September and October have been pretty slow months, as we plan and gear up for our first big event, Momentum Europe. I’ve been busying myself with a lot of administrative work, but we’ve also had opportunity to begin training our committed believers.
Bursting your Bubble
In my opinion, our greatest success last year was finding 8 believers who have decided to commit to being part of our ministry. One of the things we asked of them is to commit to be trained in evangelism by our staff. We started that training this month with the series “Bursting Your Bubble”.
The first session of the training asks us to write down a list of friends, family, whoever, and begin praying for them to receive Christ. It also asks us to begin to prepare our hearts by confessing and repenting of any sin we can think of. And that’s it. I’m actually really glad for that - the whole first session asks us simply to prepare our hearts and to begin to rely on God to give us evangelism opportunities.
Momentum Europe
Our first big event of the year involves our cooperation with Momentum Europe, an arm of CRU dedicated to reaching influential leaders in Europe. They decided last fall to bring a team here this year, and we’re finally putting it together. The main product which we’ve advertised is a series of seminars by Prabhu Guptara and Ralf Juhre. We’ve seen a huge response on Facebook and other advertising channels so far! We expect over 250 people to come.
This will be a big test for us. We can put on a big event, but have we trained our partners well enough that we together can handle that kind of follow up? How will our partners respond to the opportunity? We’ll have to trust the Lord in this, and see what He reveals to each of our partners as they pray for the people on their lists and the others who are coming.
Please pray not just for the event, but specifically for our partners: Ira, Ina, Bona, Alba, Mira, Adi, and Eriol.
Boring stuff
I’ve been working on getting a residency permit here, and there’s a lot of paperwork that goes into it. Fortunately there’s a great organization here called the Albanian Encouragement Project that helped me with everything. I’ll go tomorrow afternoon to the Immigration Police in order to submit the paperwork. Please pray that there would be no legal issues with my stay here for this year!
We also spent a lot of time geting the website put together for LLM in Albania, aka Sotmeria. You can check it out at http://www.sotmeria.org. This was a lot of effort that finally got done only when we actually had a deadline - we wanted to have it ready in time for Momentum Europe, and we did! In the coming months we’ll work on making it better but for now it will serve well as an introducton to the organization.
My friends are awesome
The last couple months have been up-and-down for me emotionally. I’m really thankful for my friends here in Albania, as well as back in the States. They sent me a care package full of chips, salsa, and sour patch kids! And two new Aggie T-shirts just in time for A&M vs Alabama! It was really encouraging to read their notes. Thanks Lauren, Danita, Matt, Ron, Chris, and Joseph. Love you guys.
Some of them are even coming to visit in December! Will, Lucy, Lauren, and Matt Rial are going to spend a week here just hanging out with the Albania staff, then we’ll all fly back to Dallas together on the 23rd. I’ll get to hang out with my family over Christmas, and fly back to Albania on January 9th. Definitely looking forward to that time.
Prayer requests
Beyond praying for the upcoming ministry week and follow up, y’all could pray for me personally to experience Joy in seeing God accomplish His purposes. One of my struggles is that I’m always thinking about the future - what can I do next, where will I go, who will I become. This year, I think God is trying to teach me to stay in the present, and let next year, next month, and even tomorrow take care of itself. It’s easy to lose sight of Joy when your sports team loses (and other stuff happens too…), but that’s not where I want to be looking for joy anyways. I came to Albania in order to be amazed at what God is doing here. I want to experience something wonderous this year, that brings me even closer to God. It’s not going to be something I do, but something God does. I’ll be praying for that.