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Dear Everybody At Home In The USA,
This was my first day in my little village of Gunnarn, in northern Sweden. Arrive, I did - last evening, after the two day trip from the sunshine and warmth of Florida. That 6 hour wait to catch the last flight covering the final 400 miles from Stockholm to here was the worst. I arrived last evening but was awakened to the tune of "Itsy Bitsy Spider Crawling" somewhere. It was unknown to me at the time where they were crawling because they were doing that in Swedish. Where were they singing all this, you ask? In the basement of this wonderful church in which I reside as guest. There were 8 mothers with their babies crawling on a blanket and sharing, with pride, the social graces their toddlers express far earlier that the normally expectation for ordinary children. The coffee they served afterwards was just what I needed. No one can claim to be sleepy after a cup of real Swedish coffee.
I go to school tomorrow to learn to speak Swedish. My Bible teaching time won't start for another week. I am anxious to start back into the Bible study material I had prepared. Being here again is just where I should be. I don't do all things perfectly - but I do things, and that is important. Then God takes over and translates it into something useful.
Pray for me here in northern Sweden. The temperature was about 22 last night and it snowed quite heavily all yesterday. Summer is just around the corner. Now it is the next day – Friday – and it is still snowing. Just those heavy, soft, floating flakes that make for deep snow. And I have to start back to school today. At least I can tell my children that I had to go 28 kilometers in the snow to get my Swedish education.
Steve in the Northland Bookstore gave me a very nice, hardly used, compact Bible left at church sometime. Well, I struck up a conversation with one of those Security Inspectors as I got x-rayed for dangerous baggage. You know the ones. Turns out that he is a fellow Christian and so he received that Bible. He was happy with the gift and thanks someone out there who left their Bible behind in an attempt to get to the restaurant ahead of the crowd.
Love in Christ,
George