I’m in Albania! Hard to believe that I’m on month 4! I feel like I just started this crazy adventure called the World Race. But Central America is now behind me and Eastern Europe is in front of me! This month O Squad is together in one of, if not the most beautiful place I have ever been to. We are surrounded on 3 sides by mountains in the distance and a sea on one side (have yet to see it through but it’s not far). We have real beds, hot water, great food, water that we can drink from the tap, we have city life and country life at the same time, God is spoiling us in short.
Our ministry this month is to help our contact George get this property ready for summer camp. So this first week in Albania I have been painting fences! Other people have been moving rocks, wood, stones, trimming back plants of every kind, planting trees, helping with the pig and sheep, and burning trash. The work may not be something that we all enjoy but the conversations that we have had from it have been amazing! This month we are not working with our team per say but rather our squad is one large team broken down into small work groups. It’s been nice working and talking with people from the squad that I haven’t gotten a chance to work with or talk to as much.
One cool thing that I have done this week that I have never done before but kinda have wanted to do secretly for a while is milk a cow! I know that doesn’t sound exciting but it’s a new experience and I’ve heard a few stories from my mom from when she had cows and had to milk them growing up. So as a kid I thought that if she could do it so could I. So this week I got my chance and had fun doing it. One of the ladies who cooks for us this month, lives nearby and her daughter has agreed to let a few of us come each day to milk their cow and she practices her English with us.
But I think that the best time that I have had this week so far would be during our worship service this past Friday night. We started out singing worship songs and it was an amazing time. I could feel the presence of God and I think we could. But then it changed to an amazing time to an AWESOME declaration of who we are in Christ, of freedom, of love, of life, of true worship, and a dance party because we are free! Jeremy pulled up a chair and told us that it was for us to stand on it and just declare truth over ourselves and renounce the lies that we have been believing for so long. I declared freedom over me, my voice, the squad, and for chains to be broken. Others declared their true identity in Christ, they realized that they were unique, that God thinks about them and that when scripture says that God thinks about us more than there are grains of sand, that it doesn’t mean the same thought over and over but rather it’s a different though each time. In the words of Maryann when asked to describe worship that night “We kicked the devil in the face!”
So with new Identity comes new life and new freedom! We did this in Honduras also and grew in the ways that we declared over ourselves, we were freed from so much then and our time in Central America was great. Now we are free from even more so Europe had better be prepared because O squad is here with a new freedom, life, and energy!
