

We actually signed up for adoption probably way too early after. After a loss that took place in. In December that same year about. About six months, five. Six months after she passed away. And we were placed.

We were actually placed twice for adoption. And both of those did not end up working out as the birth parents ended up choosing to back out and to raise themselves, which I am totally for. And.

And that's. That's wonderful. But it was multiple dates.

And as we were driving down in early May to meet this. This baby girl who was going to be born a couple days later. On the drive down in early Covid, we. My wife goes, oh, I'm pregnant.

And I was like, how do you know that? She goes, I just know. I just know. And so we actually. We were driving.

We were like driving through Wyoming and Colorado, and she's like, we're pregnant and I need to get it checked out. And so we stopped in a hospital in Texas.

On the drive down, I couldn't even go in because of COVID And we found out she found out she was five weeks pregnant. And then we drove to Louisiana. By the time our daughter Kyrie was born a couple weeks after that, she already was super sick early on.

And so we ended up adopting a healthy baby girl. Kyrie drove her back home. I had to end up flying my wife home instead of driving back because she was so sick.

But now we have a couple daughters that are seven months apart, Kyrie and JoJo, who are five. And then almost five. And then we thought, hey, I think we're about done, but not officially about done.

And then about a year and a half ago, we found out we were pregnant again and have another really healthy baby named Charlie, another girl who's nine months old right now. And so I like to say, look, I'm the father of four wonderful girls, and I get to raise three of them. And we miss our other daughter as well.

But it's holding both these things, right? It's holding the grief and the blessing of life together. And one doesn't take the other one away, and it doesn't sting as bad.

I like to say, look, when this happened to us, it felt like somebody just sliced my leg open. And I had this. This wound that was. Was bleeding, and I didn't even know what to do about it.

And I couldn't even function for the first, you know, five or six months. But over time, like, you know, just that healing and kind of some of the internal healing, and now it just feels like, look, there's a scar on me.

And I'll always remember that. But I, you know, but I can function a little bit better as. As, you know, the grief has changed over. Over time for us, but.

But, yeah, I got this beautiful family now, and. And I get to be a girl dad, which I'm. I feel very.

Well. They're blessed to have you as their dad. It's a beautiful story. Even in.

In the grief and the pain, I love that you remind us not to connect God's presence and goodness with blessing. That's such a good word.

I'm also curious, Mike, because we have a lot of, you know, female guests here, and certainly we've talked about infertility and miscarriages and grief and loss of children many times, but I don't know if I've ever a dad on here to talk about it. And so I'd love to ask you, you know, for women listening, what did you. What did you need in that time?

You know, I think a lot of times we talk about, like, what the woman needs in her grief around here, but curious what you would say, like, the dad needs when he's going through that kind of loss.

Great question. Yeah, it is. It is. You know, and I admit it's different.

I'm a deep feeler, too, and I know not every guy is, you know, we joined this support group a couple months after loss through Seattle Children's Hospital called the Journey Program. And they paired us with, like, six other family units that had all lost a baby in the last year.

Year.

And I will say, like you said, every week we would go to this, and every week my wife and I would go. And every week all the mothers would go. And every week there might be one other dad that showed up. And it was an interesting thing.

Even sometimes when the dads would talk about it, sometimes they didn't know how to talk about it. Somewhere between a feeling like they didn't want to show weakness to, getting so caught up in the emotions that they just couldn't even share.

And, you know, I don't know exactly what that tells us. You know, I think for me personally, you know, I just. I knew, like, I needed some spaces. Like, grief is different.

I do believe it needs to be engaged. Like, part of the reason why I feel so healthy, like, 10 months after we lost our baby, we started raising another child.

And I don't think that's for everybody because sometimes you're in such big, you know, grief or, you know, that your decision making is not great, or you still have these hidden things in you that are going to come out in some negative ways if not dealt with in some ways. But, you know, I was, you know, I totally am a believer in therapy.

