As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog, Albania has been an ATL month. ATL stands for Ask the Lord. That means we pray about where we are going to go in the country and what we are going to do.
So we first prayed about what ATL would look like for Albania during our last week in Romania. My team prayed, asking God where He wanted us to go in Albania. When we prayed about it both me and my team leader, Drew, heard from the Lord to go the northeast of the country near the border to Kosovo. Fun fact, that is the next country we are going to, about a week from now. So we looked at places in northeastern Albania and found the city of Kukes. So we booked the only Airbnb in Kukes.
Then when we finally arrived in Kukes, September 28th, we found out google lied to us and the Airbnb isn’t in the middle of the city but in a small village of I’d say about 100 people, 30 minutes outside the city. There are no churches in the village just one mosque, but Islam is just a cultural religion in the village. Not that many very devout people. They don’t even have an Imam, which is kind of the Muslim equivalent to a pastor.
As I mentioned a little bit in my last blog we’ve spent a lot of time with our Airbnb host. She is a Muslim who is very knowledgeable about her faith. She is an amazing person who has been making all of our meals for us. We’ve been offering to help her with the chores she has around the house. For two days we helped her and her mom pick apples from her family’s apple orchard. By the end, we had about 10 bags of apples that each weighed 35-40 lbs that we had to carry a little bit down the mountain to what they called the “stan.” The stan is a little shack that our host’s grandparents lived in back in the day, that they still own but don’t live in. (They actually live in a pretty nice house now). We grabbed all these apples for her family so that they could have apples that could last them all winter.
The Stan
While helping her with this, other tasks, and just sitting down and talking to her we’ve spent a lot of time talking to her about religion. The last few days we’ve talked about Jesus with her pretty much every conversation we’ve had with her. She has asked to join us in our prayer for blessing the food. She’s asked to hear us worship. So we played “Amazing Grace” over a speaker and sang along to it with her. She really enjoyed it. We can just see the Holy Spirit moving in her life. She was supposed to go back to Tirana, the capital, this weekend for school, but due to covid, she isn’t going until next week, about the same time we’re supposed to leave for Kosovo. This is totally a God thing. Him giving us more time to be with her, love her and invest in her. If she is the only one who comes to know the Lord from what we do over these 11 months it will have been all worth it.
“What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off? And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he is happier about that one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off. In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should perish.” Matthew 18:12-14
We need to be like God. Seeking out the one that has gone astray to bring him back to Jesus. But not through our own strength but through the Holy Spirit.
How can you be seeking out the lost sheep around you?
