Revealed in Fire and Clouds: Divine Encounters in Restelicë

Ignite Your Faith and Witness Extraordinary Power

I want to share testimonies to help grow people’s faith, and for people to understand that these things are possible if we would just believe. So, here is my Testimony of what The Lord did in a small mountain town called Restelicë.

I’m gonna talk about the Pillars of Fire and Cloud that The Lord led His people out with, about Him leading them through the Red Sea, and then the clouds and smoke (from the fire of The Lord) resting on Mount Sinai. I will first write a couple sets of verses then speak about them. 

Exodus 15:11-22

11 Then they said to Moses, “Because there were no graves in Egypt, have you taken us away to die in the wilderness? Why have you so dealt with us, to bring us up out of Egypt? 12 Is this not the word that we told you in Egypt, saying, ‘Let us alone that we may serve the Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than that we should die in the wilderness.” 13 And Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid. Stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord, which He will accomplish for you today. For the Egyptians whom you see today, you shall see again no more forever. 14 The Lord will fight for you, and you shall hold your peace.” 15 And the Lord said to Moses, “Why do you cry to Me? Tell the children of Israel to go forward. 16 But lift up your rod, and stretch out your hand over the sea and divide it. And the children of Israel shall go on dry ground through the midst of the sea. 17 And I indeed will harden the hearts of the Egyptians, and they shall follow them. So I will gain honor over Pharaoh and over all his army, his chariots, and his horsemen. 18 Then the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord, when I have gained honor for Myself over Pharaoh, his chariots, and his horsemen.” 19 And the Angel of God, who went before the camp of Israel, moved and went behind them; and the pillar of cloud went from before them and stood behind them. 20 So it came between the camp of the Egyptians and the camp of Israel. Thus it was a cloud and darkness to the one, and it gave light by night to the other, so that the one did not come near the other all that night. 21 Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea into dry land, and the waters were divided. 22 So the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea on the dry ground, and the waters were a wall to them on their right hand and on their left. 

Exodus 13:21-22 “And The Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, so as to go by day and night. 22 He did not take away the pillar of cloud by day or the pillar of fire by night from before the people.”

Exodus 19:16-18 “Then it came to pass on the third day, in the morning, that there were thunderings and lightnings and a thick cloud on the mountain; and the sound of the trumpet was very loud, so that all the people who were in the camp trembled. 17 And Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet with God, and they stood at the foot of the mountain. 18 Now Mount Sinai was completely in smoke, because The Lord descended up it in fire. Its smoke ascended like the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mountain quaked greatly.” 

So starting with our story of Kosovo. It was a mighty wild ride. We took a bus from Sarande, Albania to Tirana, Albania then from Tirana, Albania to Prizren, Kosovo. We spent 2 nights in Prizren trying to figure out how to get from Prizren to Restelicë, Kosovo. So, Restelicë is the farthest south you can get in Kosovo without going to North Macedonia. It is in the middle of nowhere with a population of 4,698 people. We were asking people in Prizren how to get there. Every person we talked to about it said,” Why would you go there?”, “No, don’t go there. Go up north instead.” Despite all the warnings we went. We didn’t have a hotel, barely had transportation to a nearby bigger town, and no one who spoke the language. I would say that this is where we felt a lot like the Israelites. We felt like we were up against a wall (the sea) with many problems (the Egyptians) chasing us. When I look back on it I can see The Lord doing the same thing over again just as He did for the Israelites, by going along with us. Just like when He went in between the Israelites, and the Egyptians, He had a plan for us the whole time. 

So, at this point in the story we made it to a little town called Dragash, which was the biggest town closest to Restelicë that any bus would take us. From here we just kept saying “Restelicë?” “Restelicë?”. First to the bus driver, and then to our taxi driver. He became our way in and out of Restelicë. The Lord provided our way with the bus and then directly after a taxi driver. One down 2 more problems to go. We then didn’t have a place to stay, and to make it harder we didn’t have an easy way to translate since we had no service. We had the poor Albanian translation that google put out saying, “Do you know anywhere to stay?” Our taxi driver rolled down his window, and asked a local in their local language (that we later found out was really a plethora of languages all mixed in one) if he knew a place to stay. This guy, I presume, said something along the lines of “I can find them one, let’s go to my cafe up the hill.” So, this stranger jumped in the van with us squished in the middle with our team. 

