SLNI Retreat - Glorieta, New Mexico

We're having an excellent time in Glorieta! We've been here for about a week now. Last Tuesday afternoon we showed up for some family time. We spent the next few days till Thursday evening as a family just hanging out in Santa Fe, taking long naps, and going to the playground. It was some much needed downtime that we purposely scheduled into our furlough. In fact, we think it's the only time that we'll be alone for the next 3 months. On Thursday evening and Friday afternoon, some dear friends of ours who are church planting in Hawaii and Thailand came. We had a blast reconnecting and letting our kiddos play together. None of these people had met our children before even though they are such close friends. It was a joyous reunion.

Then on Saturday, the entourage of people arrived for the SLNI Retreat. This is a retreat that our organization does for us every 2-3 years with the purpose of encouragement and rejuvenating the church planters for continued work in their respective places. They're amazing! Seriously, the pour out love, gifts, finances, fun, laughing, revelation, counseling, strategy...anything and everything they can give us, they do. We feel so privileged because most church planters don't have this type of support. Our kids have been super loved as well. They set up these awesome rooms for them and now Lizzie and Bekah run into that room (knowing good and well that we will not stay with them) and they feel100% safe and they have a blast! We're so thankful for that.

We've been talking about beauty and how God is the author of all beauty...in fact, He is beauty. From Him, we see what true beauty is. As His Kingdom comes and when He restores all things to the way they ought to be, we will finally see beauty as it was meant to be. Right now, in these days, we see glimpses of beauty. One simple way that I saw beauty this week (although there have been many) was when my good friend and I, Brent Pennington (whom I had not seem for 3 years), went on a mountain bike ride up a trail here in the mountains outside Santa Fe. As we started up the hill, it started raining a bit. We needed to stop and head back but before we did, we sat on a couple of logs (resting our old bones) and talked about what God is up to around us. The rain continued to fall and the sound was seriously beautiful in the quiet forest. Then we headed down the mountain the rain began to really fall. It was serious fun...and it was serious beauty. Our hearts all long for things that are beautiful...and this I believe is a call in our hearts for our God...who is beauty.

We'll hopefully be able to post some pictures soon. Talk to you all soon!

It's TOOOO hot!!

For all you Texans who have become accustomed to these blistering hot days, I have news for you...it's just not normal! It's (as the Texans say) dad-gum hot here! Today when we got back into the car after church, I put Lizzie in the car. She then proceeded to scream and cry declaring, "IT'S TOO HOT!!!" Over and over she yelled wondering why I would put her into such a furnace of a car. She just wasn't used to it. It made us laugh, but also made us sad. She didn't know about the "hope" of air conditioning...and that it would cool down in just a few minutes. It also made us laugh because she has just learned how to say that something is "too" whatever...so she says it like a foreigner learning English. Anyway, we often find that we have a clearer picture into human nature through our children. It's obvious to see how selfish we are, how we hate to share our things, how when we're sad or don't get our way we'd really just like to yell and roll on the floor. These things come very natural to us as humans and we see a picture of this in our children. I think in the same way, we see through Lizzie's observations that it is "too hot" in Texas. :-)

Stay cool this summer wherever you are!

We made it

It wasn't all that fun, but we made it. And now that we're here, we're very glad. The 19 hour travels on Friday from Croatia to America were a bit rough on the girls, but there was also a surprising amount of peace on the girls. I give credit to Jesus for that. Thanks for your prayers. We are enjoying ourselves and the girls are loving being with their Mimi and Pa (Laura's parents). We'll have a chance to see my family as well later in July.

Just wanted you all to know that we arrived. Blessings!

Roof repair and new prayer room

Here's a couple pictures of the finished (ok...there's a few little details that still need to be done) prayer room at the Massey's house. Behind their house they have a little house that was unfinished when they moved in. Long story short, they felt like God had set this room aside as a prayer room. Temporarily this is where the church will meet too. We are desperate to get space in the city, but this will do for now. Anyway, we're very excited about our prayer room and can't wait to put into use!



The next few pictures below are of the elderly woman we helped through Love in Action, International...the humanitarian aid organization we work with part time. This woman's roof was still severely damaged from the war and because of her ethnicity Croatia was letting red tape stop her from receiving a new roof. (This is a common story for Serbians living in Croatia. We work with many of them in these villages where we distribute aid.) When it rained, water would leak into the one little room where she lives. We found a Christian contractor out near her village and hired him to do the work. He did an excellent job and we are very pleased that God let us help this woman out a little. Due to finances we were only able to repair her roof over the room where she lives, but this will suffice for now and stop the water from flowing in when it rains.

Below: This is the before picture.

Above: This is near the end of the project. Unfortunately I couldn't stay till the end to see the final product, but my co-workers will be going out next week to see how it looks. I'm sure I'll get pictures from them.

European Championship

It's soccer-mania around here lately. Croatian flags hanging from apartment windows, attached to cars, people wearing the typical Croatian red and white checkered soccer jerseys all around town...it's total mania around here! It's sort of a fun atmosphere. One Croatian explained it to me saying that in the 90's they had the war that gathered Croatians and made them root together as one nation...now they have soccer. Soccer is life around here. Everyone plays. Everyone watches. When Croatia scores a goal, firecrackers and gun shots are heard around the city...horns are honking, people are shouting. Someone also told me a pretty shocking statistic...they estimate that approximately 50% of Croatians during the European Championship this month have either taken sick leave from their jobs, taken their vacation time, or have quit their jobs. That's some soccer passion! (Direct that passion at Jesus, and you got yourself a pretty freakin' radical group of people!)

On Sunday Croatia won 1-0 verses Austria and tonight (Thursday) they'll play Germany. Go Croatia!

Who reads this?

This is not a needy question. I'm just curious if I've done a good job "advertising" that we have a blog and use it pretty regularly. I wanted to see if you who read this wouldn't mind shooting me an email and letting me know that you read it. (You could also throw in a comment about my amazing writing skills if you like.) :-) Just kidding.

Shoot me an email at james@albrightcrew.com or albrights@sharelifenow.net.

Thanks!

Camp, getting ready, etc.

I haven't blogged in forever because it's been real busy. That's good in some ways, but we feel like we have to weed out some less important things in order to find the most important things. We're preparing right now to leave for America. We'll be there 3 months. This is a good thing for the church here...even though it can be overwhelming for them also. It's good for the church to see that they can function without us. Regardless, we are trying to prepare the necessary people to take over different aspects of our ministry here. This along with preparing ourselves, our home, making plans while in the States, etc. is taking up lots of our time.

We also had our camp last weekend up in the mountains of Croatia about an hour away. The majority of the church went and we had a speaker from Karlovac (nearby the camp) come. She and her husband are the leaders of the prayer movement here in Croatia...so we talked about prayer and worship. It was good retreat. I wouldn't call it our best, but it was needed and useful. We really believe it was exactly what God wanted to do with the time. Here's a couple of pics below with captions explaining what's happening.

This is the about half of my worship team. There's 2 key people missing...my other guitar player (Ivan) and one of my main singers (Maja). From left to right in the picture are: Nerka, Juliana, James, and Damir.

Group pic!

This is Helena with some of our kids. Helena goes to a local church in Zagreb. We hired her to come work with our preschool kids. The group of kids here are a mix of preschool and school aged. From left to right: Addie, Bekah (our little girl), Andrej, Mihaela, Cameron, Ivor, Ian, and Helena.

This is Maja (who is the regular babysitter for our kids) working with the school aged kids...and Lizzie. Lizzie just happened to pop in on that picture. Maja did great with the kids and the kids loved her as well.