January Nesletter

This is our final Newsletter Update as our 1½ years of service in Tirana, Albania has come to an end. We are now simultaneously happy to be with family/friends in the U.S. and missing family/friends in Albania! Currently, Mindy is considering job offers for teaching, with a goal of eventually getting a masters in Social Work. Jen is weighing her options, with the potential of ending up at a Seminary, with a focus on Urban Studies/Development.
Below we have each written a section, as usual, and being our last we added a few extra thoughts and pictures. We hope you enjoy it! We do hope to be visiting friends and churches again within the next few months, according to work and life schedules.
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God is amazing, and provides for us. Completely uncertain about what precisely ought to be included in this, the long overdue final installment of our newsletter, I find myself in the end focusing on that point. Through everything we do, and everything we experience, God's awesome nature and His provision show through. I apologize profusely that this letter has not found its way to you sooner, but as it is finally being composed I thought it might be appropriate to use it to illustrate, through a few brief anecdotes, some of the ways in which God has been awesome and providential in my life. He has allowed me to realize, in some part, the sanctity of human life, and blessed me in ways I may never have imagined.
I'd like to begin with a boy. Prior to my embarking on this journey, various people told me, with hopeful and serious or light-hearted intent, that they believed I would fall in love with a boy in Albania. As one of the most solidly established bachelorettes of my acquaintance, such suggestions of exotic romance were to be expected. What people may not realize, however, is that their hopes were realized, though not in the manner they intended. I did fall in love with an Albanian boy, and have missed him dearly since returning home. I worry about his future, I missed him at Christmas time, and I remind myself from time to time that I have to place him in God's keeping. He's two and a half, he has cerebral palsy, and he, as I've said before, is perhaps one of the greatest blessings God gave me in Albania.
Working with him, and with another boy who in time joined our therapy circle (of whom my boy showed not the slightest jealousy, a true mark of his giving nature) allowed me to experience how truly special special-needs children can be. I used him the other night in a discussion regarding abortion. What should we do if the child is going to have a hard life, my friend queried. Should we condemn them to hard circumstances? Yes, would be my resounding answer. Even “hopeless” children have hope, have joy, and revel in the experience of love.
How can we take this hope and joy away from them? What my boy, and others like him, represent is the sanctity, value, and hope of human life, even when that life is hard. He lives in an institution, in a country where the chances of success for even a normal child who never gets into a stable family are restricted. He has a serious medical condition, in a country where quality therapy isn't guaranteed as he continues through the system. Right now he resides in a wonderful institution, where he receives love, therapy and special attention from a qualified nurse and house-parent. However, he has a birthday coming up, and every looming birthday brings with it the fear of an uncertain future. Eventually he should age out of our 0-4 home. He has a sister with a serious medical condition in a country where the best treatment for this condition isn't even available, and the treatments she currently receives may be endangering her life as blood isn't properly screened. Yet despite all this he has a winsome smile, an infectious giggle, and a capacity for love and acceptance which strikes me as uncommon.
About a week before I left, God allowed me to receive a going away present from him which, if I am wise, I will treasure forever. After more than a year and a half of therapy, at the age of two and a half, he pushed himself up on his knees into a crawling position all by himself. I was able to see it, to see an achievement which we'd been working toward for months.
Maybe his life is hard. You can look at his life, shake your head, and comment on how awful it is that such situations exist. “What a shame,” you can say. “Where is God in this?” You can become bitter and cry, rail against the sky and society, scream with all your might at the injustices of the world. You can do this, and I can't honestly tell you that I haven't done it in the last year and a half. However there's another option. You can look at that life, and realize that the answer to your question lies within the question. Where is God in this? He's right there. He's in that little boy, in his smile, in his laugh. He's in the achievement, the pushing up of a spastic torso onto uncooperative legs. He's in the hands that hold those legs, and spend months upon months bending them and placing them under that torso in preparation for their big moment. When you look at the life from that perspective, you may get an idea of how beautiful it is. You may also be convicted as to what we all should do with this life, and the millions of others like it. You may realize that it is our calling to be those hands. We aren't to look at a troubled child's life and ask why we allowed them on this earth, because quite frankly we didn't. God did, and He put them on this earth for a reason. We must now be His tools to improve that life, and help bring hope. That's one lesson I hope I've learnt in Albania. We should all hope for the opportunity to be blessed with opportunities to be used by the Master's hands in His work.
