Spaghetti in a Basement

My team has made a lot of friends here in Kosovo. One friend we made is my age and he runs a coffee shop. The coffee shop has only been open for about a month now. He works a lot as most business owners do. We asked if he and his best friend, who comes by the coffee shop after work a lot, would come over to our Airbnb for dinner one night. Because of the coffee shop, he wouldn’t be able to join until 10 pm. But he would let us bring dinner to the coffee shop and share the meal with us there.

So we made spaghetti for them and brought it over to the coffee shop. He led us down to the basement to eat dinner there. So my team, the guy who runs the coffee shop, and his best friend were in the basement eating spaghetti that we accidentally made way too salty but besides that it was good. We just enjoyed getting to know them by talking about things like movies, Prizren (the city we’re in), sports, and other things for a while. It was fun. 

At some point during the night, the coffee shop owner’s father came downstairs and joined us in conversation. Once he joined us the conversation quickly changed towards religion. He talked about his Muslim faith to us. He didn’t speak English but his son and his friend translated for us. We got to learn more about what he believed as the conversation went on and we got to share the gospel with all three of them since we had to talk to them to communicate to the dad. The dad really loved getting to hear what we had to say. 

After the dad left, we went back to more lighthearted topics for the rest of the night and invited them to our Airbnb the next night for Uno. We didn’t have any Jesus talks while playing Uno but that’s ok. You don’t always need to have them. You still want to be actual friends with them. Besides, I did so good at Uno that night they kicked me out of the game so others could win. So that was nice.

But on a more serious note, we went back to the coffee shop a few days ago, and the guy who owns it was very busy when we first got there and his friend was at work. So our team was just talking with each other for a while. But eventually, he could relax for a moment and he sat down with us. After talking for a while my teammate, John, asked if we could pray for him. He didn’t understand why but after a little bit of asking he let us pray for him. After John finished praying for him, he had a big smile on his face. We were planning on leaving but he asked us to stay for a while longer, so we did. Just seeing what the Lord has done in these interactions already has been so great. I’m so excited to see what he is going to do in his life and others that we’ve befriended here in Prizren.