Tirana, Albania is an interesting place.
No matter what time of the day it is you feel like you’re at a night club. The music is always popping, the hookahs are always smoking, and the people are always drinking … coffee that is.
Every corner has a coffee bar, it’s next to impossible to find a restaurant until you familiarize yourself with the city, and if it weren’t for the cultural differences I would have to remind myself on more days than not that I’m not on Lincoln down in South Beach.
We have our favorite coffee spots, each for its own unique reasoning to match the mood we’re in when we go to them. A hot spot among the team is a coffee bar called Bosfor. On our first day there we befriended the owner, Remi, a 25 year old Muslim man who is lively and driven. We found ministry with him natural and easy more than likely because he was happy to talk to us.
One day while a few of us were sitting around talking with him he waved at a table of girls behind us, we turned and smiled to be polite and the girls returned it with air kisses and flirtatious giggles. Remi quickly laughed saying they were trying to make us jealous.
The next day I was talking with a teammate and told her that was clearly a missed opportunity on our part. That should have been a trigger for us to invite the girls over and extend our friendship; so instead of them trying to make us jealous we could tell them about the one who’s jealous for them.
Relationship building ministry is tricky in that way. It calls for you to be in constant communication with the Holy Spirit. Intently being aware of the divine appointments He is placing before you so that there is no possibility of missed opportunities for His Kingdom.
Well the Lord wastes nothing and we decided we wanted to truly focus on praying about creating friendships with women in the area after that interaction. We could feel the enemies hand in how women valued themselves in Tirana and how God was calling us to tell them how loved they are.
At no coincidence at all we ended up at the same restaurant as the girls who were at the coffee shop the day before “trying to make us jealous”. We struck up a conversation with them and they gave us the scoop on the “hook-up culture” of Tirana and why women portray themselves the way they do. Yet, the peculiar part of the conversation that stuck out most to me is even with the cultural norms they were explaining they also said a woman is still perceived “unmarriable” if she is not a virgin in Albania.
So why are these women so quick to exchange their value for a few one-night stands? Please do not misinterpret what I am saying here in no way am I saying a woman’s value is based off her marriageability. Its just an observation of the culture that is relatable to how quick women in general are to dismiss their value for a feeling of being desired. Yet, we are not correcting this downward spiral of a woman’s thought process of her worth. Just as much as we should not base our value off of our marriage eligibility we should not be so quick to disrespect ourselves to feel desired. I am in no way pointing the finger or condemning those who have fallen into this either, I would be a hypocrite if I pretended I haven’t been guilty of this myself.
I am just frustrated for my sisters!
I am fed up that we don’t truly understand how much as women we are worth!
Everywhere you look the enemy is polluting society with innuendos of what makes a woman desirable which is creating a culture where women feel in order for a man to find them attractive they must match the images portraying how a beautiful woman “should look”.
What happened to inner beauty is more important than external beauty?
Why are we more focused on becoming bait for the wrong fisherman than working on loving who we were created to be and more importantly realizing how loved and valued we already are by the one who created us?
Why are women more focused on making other women jealous than understanding the one who is already so jealous FOR us?
When did we accept that we were anything less than we were created to be?
When we read the Word why do we only see “wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.” Ephesians 5:22? Yet, we so easily forget that God’s beloved Israel was depicted as a woman; that wisdom is represented by a female’s image; and how much of Jesus’s ministry was accomplished through women?
Needless to say, talking to these two girls that day sparked something in me.
It also broke my heart for all the women who do not know God’s unfailing love.
Unfortunately, we did not get to spend anymore time with the girls we met as our schedules never really worked out. However, I know God used that time with them to lay it on my heart to continue to seek after women the remainder of this journey. In order to share with them the redemptive, powerful, unconditional, jealous love of our Savior. Ultimately leading to women all throughout His nations truly knowing how valued and adored they are by the Creator.