Another unexpected blessing came right before I left Albania. This one came, however, in the guise of twin girls with a lot to say. Imagine being fifteen years old and about three months shy of losing all legal hope of a family. Close your eyes and envision how this might feel, after a lifetime of institutions and rejection. Then imagine how you might feel were you to learn that a woman and a man were going to journey thousands of miles, and spend thousands of dollars, to claim you and welcome you into their family. What might you want to say to them? How would you feel? Try to picture your emotions- happy and grateful, yet nervous and awkward. Now imagine being virtually incapable of speaking the language of your new family. What would you do? Perhaps you'd grab onto the first willing girl you found who spoke mediocre Albanian, and ask her to translate your thoughts and emotions, your life history and background, your aspirations and your dreams to these relative strangers who just became family. This is what happened with me, as the twins arrived to stay at our campus shortly before my departure. It was another important lesson in God's plans, His providence, and His bestowal of hope for the future.
It was only by God's grace that I spoke enough Albanian to serve in this faculty, and it was, in my opinion, one of the best uses my language lessons could have been put to. It gave me a first hand glimpse into the sacrifice both sides are willing to make to meld their separate components into a cohesive unit. Just for a moment place yourself in their shoes, be willing to embrace a complete stranger, adapt to their habits and personalities, leave your country and comfort zone to be used of God to enrich the lives of children in need. Or put enough faith in God to leave your homeland and place your life under the jurisdiction of strangers, in the hopes of a better life and a parent's love. Witnessing it, the girls' earnest desire to get to know, to be known by, and to please their new parents was truly touching. Seeing the seemingly unlikely hope which God arranged for girls nearing the point of illegality was a lesson in faith. Being able to witness and participate in this interchange, and glimpse the beauty of the situation, was an amazing blessing.
As I draw this to a close, while the hour wanes and I push once again the length of a newsletter entry, I contemplate again the blessings God gave me in Albania. He gave me children, beautiful children with lives so special and precious it's incomprehensible that people might try to deny them their lives, even if they aren't what we may call “ideal”. I must try to remember that it isn't our place to define “ideal”, but all happens according to God's plan and my job is to aspire to be used of Him to assist in the blessings and miracles He provides. Just as you, and so many others, have been used to help bless me. You have all been a blessing, and I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you. Thank you for allowing God to use you to make our trip possible, with your donations, prayers, and support. I thank God for His blessings, and I thank God for you.
May He bless you in the coming year!!!!!!!!!!,
mindy

Dear Friends,
At last the time has arrived! Mindy, Hiri and I have made the long trip home from Eastern Europe to the United States. We left and landed December 7, and my dad and Mindy’s mom made the journey to pick us up at JFK in New York City. Two days later, we were welcomed to PA with 8+ inches of snow overnight! Everything was beautiful and “just as it should be” for Christmas time!
So.. what does one say in the final letter of a sojourn, as we call it? The first thing is THANK YOU. Thanks to you – your interest, your emails, your money, your prayers, your cards & gifts – our last 1½ years were made possible. It could not, and would not, have happened had you not dedicated yourself to us and invested in our lives – lives that were far away from your own and in which you trusted something worthy of your interest was developing. When considering this, I am shocked that you so freely gave of yourself, and am overwhelmingly grateful for it. So, thank you, or rrofsh as they say in Albania when expressing deep gratitude from the heart!
The second thing that comes to mind is to let you know what happened in the time since our last update. Two adopting families arrived in Albania to adopt a 4-year old boy and a set of 15-year old twin girls, respectively. What a blessing adopting families have been in my life!! It’s one thing to work in an orphanage to help care for children that no one else will look after… another thing to have families travel across the world to meet a child that no one else will take care of, to claim him/her as their own. What an awesome love and commitment it is that defines adoption! Mindy and I have become quite attached to the adoptive families that have adopted during our time and plan to keep in touch with them, and even visit the children and their new families across the United States. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to impact these children and their new families, resulting in new friends and families across America and Europe.