Not just because my wife is a therapist, but, you know, going myself, being part of a support group, but also having some spaces. Like, first of all, I just needed some friends to go drink beer with sometimes. But also I started building a fence.

We had no fence on our house, and I built this big fence around our whole yard. And I didn't have any help and I didn't hire anyone.

And I just would go out there for like two hours a day, and I would work on the fence for like, two months. It took me to build this thing, and my wife calls it our grief fence, which was I just needed to have something to do.

Like, you know, I think stereotypically and probably plays out a little bit is sometimes a guy needs to be able to do something. We might be able to. To talk about, you know, what's going on, but we're not always the best at talking about kind of how we.

How we feel, especially the unprocessed thoughts. If we're not. If we're not verbal processors, it's hard for us just to say it. You know, I talk to way more guys.

And part of the problem with losing a baby is that then you become the people that other people recommend a couple to meet with when they lose a child. And so we do have this sad network of people that, you know, we're connected with that reach out to talk about things. And.

And most guys are not great at talking about unprocessed thoughts and feelings that they have not already made decisions on in the end.

And how do you get guys to be able just to show, like, hey, you can share honestly about what you're feeling in this, and you don't need to end up with some great conclusion or right answer at the end. Our struggle with guys is always we want to be right. We want to be able to say something that, like, does good in the situation.

We're not given a lot of spaces just to just, you know, to verbally vomit and not know if it's going to make people never want to spend time with us again. But I think it's a really healthy space to really try to encourage guys that go through this, even if it's not shown.

They might channel that into going and building a fence or totally ignoring it, you know, and wanting to move to a new city and just forget all their. Their feelings and thoughts they had around that experience.

But how do you help guys, you know, share their unprocessed thoughts and feelings before they just feel like they have a right answer to share at the end?

What do you think helped you and your wife turn towards each other instead of away from each other through all this?

God was graceful with us. We gave each other a lot of grace. When this happens, you say a lot of stupid things and you hear a lot of things from people.

A lot of people can't handle sitting in that space, so they want to make things better, right? They try to come up with a little cliche that makes you feel better. Those things really, you know, for us that have lost somebody close, they.

They become annoying pretty quick. People that just sat in the grief with us, I think. But we did some things right. There were times we'd turn away.

There were times I'd go do something or just totally forget about my life, responsibility. Or the same thing with my wife. She wasn't always perfect.

You lose your temper quickly or you're very short with the other person and you don't give them much grace.

And I think we've always been pretty good at okay in the moment, even as there's conflict, if we can step away for 10 minutes and just really think about, hey, what is this person going through right now? And maybe that answer was not the one that they would give if they were perfect. And Maybe, you know, we're always so quick to go.

What you said really hurt me, so I'm going to share out of my own hurt right now. But for some reason, we could step away and go, man, I bet she shared that out of a really, a really hard place right now. And I bet if.

I bet if we were a little more, you know, on good ground, I bet that's not how she would react. And she gave me so much grace for some of the ways I would do that. And it kind of kept us coming back.

Even though we had some really tough, tough conversations, arguments, or feeling like, you know, even apathy toward. I just don't even care anymore.

Well, it's. It's honestly really hopeful to hear. I think in the face of grief and loss, it's so easy to turn on each other.

And you guys are such a beautiful example of how do we keep turning towards each other, how do we keep repairing, how do we keep coming back to each other in the midst of this? And, you know, we go through hard things that threaten to take us out. But, you know, to hear that you have this beautiful family and you have.

You're the father of four daughters and you get a parent three, and you guys are together and you're doing construction for change is so cool. I also love and, and hope that you can share about it a little bit as we sort of come to an end here. You've really chosen to purpose this pain.

You've decided, hey, let's make it count for something that actually helps other people who are struggling.

Can you tell us a little bit about this recent project that you're so excited about that ties back to the daughter that you lost and what you guys are, are doing in her name?