We made it up to Cafe Bardhi, which ended up being our “safe” place that would provide us with our only hot food we got in this town. He offered us a drink of tea, coffee, or a coke. Now Restelicë is a 100% muslim city with people, who have never met an American, and have never met a Christian. So, naturally every man in town had to come by the Cafe to see the First Americans they had seen. In this town men went out to work, and have coffee, while the women stayed home to prepare food, and the house. The women were only seen going to the store or stacking wood outside in preparation for winter. It spread through the town that the Americans needed a place to stay, and one sweet family said that they had an upper set of 2 rooms, a bathroom, an attic, and a very small balcony that we could have. We also had one mini fridge, but no way to cook any food. This was a blessing considering otherwise we would’ve had to bust out our tent on the side of this mountain. Problem 2 down now for our last and toughest challenge: the language barrier.

There was one child, who spoke very broken english. He was the “savior” of the town because he could help communicate with us Americans. Of course this kid had work, both school and working with his family so we didn’t get to speak to him very much. So, back to square one with the language barrier. While sitting in team time we spoke about what we felt that The Lord was calling us to in this small town. We all thought to pray for them to have dreams and visions of Jesus.

A tidbit about Islamic culture, they have 5 prayer calls throughout the day. The first is to thank allah for waking them with the last being to thank him for the day, and asking for a good night’s rest. They have prayer calls for each of these 5 prayer times. We thought of praying for them from their last prayer call to the first prayer call. We began each night with an hour of worship/teaching, then an hour of group prayer, and finally we began what we called our “Prayer Vigilante Life”. I had always called it prayer vigils so we wanted to have a bit of fun, since like vigilantes we were working in the night we were just praying for people instead. This consisted of  each of us having 1-2 hour slots to pray for them to have dreams and visions of Jesus (which is a large reason muslims convert to Christianity.) I always think of Paul on the road to Damascus. 

So, now you’re caught up to the point of the second 2 sets of scriptures.

In these verses it is talking about Shekinah Glory. This is the indwelling of The Lord. The Lord’s Physical Presence leading the Israelites, and The Lord’s Presence on the mountain. So, our first night after our worship, and prayer as a team our first teammate started her prayer shift. She looked outside of our house, which was maybe 150-200 feet from a mosque (which typically has a huge bright light on the top), and we couldn’t see the light coming from the mosque because there was such a thick fog over the city. We admired it and thought it was amazing. 

Well later on, on the start of our second and last week here in Restelicë we came back from Dragash and on our way back to town we saw a fire on the nearby mountain. I texted some pictures to my mom and asked her to pray for us just to be safe. Well by the time we started praying that evening the fire had been put out, but the wild thing was the next morning when we looked across and the mountain that was on fire had not a single sign that a fire had ever been there. 

I hadn’t thought about this until I got back home and spoke with my dad about the crazy things we saw. He proceeded to remind me about Shekinah Glory and how the Lord would physically dwell in a place in the old testament. It brings me to tears thinking that the Lord’s presence was there in this small village, where we may never go back, that He came when we asked Him to cover this village. 

This story didn’t finish until I got to Armenia, and spoke with my great Persian/Armenian friend Teddy, and he confirmed to us that muslims worldwide, even in Iran, were having dreams and visions of Jesus and that they would go on to live radical lives for Jesus. 

My prayer is that The Lord’s presence would continually rest on people worldwide, and that He would give people Dreams and Visions of Himself so that they may know that Jesus is the King of all kings, and Lord of all Lords.

If you would like to pray for the country of Kosovo you can go to my Pray for the nation Kosovo post here and write your prayer for the people in Kosovo!