My time at AEP (the Albanian Encouragement Project) was a wonderful experience, and moreover I discovered a family there. I now have friends all over the world (the foreign missionaries that I worked for), and dear Albanian friends that I worked with that will always be considered part of my family. During my 1½ years there, I found myself not necessarily irreplaceable, but rather filling a place that no one else was available to fill. I served mostly as the Office Manager, but also as the Interim Administrator for the last couple of months. At the end, I had a few weeks to train Jeremy, a missionary from Tennessee, to fill the Interim Administrator position that I have left open. We are still praying for a new full-time Administrator, and it looks like the Lord may be providing a couple of options. It is evident that God has His eye on our needs and for AEP this means we have had Interim Administrators available for the past 2 years until the Administrator He has in mind shows up! Thank you for giving me the opportunity to serve exactly when needed at AEP, and for helping me build an international family for life.
The fourth aspect of our time in Albania that I want to share is our involvement with Grace Church of Tirana (a Grace Church, CA church plant). When we arrived we were two of a handful of ‘young adults’ attending Grace Church. However, it took us a while to get to know the others because no one met with each other outside of church hours. When finally we started to interact with the other “youth” (ages 13-38) in our church, we discovered a group of believers growing in the faith, and moreover a group of young people that were a blast to hang out with! During our time there, we saw the beginning of Grace’s first Youth Group, which consisted of anywhere between 5 and 15 people, to now two weekly Youth Groups (Young Professionals, and Youth) and a girls’ Bible Study. Plus, a guys’ Bible Study is in the works! Praise God for His faithfulness! I learned that it doesn’t matter so much who I am and what my skills are, but that being dedicated and pouring my whole self into something can make all the difference – and to His credit, we were told that these groups would not have started had we not been there and actively involved. The Youth Groups have used our apartment to meet and hang out; we have been able to help provide food, drinks and other useful items; we brought experience from groups we’ve been part of, with ideas and abilities; and we provided some American time-to-get-things-started motivation to a place where often things get dragged out for no reason. Also, the church is now starting up a ministry to the underprivileged, mostly run by the youth! Thank you for the opportunity to help this church start its Youth Groups and Bible Studies, and for the inexpressibly wonderful group of Albanian believing friends we have made.
Lastly, I want to mention my expectations and the outcomes of this expedition. I desired to do missions for a year 1) to help the less-fortunate and 2) to see if it’s something I can foresee doing longterm. You have heard about both of these in our updates – our work through Bethany (kids, clinic, adoption), through AEP (serving missionaries that are serving others), through church, and through our friendships. These are tangible, obvious results. However, for me there are many personal changes as well. I have learned that if you are in search of serving our holy Lord and furthering His kingdom, He will provide – and in unexpected ways. Also, I have learned that I have skills in administrative and business areas that I didn’t realize, and furthermore that my love for the church is beyond Sunday every week. The body of Christ is something unfathomably profound and beloved, and those that choose to encourage it, build it and love it will see the blossoming of the most beautiful flower. There is nothing more lovely than normal people gathered together to worship something much greater and better than us.. daily learning that our wrongs cause us to deserve death, and yet a solution has shown itself. Someone has saved us from this imminent death and has given us the ability to instead live a life that’s dedicated to something better.. living for someone else instead of ourselves and instead of being selfish, deciding there are more important things in life. Believing – that Jesus came to earth as both God and man, and died on the cross to erase our guilt and wrongs from God’s eyes, and rose again to show He’s a real, living and active eternal God, and that we now have the ability to shed our seemingly irrepressible desires to love self and love Him instead – is an amazingly freeing thing. And the fact that it is something anyone can do with His help has been proven to me through my friends in Albania.
Thank you for the opportunity to learn more about Christ’s redemptive work all over the world, and that God doesn’t change from location to location, nor does He love one more than another. Thank you for helping me learn more about who I am and where my abilities and loyalties lie. Rrofsh.
In His Unconditional Love,

Xheni

*If you would like more info, pictures, etc., and/or would like to remain in contact, please just let us know!
*Remember: We have an online journal, complete with a few pictures, if you want to see previous newsletters
and future happenings, if we can keep it going. Go to www.jenminalb.blogspot.com.