Today, I need to bring you all up to date on the happenings of last week. Yesterday, Sunday, I traveled with my little, new car to a small village, to fill in for their regular pastor. I had this Sunday off from my own church in Gunnarn because, they had scheduled another event. I have arrived – I have gotten an assignment to fill in for another pastor in the area - down near Lycksele. The price was right – all the Swedish coffee I could drink. It seems I function on coffee, here – they keep the temperature in those buildings down a bit lower than in Florida and I need the hot coffee inside of me to keep me going.

That particular pastor for whom I was substituting, had contracted rat fever. I didn’t even know that rats had a fever, but he came down with it anyway. He was cleaning out an old barn and was not wearing a mask or gloves. And he is Swedish and he caught rat fever. I’ve only seen mice around here. What is a poor guy like me to do if even the mice turn against me? But, I have the solution – don’t clean anything, anywhere, and be safe. My mother used to say, cleanliness is next to godliness, but she didn’t have to put up with Swedish mice.

It has gotten to the point that now, every time I go down into the basement, I look behind me to make sure there are no mice following me. The bears in the area intimidate me enough and now I have to watch out for mice, too!

So, thank you for praying for a car for me to buy here. I now have a Toyota Corolla 1999 with heated front seats. That is alright with me because I have been sitting in the hot seat for years, now. It only has 45,000 miles on the speedometer. It had only two former owners. Great economy. It is red in color so that if I go off the road, they can see me under the snow.

The local elementary school in Gunnarn had a dinner for the town folks. It was held in order to raise money for their students to go on a trip. They get a great response from the parents of those kids because it gives them a chance to be away from them. Now consider me - I am studying in the State funded school set up to teach immigrant to speak Swedish. That makes me a school student, too. But I can’t find anyone around who wants to pay to send me out of town. The students are going to Gothenburg, way down in southern Sweden. They say, “you all”, down there, too, but you wouldn’t recognize it because they say it in Swedish.

God is good! He has given me everything I need to function here. It is a great place – I am amazed at the beauty of the sunrise. It rises later every morning, now. This morning it rose at 7:07 am and set this afternoon at exactly 4 pm. That means about 9 hours of daylight and 15 hours of night. Wait till December when the days will be really short. God bless you all.
In Christ,
George Wilson