Yeah. So my daughter Mira would have turned six this July. July 8th and every birthday. Right. Birthdays are tough. Anniversaries are tough. Right. These days.

And so for her first five birthdays, like, it was just grief central. Even if we were doing pretty good. Good.

We'd take the whole day, we'd go, we'd go do a hospital visit, we'd go thank all the nurses in the morning that were so helpful to all of our time there. If they were still there, we'd go to, you know, we go to her grave. We go do something that lets us really engage the grief fully that day.

Get a sitter for other kids even, you know, all that. This was the first year that as it was coming up, we said, you know, we have this beautiful family we still love and care for her.

I'm not feeling as strong in terms of needing a time for the grief. What if we. What if we took some time around her birthday and really talked about what could we do that could be a positive in remembrance of her?

And so, through kind of partnering with my work with Construction for Change, we've started what we call the Mira Project. Okay. Which is. The Mira Project is providing more access to maternal and infant health care around the world.

And so most of what we do with Construction for Changes is we partner with these organizations, we manage their construction project. We don't come in with funding on them, but we want to start this initiative.

In fact, we've launched this initiative where we've developed a portfolio around the places we work, which most of our work right now happens to be in East Africa and West Africa, but Sub Saharan Africa is the place that we see most of the deaths around maternal and infant healthcare. Most people that don't have access to good health care, in fact, 62% of deaths that take place around childbirth happen in Sub Saharan Africa.

And so we want to provide more access.

We want to build clinics, hospitals, maternity wards, milk banks, anything you can think of that's going to help improve that in places where women don't have very good access to healthcare. And we've seen the need.

I've been on the ground enough to see the need to know that if there's a great organization out there and they want to expand what they're doing and run this maternal healthcare center, we want to help to make that possible, not just in the construction management of it, but we want to help make the funding accessible to them, which is such a big gap. And so the Mira Project is.

We now have developed a portfolio of great partners that are sitting in this portfolio ready to build a healthcare facility, a clinic, a maternity ward. And then the next launch, which is coming in a couple months, is that somebody could start a campaign in the honor of a loved one.

So we've met a lot of people because of our situation that have also lost a loved one, that they wanted to start a foundation in their name. They've started raising money.

They put out a GoFundMe or something, and all of a sudden they have 50, $60,000 raised, and they don't know exactly what to do. Should we start a scholarship? Should we. What should we actually do with this money now in their name?

Well, the Mira Project is you can start a campaign.

If you lose a baby or a loved one in life, you can start a campaign through the Mira project through Construction for Change, where you can raise money into this campaign.

And we will help connect you with the need for building a maternal healthcare center somewhere in the world and a certain amount of money that different ones cost to build, essentially.

And whether it's providing the funding for it, whether it's naming it, whether it's creating a long term partnership between your family and this community, you could help provide access to hundreds, if not thousands of people around maternal healthcare in a region. And so when something like this happens, right.

The immediate grief is you don't know what to do and you don't just all of a sudden strategize two days later about, we should really do this.

So we want to have just the awareness of the Mirror project for people so that if they know of somebody that loses a loved one, they could go to constructionforchange.org and our new website that launches in a month will have this piece of it in our portfolio and they could reach out about having their own campaign where 100% of the money that they raise will go directly toward a project of their choosing and form a lifelong partnership with helping do good by providing maternal healthcare access to women that have a hard time finding it in some places in the world.

So we're really excited about this initiative and hope that it's a long term thing for us that does a lot of good in terms of changing some of the statistics around bringing healthcare access for women and babies.

Mike, I love so much that you're allowing God to show up in the pain and use it to bring help to other people.

And you're also sort of inviting the ripple effect of that, that you're inviting other people in their place of pain and grief to say, let's like figure out how we can purpose this to help other people and really honoring the people that you lost in such a beautiful way. I love it so much. I know there's women who are listening who are gonna want to check out this, this special thing that you're inviting them to.

How can they do that?

Yeah. So like I said, we're in the midst of this.

