July 25, 2006 - Page 2

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My summers in Albania have always been spent preparing for and attending our girls' camps, which are held at a monastery about an hour's drive from Tirana. My primary responsibilities have been to organize and direct the craft project and also to give talks as needed on the camp's theme.

This year, our craft project is making hemp bracelets and necklaces decorated with beads. We've just completed the junior high girls' camp, and so far the craft project has been a big hit. The girls loved making the bracelets and wearing them around camp or keeping them as gifts to give to others. I was so pleased by their enthusiasm and hope to have similar results in the second and third camps. I will be giving a talk on the camps' main theme, “Be not overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good,” a fantastic passage in Romans 12, and I would appreciate your prayers as I prepare over the next week for this.

We have a very tangible example at our camp of trying to overcome evil with good. At present, the “overcoming with good” has yet to be realized. Let me explain.

From the very first summer that our camps have been held at this monastery, we have had trouble with our water supply. In the beginning, the village in which the monastery is located complained that we were using too much water and depleting the supply for the local residents. All of this was very strange because before we started holding our camps at the monastery, our church did a project to provide the village with plenty of water. The project was successful and should have solved the water problems for the entire village. In our case, however, it didn't seem to work as we were continuing to run out of water and had to buy it from a neighbor.

Last week, during our first camp, we ran out of water again. Fault was placed on a group of workers who had mixed concrete using water from the monastery's reservoir and had spread it around a new bathroom that was being constructed outside the church. Simple math showed, however, that the amount of water needed to mix the concrete was minimal compared to the size of our two water tanks. The workers couldn't possibly have used up the water. For the first time in all my years at camp, Nathan, was with us this year. Knowing of his skills in plumbing and electricity (and math!), and being confident that there ought to be an adequate supply of water for us and the village, I begged him to get involved in solving this persistent problem. What he discovered, after insisting that the main water line near our pipe be dug up, was that the valve between the main water line and the 3-inch pipe that runs to the monastery's reservoir was almost completely closed. This meant that our tank was never able to get an adequate supply of water to fill. Someone had turned the valve almost closed and then had buried it so that no one would know of its existence. All the evidence pointed to an employee of the monastery, who is brother to the one whose water we have purchased each summer to make up for our shortage.

The sad thing about this case is that this man who closed the valve watched our girls suffer by having no water to bath in, and saw our kitchen piled with unwashed dishes and marred by a filthy floor. He saw all this and did nothing to relieve the suffering around him, knowing that he had the key (or rather, the valve) to relieve it—and all that to win a few dollars. The ironic thing is that, in the first place, the water he sold to us was a gift to him from the Church.

What do we do in this case? There is nothing to be gained by accusing this employee, as he would deny any guilt. There is nothing to be gained by firing him because there is no guarantee that the next employee would be any different. All we can do is open the valve and keep an eye on it until the camps are over. The monastery does not have any permanent residents. We need water only for the girls' camps, which run for about six weeks of the year. The rest of the year, anyone who chooses can close the valve, and it would not be a problem for us.

Regardless of what we do, we need to remember that God deeply loves this man whom we think guilty. Perhaps God will have more pity on him because he is poor and acts out of his poverty. May God help us also to have pity on him and any others that we feel have “wronged us” (or the Church, as in this case).

What does it mean to overcome evil with good? That is a question to be answered many times over as we face evil in this world. Evil has no scruples and we may get hurt in the process of trying to good. We cannot forget that Christ, who is the Good One, was killed for doing good. Of course, Christ's death was necessary because it was through this that evil was overcome. Nonetheless, evil rebelled against the good that it confronted in Jesus, and appeared to have “won” when it crucified the Lord. Thank God, it was otherwise.

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We are hoping to put our children in an English-speaking missionary kids' school this September. For some reason, the policy of the school is to charge non-Protestant missionaries at the diplomatic rate, which is 60% more than rates charged to Protestant missionaries. We are going to try to appeal to the board on this and would ask for your prayers. The school is a good one and we would be very pleased to have our children enrolled in it. I am not up for homeschooling the kids any more, so that isn't an option this year.

We continue to be very grateful for your prayers and support, which make our work in Albania possible. Things seem to be particularly challenging and discouraging right now, so we appreciate your prayers even more. God bless you.