Last weekend, our squad of about 35 people all got together for what’s called a Leadership Development Weekend. This is just a time where we can all come together and learn from one another and pour into each other, encouraging our friends with what the Lord has been doing throughout the squad.
In the center of Tirana, there’s a big open square where tons of people are always walking. On Saturday night, we decided that we were going to have worship in the square. We wanted to praise the Lord in the open, knowing that people would want to come see what was happening. As we worshiped, people started to gather around our group. Some just stood and listened, others pulled out their phones to record this crazy group of people waving their hands in the air and jumping around, and some began to ask us questions.
Over the course of the night I got to talk with such a wide variety of people. I met a group of Christians from South Korea who were traveling and were in Tirana for one day, and just happened to be walking by. I met a man who is a missionary in Switzerland whose sister was getting engaged, and was heading back the next morning, but heard us singing Oceans, so he stopped by. I met an Albanian man who had a really hard day, stopped to listen to us, and felt “so much peace from your voices.”
My favorite encounter of the night was with a 16 year old girl who had just left dinner with her family. They stopped by because they thought we were a professional singing group. She asked me the same question most people do when they find out we’re from the United States, “Why are you here?”. I told her that we were Christian missionaries who love Jesus. Our conversation continued and she told me that she was Muslim and that she had heard of Jesus. I asked her what she knew about Him, and she told me that he was a good man who was murdered. I told her that both of those things were true, but that there’s more to Jesus than that. She asked to hear more, so I shared about Jesus coming down from heaven and dying for you and me because of His great love for us. She thanked me for telling her more about Jesus.
I turned around to talk to one of our friends Tyler who goes to school in Alabama and is studying abroad. I felt the Holy Spirit prompting me to stand up and share the Gospel with the crowd, but I don’t speak Albanian, and Tyler knows a little bit. So I asked him to translate, and he told me that he would try. As Tyler and I climbed up the stairs, the same girl I had just talked to about Jesus came up and told me that she heard Tyler and I talking, and that she would translate. So I stood in the middle of Tirana, and preached the Good News to a crowd of people from all over the world. With a Muslim translator. God is good.
