I can’t even tell you how happy and full my heart is right now! Ministry in Albania is full of all of my favorite things so far: painting, soccer, laughter, and plants are coming very soon. We are working with the Church of the Nazerene in Tirana, Albania and helping them prepare a building to be a kindergarten that is supposed to open in just a few short weeks.
At first, I was put on the flower crew and told to paint flowers wherever there was grass painted already. We filled the balcony outside with flowers and learned quite a bit about how paint drips like ice cream when it’s over 100 degrees outside. Even though we all felt like we had no idea what we were doing, there were quite a few laughs and plenty of flowers that turned out just fine.
Then we noticed the stairs had grass too, so we worked our way down and discovered that the bumpier the wall, the harder it is to make pretty flowers. At the bottom of the stairs, we looked around and saw that the little courtyard area also had grass, so we continued on and learned that we are actually half decent at painting flowers by now. After a couple days of work, this is what you see when you walk into the kindergarten now:
Next thing I knew, someone put a pencil in my hand and a picture of some butterflies in my other hand and told me to draw them on the balcony wall. At first, I freaked out a little because we had been using a projector to trace the lines of the larger murals before we started painting. There were places, like the balcony, where a projector just wasn’t going to fit. But large, detailed butterflies? Maybe they wouldn’t be so hard without a projector. I decided I could handle it. Once our ministry host discovered I could draw, I was whisked away to more difficult places to reach to draw a complicated picture of a story book with children peeking out of the pages. When that was finished and started to get some paint, I was put in charge of drawing Thumper from Bambi and another rabbit along the rooftop staircase. Y’all, I recognize that God has given me some artistic abilities, but there is NO WAY I would have been able to do these freehand drawings without the help of Jesus. Take a look at beautiful Thumper that my dear Molly painted for me:
Today, I walked into the Kindergarten knowing that I had a list of freehand drawings to do, and I just completely shut down. I spent the whole morning staring at a blank wall I wanted to draw some little giraffes on and fighting back tears of incapability. I have never really studied art. The only things I know I have learned by making many mistakes and copying Youtube and Google images, and making many more mistakes. Making mistakes in watercolor is easy because I can throw a piece of paper away. When you make a mistake on a wall, you can’t just crumple up the wall and throw it in a trash bin. They don’t really have trash bins large enough in Albania for a whole wall.
After lunch, I came back and went up to the rooftop to talk with the pastor’s wife about what she wanted on the walls there. As she showed me all these pictures of animals, bugs, Winnie the Pooh with friends, and little birds, my mouth was saying, “Sure, absolutely I can do that,” but my heart was screaming, “Heck to the nope-nope.”
Then, her face turned soft as she looked me in the eyes and told me how thankful she was to have us here to help paint. How blessed she was to have us here to help make the kindergarten so beautiful. We kept dreaming about how to make the rooftop a welcoming place for their open house dinner in two weeks. She ended by giving me a lovely and much needed hug.
I’ve been reading the book “In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day” by Mark Batterson and he talks about how to live your life boldly when faced with challenges. At one point he writes about the time when God reduced Gideon’s army of over 30,000 men to an army of 300 men to go against the Midianite army of thousands and thousands of men. Gideon’s army ended up winning, and all the glory had to go to God because there was no humanly possible way that Gideon’s army could have won that battle.
Batterson writes, “Too often our prayers revolve around asking God to reduce the odds in our lives. We want everything in our favor. But maybe God wants to stack the odds against us so we can experience a miracle of divine proportions. Maybe faith is trusting God no matter how impossible the odds are.”
After my talk with the pastor’s wife, my heart was suddenly filled with joy again, and I was soon bouncing around the house gathering my pencils to start on those giraffes I had been putting off. Do I feel confident in my drawing abilities yet? Heck no. Did I spend as much time cringing as I spent praying over every pencil line that created Pooh and Tigger? Oh, absolutely. Does it still seem like the odds are stacked against me? More than I can say.
Sometimes, Jesus stacks the odds against us and takes away a projector and asks us to trust him to make our hands steady. Not because He wants to make my life difficult or stressful, but because He wants everyone who walks into this kindergarten to know that his glory can be found in paintings for children too.
Prayer Requests:
– that we can finish all the paintings to be done in the short amount of time we have left
– that Jesus would continue to “turn water into paint” and also mix the perfect colors for us
– that the right teachers would be led to work at the kindergarten
– that the kindergarten would become a beacon of hope in a rough neighborhood
