Johnstein!

We left Gjakova yesterd to go to Pristina for the night before our flight back to Vienna today (Thursday)...but before we left, Berat invited us to join him at the Bethany Christian Services Community Center for an event as part of the USAid celebration of 15 year anniversary of providing development assistance in Kosovo. We helped Berat do some last minute set up stuff, but mostly, we just sat around waiting for the show to start. Maples and Faisal spent a lot of time with some of the young men and women who were waiting to present their vision to the USAid Executive Director. Soon, the delegation from USAid arrived and took a short tour of the center, in the middle of the tour, Berat took some time to introduce the Baseball camp to them...and then graciously introduced me. The delegation was surprised and excited to hear that there were some baseball opportunities. We spoke for a short while and it turns out that the Executive Director used to oversee the Denton Prog...

Today we headed in to Pristina, the capital city of Kosova, for a couple of reasons. Primarily, we planned to visit Prishtina High School. This will be Justin's school, so we were very interested in checking it out and making sure that he takes the correct classes next year while we're in the states. It's a very interesting campus, newly constructed with an addition currently in progress. It is a  pretty amazing story of provision...with the hope of investing in the future of the nations, a Kosovar building company essentially offered to provide the building for the school as long as a group of missionaries would take over the operation of the school itself. We are hopeful that it will be a quality option for Justin's education and we are thankful that it exists. It was a rainy day for most of the day which made the roads quite interesting to say the least...and it also meant that we seemed to take very pictures...except for the ride home later in the day. The coole...

Today was a great reminder of how awesome a game baseball is...and how we serve an Awesome God that will use this game to be glorified in Kosovo. Everywhere we went today we had the opportunity to share the vision of the Kosovo Baseball Initiative and give out gloves, play catch, and talk about Jesus. A dream of a day, really. We started the day out by visiting the Smiles International center...this is where out team will stay in June. This amazing location is a hostel/conference center that houses up to 45 people. It has 15 rooms, 19 bathrooms, a huge kitchen, dining room facilities, a library, and classroom space. After talking for a while, we took a couple of the staff members outside to have a catch. It was a beautiful day today and seeing these grown men's smiles as they played catch made the day that much better. From there we headed to the school where we will be hosting the camp. Our friend Anton met us at the school and served as a transl...

We all fell asleep fairly early last night and since the church service we were attending didn't start until 11:00 we had a nice lazy morning just laying around. It was quite nice.  The owners of the house we are staying in (and pastors of another local church) invited us over to their side of the home for coffee and to meet a group visiting from the Netherlands. We had a great time hearing about their long time involvement in the Balkans and we were able to share what God is doing through baseball. Church was great....it was in an upper room and we worshiped alongside about 30 others. It was exciting to hear and see the worship in the albanian language. This will be our future; it's exciting and scary at the same time. We were surprised that there was English translation...we expected to not be able to understand a thing. So this was a positive development. The worship leader is an American from Buena Park and Pastor Jeton is a local guy with twins who were just...

  It was a really interesting feeling flying into Kosovo for our second visit. The first time we had no clue what we were going to see or experience. We were hopeful that God would use us for something, but other than that, really didn’t know what was going to happen.  This time is different. It’s only been 9 months since the first visit and a lot has changed. First off, we have a clear calling that Kosovo will eventually be our new home; we have a pretty good idea what God is using us to do in Kosovo. While we had some good direction and focus during the last trip, this visit just feels different. It feels more important, it feels more comfortable, it feels more…real. Last July we landed in the middle of the night and then packed into a bus for a ride across the tarmac to the tiny, cramped, and old terminal. Today we arrived at noon and walked down the spacious jetway into the arrivals hall in the new, spacious, and modern terminal. Basically, it was completely di...

Starting something new is a scary thing. Over the last 8 months, we have had some moments of panic as we anticipate all the changes ahead of us. We have many questions to answer; too many to list, too many to think about sometimes. But this last week has been a reminder that we as individuals need not fear these questions. Rather, we move forward with a desire to serve and Glorify God...and He will go before us and prepare a way. Some examples of the surety of this truth from the past weeks; While many of the details for the camp and the beginnings of the Kosovo Baseball Initiative have been coming together (also answers to prayer), our main question remains the logistics of all the gear and getting to Kosovo. - At the beginning of this week I had the opportunity to skype with the Director of Fellowship of Christian Athletes - Baseball...he told me that they already have a guy who has been working on a logistics plan for getting gear to ministries around the world; including us! God ha...