On Monday morning,
October 1st, we began the day having breakfast with Damir (Sicko) and
Marija Alic, who are the pastors of Rijec Zivota (Word of Life) in
Zagreb, the main church of their network of 16 churches in
Croatia. We were blessed in attending the previous evening
their church service and worshipping with hundreds of believers. Of course, for
us, it was another trip down memory lane and a further reminder of God’s plan to
equip Bosnian believers in the harvest.
We came to know
Sicko (who was from a Muslim family) around 1987-88, when he was pioneering a
church in the coastal city of Dubrovnik,
Croatia. During his trips to Srebrenica,
Bosnia, to visit his family, he would stay at times with us in
Sarajevo, and we would likewise visit him in
Dubrovnik. On one such trip, while he was visiting
Sarajevo, we introduced him to a beautiful girl from
Sarajevo, Bosnia and they eventually married.
After a few years in Dubrovnik, Sicko and Marija moved to
Sarajevo to work with us right before the 1992-95 civil war
broke out, during which they were able to escape and resettle in
Zagreb. Today they have a lovely family, and are leading one of
the strongest ministries in the entire Balkan region.
We finally made
our entry into Bosnia by taking a four-hour bus ride from
Zagreb to Banja Luka, which is the main city
for the Bosnian Serbs located in the NW corner of Bosnia.
Although it may be the same sun shining down on both the Croatian and the
Bosnian sides of the border, there is a distinct atmosphere present in the
mountains and valleys of Bosnia. It is a land that travails,
that struggles, searching out for its own identity as an orphan among the
nations.
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