Peter -n- Melodye

For those of you unfortunate enough to not have Albanian exposure, here's a quick "glossary of names". Each of the names are typical Albanian names, but each has a special meaning.  Alban="The Albanian", Shpresa="Hope", Kreshnik="Warrior", Gezim="Joy", Bekim="Blessing".  I won't be any more obvious than that... :-) Once upon a time there were 5 friends.  They were born in the same town in the same year, grew up together, went to school together, played on football team together, got in trouble together.  They were inseparable; you almost never saw one without the others.  After they finished high school they found various honest jobs around town and soon one of them, Alban, fell in love with a young lady named Shpresa.  Soon they were engaged and Alban was hard at work building another story on his parents’ home in preparation for the wedding.  But then one day the unthinkable happened.  Alban had been wo

It seems like something is going on here in Albania...  More to the point, it seems like God may be moving in a new and exciting way.  This is purely anecdotal, but consider these examples from my own life all from the last month or 2... I mentor 4 young men.  One got married 2 weeks ago, so he's legitimately out of the picture for a while.  But the other 3 are all significantly growing in their passion for evangelism and are beginning to practice it and encourage/exhort others to do the same.  Some of that I would like to think has to do with our mentoring sessions, but the fact of the matter is that I have been mentoring for nearly 15 years and this is the first time I've started to see this type of response.  Might the Holy Spirit have something to do with it?! Of those 4 young men, 1 held the first meeting of a new church-plant last week and another is actively and intentionally planning towards the possibility of a new church-plant in the not-so-distant future in the

There once was a small town where nearly the entire population was afflicted with headaches.  Some were a mere annoyance, others were raging migraines.  Needless to say, these headaches, and how to relieve them, were the topic of much conversation in this city. But life goes on, and people need a place to save their money and a place to borrow money, and one day a new bank opened up in town. Other banks offered many different programs for saving and checking, but this bank had just one program: a certificate of deposit with a 20-year term.  Normally a bank with a single program with such a long term would never attract customers, but this CD was special -- it promised an annual 100% rate of interest, compounded annually. Other banks had certificates of deposit, but the best interest rate you could get was standard at all the other banks -- you could get a maximum of 5%. The city was abuzz with this amazing new program.  Everyone had their calculators and their phones out, calc