About Us

About us -- We are Luke and Lydia Valenti, from Oregon and serving as missionaries in Southeast Albania. Luke has been serving here since 2009 and now leads a church plant in a village. Lydia spent the summer in 2013 living with an Albanian family and helping both at a day center for street kids and with the village ministry. She joined Luke for long-term missions after their wedding in 2014. Our focus is church planting and discipleship.

Why "Let's be glo-worms -- Shining the light of truth and God's love in the darkness -- "? Winston Churchill once said, "We are all worms, but I do believe that I am a glow worm." I (Lydia) enjoyed this phrase, and it struck me that as a Christian I need to remember that I was made (and born again) to reflect God's light in the world. I am just a person, but I do believe that God made me to glow for Him.

About the blog -- Blog posts prior to November 2013 are just from Lydia:
2013 - Albania
2012 - Romania
2010 - missions training in Hungary*

*Shameless plug for CCBCE -- If you are interested in Bible College or missions training or just want to seek God in a place where a lot of other people are seeking Him too (and you think it's neat to be in Europe), you should check out the school's website: www.ccbce.com.


The story of "us" -- People have asked us how we went from a 12 year friendship to married in less than a year while we had been living 6000 miles away from each other. Our answer is simple: God. It took us by surprise too. :-) We met and became friends in our teens, having no thought then that we might someday get married or even be missionaries. In our early 20's, God led us both (separately) toward missions in Eastern Europe. For Luke, that happened through a college missions trip to Albania and the way was clear -- he arrived here shortly after completing college. For Lydia the way was less obvious. God paved the way for her to serve at an orphanage in Romania for two months in 2008 and then to go through missions training in Hungary in 2010. Lydia thought God was leading her to serve in Romania, but every long term option there seemed to fall through. As the years went on and the ring finger stayed bare, both of us desired to be married and were struggling with the thought that missions might mean staying single for life. We both had to surrender our desires and selves to God -- though still chafing when we heard the Christian saying that "when you're running after God in the work He's given you to do, look around and see who is running with you, because that's the kind of person you want to marry." By the time your mid-twenties are in the rearview mirror, you start to wonder if anyone is running with you. But then the most remarkable thing happened - God brought us back into one another's lives and we realized that all along we had been running side by side. There is a lot more to this story, of course, because love isn't just about proximity. But God had the details all taken care of... it's like He knows stuff. :-)