We made it to Albania!
New continent, new country, new month, new currency, new set of cultural norms.
Coming from Asia for the last 5 months we weren’t too sure what ministry in Europe was going to look like or if we would have to add anymore interesting rules to our ever-growing list.
In Asia we heard it all – no shoulders showing, skirts below the knees, actually just never show your ankles, don’t play cards in public, chacos are ok but sandals without ankle straps are not polite, and so on.
So on our first day with our new host we all sat down to hear the details of what this month was going to look like and we began to ask questions about how we should present ourselves in the community as Christians. If I knew his face or response was going to be as great as it was I would have recorded it. He told us to use our own judgment in dressing and not to draw negative attention to ourselves. That confused us so we asked more detailed questions … can we wear tank tops, do we need to cover our knees for church, can we wear jeans, do we need to cover tattoos or take out piercings?
No exaggeration he looked at us as if we had 5 heads, he was so confused as to why we were asking these questions (Asia changes your norms of appropriate). Better than his facial expression though was his response: “just don’t wear anything that will cause me to stumble when I’m preaching”.
We giggled it off realizing how ridiculous we probably sounded to him; then happily celebrated a month of jorts above the knees and world race dress code appropriate tanks! I know this sounds so silly but, when you’re in 100 degree weather at 90% humidity and you have to cover your shoulders and your ankles you pray about the days you can wear weather appropriate clothing. Thank God that we can we give our knee caps and shoulders to get some sun plus the weather in Albania is magnificent!
We are in the capital, Tirana, surrounded by mountains and only 25 mins from the coast (Adriatic Sea). Our team has a small apartment where all 7 of us are crammed into a small room with no air conditioning and its not completely miserable because we can leave the windows open for a nice breeze. We have a mile walk to ministry every morning that we are excited about because you don’t immediately start sweating when you step outside. On the Race you quickly learn how to celebrate the little things that we do not think twice about in America.
Our ministry is awesome this month! For the first week in the mornings we will be helping renovate the old church into a community center for the youth. During the evenings and then in the mornings starting next week we are to come up with creative ways to build relationships with the youth in the community and invite them to the center so we can share the gospel with them. Church is considered an “uncool” thing here so we can not just outwardly evangelize we have to build relationships and share how our lives have been transformed.
I am really excited and prefer relationship building with locals because in my opinion it is one of the most effective ways to share the Gospel. Our host suggested hanging out at coffee shops that are popular in the area (score!) but, really has given us the freedom to make ministry look however we want. Some of our team has joined a gym as a way to socialize and meet people; its summer time here and the lake is a popular spot to hang out for high school and college kids so we will most likely be going there a few times; and some of the high school kids at church want us to go play basketball with them as a way to do outreach (guess I better learn how not to travel).
Tuesdays, God willing, we will have the opportunity to hang out and love on women who’ve been rescued from sex trafficking. Thursdays we head over to the local prison, I am so excited to have more opportunities with this type of ministry after how much it impacted me last month. Saturday mornings we will have children’s ministry … our host gave us face paint yesterday for this upcoming weekend so I’m curious to see what that will look like.
With all the excitement aside though the reality of this month looks like eating pizza everyday, inviting the random people to hangout, and drinking at least 4 cups of coffee a day . . . so cheers to that!