We have a couple of our staff on the ground in East Africa that have been going around vetting organizations, building connections. That's like in about a month or that part, that section of the website will be launched for us.

But through constructionforchange.org and, and, and honestly just contacted me directly@mike constructionforchange.org emailing me. I'd love to connect with anybody. Even though you're not going to see that today on our website.

That's what's in the works for seeing how we can take some of the relationships and the knowledge that we've gained over the years and help it connect to doing good.

And we've been in the position now to pastorally lead people enough early on in this grief that we are strong enough in our own situation to help to guide somebody that just has no idea what to do.

And that's how you feel when, when you lose somebody you love and you feel like, I don't know, I don't even know if I, what to do when I wake up in the morning, much less how do I, how do I help to do something. But most people early on in that when people are reaching out going, how can I help?

I want to support something that's, that's really the time, you know, for somebody to take advantage of that and try to do something good in their, in their honor. And if we can help be a part of that, that, you know, we'd love to be a blessing to the family and the world, you know, however we can.

It's really interesting coming from a guy who, you know, 20 years ago, was in college and was feeling led to go into construction and the Lord completely got a hold of your life in a way that called you to a bigger purpose, construction for good. And you had no idea what you would go through personally on a personal level.

And you continue to allow God to use whatever it is you're going through for good, for a bigger purpose. And I just, I just want to honor that. Mic. I want to tell you how admirable it is and it's truly inspiring.

Well, thank you. It sounds so good when you say it. It makes me feel like, like a saint over here.

But we all have our journey and you know, there's been a lot of moments and, and there's been a lot of moments I've, you know, I've wanted to, to quit this like anybody or wanted to do something that either felt easier or just had some consistency or, or whether at five o' clock you just got to check out at the end of the day and nothing wrong with a job like that, but, you know, I think that, that God has continued to pull me back into things and to guide me pretty clearly, even with the big profession switch.

Getting back into this at a time where it's been this huge blessing being able to do good, but also not being as relationally heavy as what I was doing in campus ministry, where college students need your attention all the time, and they need your attention on a Friday night. And I also got to this place where I want to be a great dad to my kids.

I mean, there's only two jobs in the world I can do and that no one else can do, you know, and that's be a great husband to my wife. Wife. And be a great father to my kids.

And I don't want to miss that because, you know, I never wanted to be one of those pastors that was so tied to their community or their church that their family didn't like their job.

You know, I said, hey, the moment that you think to Rachel, the moment that you think, you know, I'm prioritizing this job over our family like, I'll do something else because my first call is at home with my family. And so I do. I feel blessed to now be in this role and.

And be able to do good but not use quite as much of the relational energy so that I can be really present with my kids and try my best to be a little more patient as a dad. And hopefully God continues to just put grace in my life in that way.

Well, we all need that, for sure. Thank you for being on today, Mike.

Hey, thank you so much for having me. It's a blessing, and thanks for what you do.

Friend.

If Mike's story encouraged you in any way and you have a friend on your mind who might need to hear what he has to say, I encourage you to send this on.

Just that simple share not only gets the word out about our ministry, but it will bring hope to the person that you care about, the person that maybe the Lord is putting on your heart for a reason.

I absolutely loved the reminder from Mike that God's presence shouldn't be tied to God's blessing, that God's presence is with you and I no matter where we go, Whether we're in the valley of the shadow of death or we're on the mountaintop in victory, he is with us. There's nowhere we can go that he is not. Psalm 139 reminds us of that, that he is always present and that his character is always good.

And when we don't feel a blessing, when we are knee deep in disappointment, when we're grieving, God is still good and he's still present. I loved that reminder. And if you needed it, I hope you'll take it and you'll put that in your pocket and you'll hold on to that this week.

My hope is that you'll keep colliding with Jesus. And if you need other ways ways to do that, make sure you subscribe to this podcast.

Go to our website at wecollide.net we have a million jillion ways that you can keep colliding. We'll catch you next week, friend.