Wow, it has blown me away with all that the Lord has done since we have been in Shkodër. I am finding it hard to even know where to begin, so much has taken place since we left Romania. Let me try to start at the beginning… My squad had 1 week of training and then another week of debrief in Durrës, Albania. It was a great time to be challenged with teachings from our squad mentor, coaches, and squad leaders. Debrief also provided the opportunity and space to process what the Lord has been doing in our lives in our first month and to reevaluate and adjust going forward as a squad and as a team. After the two weeks in Durrës, each team split up to head to different cities around Albania. It was hard to say goodbye to our squadmates after 6 weeks of being constantly around each other, but everyone was so excited to begin our first ATL month!
(M Squad in Durrës, Albania during our Squad Training)
What is ATL?
ATL stands for Ask The Lord. This means that for this month in Albania we have not been given hosts for this country. We pray and ask the Lord where He wants us to go and for what He wants us to do while we are there. We found out that we would be moving into ATL month right before we left Romania and we began to pray and ask the Holy Spirit to lead and guide us into what He wanted for us in our time in Albania. As we began praying for direction, we sensed the Holy Spirit speaking a few things about what our ministry would look like; specifically kids/women’s ministry, muslim ministry, and prison ministry. A couple of us on our team got a general sense about going north, but we weren’t sure about what specific city the Lord wanted us in. At this point, my team leader had each of us look up cities in Albania and send him 3 cities that we were interested in going to. When we each had sent him our list of cities, we realized that we all had one city in common…Shkodër, Albania.
Shkodër, Albania
After our debrief was finished, we headed out and took a bus from Durrës to Shkodër. We arrived on September 28th and had booked a couple nights in a hostel to get us started in our time here. We arrived at our hostel and were in the process of getting settled in our room and were trying to figure out some logistical details about meals, as we didn’t have access to a stove or a refrigerator. We were brainstorming possibilities and decided to grab some items for lunch first since we were all hungry. As we were leaving our room, there was a couple sitting outside on the picnic table using a camping stove to heat up hotdogs. We exchanged hellos and then they casually extended the invitation to share their lunch. I was blown away by the offer. This generosity and hospitality is so uncommon to me that I am still shocked when I think about it. God has definitely been teaching me a lesson in hospitality through my time here in Albania. As they shared their hotdogs, sliced bread, tomatoes, and tea we learned that this couple is from Poland and were vacationing through parts of Albania and the surrounding countries. After getting to know this couple over lunch, we decided to head to Big Market and get the necessary supplies to put together an American barbeque of hamburgers and invited our new friends to join us for dinner. Later that evening, we gathered again to cook the hamburgers on their charcoal grill and continued to get to know our new friends better. They contributed some polish sausage and mustard which was amazing! They eventually asked us why we are traveling and how we know one another. We got to share with them that the reason we are traveling is to share with people about Jesus and how He has transformed our lives. They are culturally Catholic so they are used to rituals and tradition, but were intrigued by the trajectory of our lives. They kept saying how unordinary we are as young Americans that we would be living the way that we are, that we would sacrifice comfort, our families, and our jobs for a year. They were also surprised by our love for Jesus and our pursuit of Him in our daily lives. We got to challenge their thinking of Americans and what it looks like to be willing to sacrifice comfort for what we feel like the Lord has called us to do. Then all of a sudden a man comes walking up to our group and tells us that he heard us speaking English with unique accents and asked to join us. He and his wife and young baby son are traveling since his job allows him to work remotely. They are from Ukraine and they ask why we are traveling and we get to share with them not only why we are traveling, but the gospel as well. Then a man from Israel walks up and joins the party. His family background is Jewish, but he claims to be agnostic and we continue to share our stories and engage in theological questions with our new friends from the start of our dinnertime to well past midnight. Our team was blown away by the way the Lord worked and the opportunity that He had given us to engage in faith conversations with people from around the world on our very first night of being in Shkodër.
(Dinner with our new friends)
(Windmill Hostel)
The next day my teammates and I split into two groups and went on a prayer walk around the town. Chris, Anthony, I went one direction and Isaak and Madison went another direction. We were praying over the city that people’s hearts would be softened to God’s goodness, mercy, and love. We found a soccer stadium and ended up walking around it and praying over it that the Lord might use the space and that the people who go there would fall in love with Him. We also prayed for a couple mosques and went into a Catholic church and prayed that the people would be transformed by God’s pursuit of them and know that a real relationship is possible with God. When we came back to our hostel we shared stories of what happened on our prayer walks over dinner. Madison and Isaak had been walking around a neighborhood and saw a building with a sign for a pregnancy clinic and they walked over to pray near it. Isaak then saw an old rundown building a little farther down the street and went closer to take a look. Directly behind the building was a church that they discovered and he had heard somebody playing guitar inside. They walk inside the building and surprise the girl who is practicing for worship. She explains that the church has recently moved to the area and it is an Evangelical Christian church and she was practicing worship for their church service on Sunday. She then proceeds to give them a flyer explaining that there would be a guest preacher from America preaching the coming Sunday and the service would be in English. It has been so amazing to see the way that the Holy Spirit specifically led our team to the city of Shkodër and then to the front steps of an Evangelical church where there are very few in this city. Shkodër is approximately 50% Muslim and 50% Catholic and this city has a higher percentage of Catholics than most cities in Albania. Albania as a country is about 0.6% Evangelical Christians. Communism officially ended in Albania in 1991 and it has only been 30 years since. Most of the Christians here are in the younger generations who have heard the gospel and been discipled within the last 30 years. The local church here is still gaining momentum and influence to reach more and more people.
(Views from our first prayer walk)
That following Sunday, after arriving in Shkodër, we all went to Cornerstone Church and were instantly welcomed. From our initial meetings with the pastor and some of the church members we were connected to various opportunities to work alongside this church through kids ministry, women’s ministry, and a couple Campus Crusade for Christ events. We have been deeply blessed by this community and church leadership and stay tuned for some of the various ways we have been involved with this church.
(My team with the dog we nicknamed “Maggie”)
Thank you all for your support, prayers, and encouragement! As I am writing this now, Albania just had a 4.5 earthquake with the epicenter about 40 km from the city I am in. I am praying that the Lord is spiritually shaking the strongholds of this nation as the physical country is being shaken. Thank you for reading!
Much love,
Elizabeth
