Since September, my teammate Kim and I have been stationed in North Macedonia. We have witnessed God moving in a powerful way and look forward with great anticipation to what He will do this spring. One of the new doors God has opened for us is the neighboring country of Kosovo. Kosovo is predominantly a Muslim country but still has a few small churches scattered throughout.
About two years ago, I visited Kosovo together with the Impact team from Livets Ord. During our trip, we met many young people in the church. They loved to serve God, but something was missing—most of them had never personally experienced the gifts of the Spirit. At that time, I didn’t know that I would one day have the opportunity to return.
But last year, at the end of September, we received an invitation to join a group for evangelism in Tetovo, Macedonia.
To our great surprise, many of those in the evangelism group were from Kosovo. We got to know many from the group, and as we spent time together, a thought began to stir inside me: “What if we gather Christian youth from Kosovo and organize a conference for them?” We decided to stay in touch and visited them several times at their congregation in Vushtrri. Slowly but surely, the idea of a conference in Kosovo began to take shape, and the church was very open to teaming up with us to make this a reality.
Later this spring, we will be visited by several teams from Livets Ord Bible Center in Uppsala who will help us with the conference. However, because of this, we are “locked” to just one date.
So after some planning, we suddenly encountered a small problem. One of the churches in Kosovo has a Bible school weekend on the exact same date, during which many of their key leaders will be involved.
Our contact pastor promised to bring this up with the school, but there was very little chance they would change the date. We decided to pray. If the conference is from God, He will open a way. Two weeks later, I asked the pastor, “Did you talk to them at the Bible school?” The answer really surprised me: “No, but they changed the schedule themselves.”
God didn’t just make a way; He did it without our help. After that, I was filled with a new sense of expectation. I can’t wait to see what God will do in Kosovo this spring!
/Jan Marek
Missionary North Macedonia
