Community is hard. Its irritating. It gets under your skin at exactly the right time. It eats the last slice of pizza that you wanted. And most importantly, it never allows you to have any alone time. I live with five girls in an apartment about the size of a shoebox. The walls are extremely thin and truthfully we cant escape each other even if we tried. But community is beautiful. It is service. It is cooking dinner every night for your team. It is giving your teammate the last slice of pizza because you know they really wanted it. It is picking each other up when we are down. It is always having a shoulder to cry on. And most importantly it is having someone else understand this crazy life we are currently living. There is a quote that resonated with me from “Kingdom Journey’s” and it says “My idea of community most of my life has been going to a Bible study once a week. If i was ever uncomfortable, I would stop going. This community doesn’t work like that. You wake up in the morning next to community. All day long, community notices your every time you roll your eyes. Community will not be escaped. Living in community is the scariest, hardest, most out of control, beautiful thing I have ever been through in my life.” This quote really sat with me because it is so true of this experience. We all came on the Race ready to serve with a zeal that could not be stopped but then the honeymoon period ended and we all realized that being a full time missionary is hard and community is hard. But despite all this “hard” The Lord is moving in radical ways. He is teaching each of us new things about ourselves and better ways to love. He is showing us how much more the children we work with are changing us than we are even coming close to changing them. God is revealing new depths of his character to us and showing us who to love better and how to be better. Every day is a unique day (especially living in a shoebox with five girls) but every day is such a blessing. My life sometimes feels crazy but truthfully I wouldn’t have it any other way.
We are still in Lushnje, Albania. We are doing English clubs two days a week for the children and youth. Two other days a week, we are helping with an after school program that our ministry host established. We just have four more weeks in Albania before we head to the Philippines! Thank you for everyones constant prayers and love!
