Opening Day of Streha

Today after church, the entire church walked over to "Streha" (The Refuge in English) for a time of food fellowship and then prayer, giving God the glory for his provision of this center for youth.

It was a wonderful time, we had anywhere from 150 to 200 people there, the doors were overflowing on either end. The Lord provided so much, even in the last week as we were doing final preparation. Here is one example. In Albania we are still in the midst of an electric crisis, and so the government shuts off the entire city, portions at a time. However instead of letting you know when your electricity will be off, they just shut it off at random times during the day which makes it really hard to plan for a party or big gathering with people and have lights, like today.

However this past week, I was trying to figure out how to solve this problem, the best way is to get a generator, but the people I was working with on this had showed me some generators that were way too expensive and on top of that they would not run the entire room, they only could run half of the room. So we prayed that God would provide something, or at least keep the lights on for the party for us.

At the end of this past week, a student from our youth group, found a place that sold good brand name generators for a very good price. So on Friday I went with him to buy a generator that was powerful enough to run everything in our youth room with no problems. This was just the beginning.

Yesterday, I got a guy from church that works at the LC who is in charge of the up keep of those generators. He came over and helped me wire our generator. We spent the entire day, shoving wires through tubes in the wall and blowing up switch boxes and finally we got it to work last night. Praise the Lord that we did, because today during the grand opening we would have had no lights the entire time without the generator. This is just one of many examples of the Lord's provision for so many things to make this thing happen.

We are excited about the opening of Streha, and believe that today was a bench mark in the youth ministry out here, we pray that God would glorify himself in this building, and that many young people would come to know Jesus through the ministry and training that will happen here. Thank you for your prayers and support for this on going project! Praise God!

Here are some pictures from today.



The words below say why we exist. We take it from Psalm 73:28 that says, Psalm 73:28 "But for me it is good to be near God; I have made the Lord GOD my refuge, that I may tell of all your works."