Wednesday, June 22, 2011

I woke a bit tired Wednesday. Nicky and Stef were leaving, and so I cleaned up quick, and we all met in the office to go grab a quick breakfast before the guys departed. I had an interesting dream about working on a home with a failing roof. I had to leave for something else, and we never actually fixed the roof. Could just be thoughts/anxieties. After breakfast, we said goodbye to the guys and sent them off. Marino and Stole also had to run some errands, and so I had the office to myself for maybe two hours. I spend the time reading and singing and starting to pray when Stole returned. My brother had sent me an interesting e-mail that night/morning, and so I shared it with Stole and we then prayed for awhile. Marino joined us near the end, and then we had a good long discussion about ministry in Macedonia, a short history of the Bible League under Stole’s leadership, the growth of the Evangelical Church in Macedonia, and the legal structure of business development in Macedonia. From all that I’ve gathered, the framework for entrepreneurship is nearly nonexistent – if you want to do things legally and/or you don’t have strong connections with government officials. But, you should take those observations with a grain of salt, because I see small businesses all over the place. What I’ve heard, though, is that those businesses only permit someone to survive. There’s a gathering of Christian business persons in Skopje, but I have yet to be able to meet them. When I return in two weeks, I’ll see if I can get together with them (if they have a meeting) – it will be tricky being that I’ll only be back for half a day. We had a short break after a couple of hours, and then we continued for a bit before breaking again for lunch. For lunch we returned to the café outside of that hotel holding the interfaith conference. During lunch Stole told me about his childhood and testimony. Then, Rev. Jonatan Vlaisavljevic (the executive director of Teen Challenge Europe in Macedonia) joined us and shared with me about their ministry in Macedonia and relationship with the government. Instead of heading back to the office after lunch, we went to another session about Muslims and Christians and what they agree on and what they disagree about. From there we went back to another nearby café and had some coffee and soft drinks. One of the guys’ eastern orthodox friends joined us. From what the guys told me, he’s very much evangelical in his theology but he likes the comforts the EOC has to offer him. From there, they dropped me off at the BL office and I called it a night. I had to do some writing I wanted to get finished and some singing also. I called my brother and Pr. Bob on Skype while uploading some videos to YouTube. Then I packed a bit a went to bed.