Off to Sweden

It has been a splendid sunny weekend in Brussels, I only couldn't spend a lot of time outdoors. Yesterday, we had a special Sabbath for the immigrant churches, i. e. all the churches that are not French- or Dutch-speaking. These are the Romanians, Hispanics, Lusophones (Portuguese-speaking), French-Africans, and our International Church. They do this every year, so that the non-Belgian church members can get in touch with each other. I don't know what our church in Belgium would do without these congregations. The membership here is already quite meager, but without the immigrants, the church would almost die out I guess.

This afternoon, we had a church board meeting, which turned out to be quite long as usual. One of the points of the agenda was the issue of immodesty in dress, especially displayed by some young females. In fact, this is quite an issue at our church, and I somehow feel sorry for the brothers who are exposed to this every week. I suppose the problem is the ignorance of the young ladies about what they can trigger in them if they dress like this. But of course it's a sensitive issue to deal with. We agreed that the Pastor will give a talk on this subject, and I really hope that the Holy Spirit will convict them. My general observation ever since I'm sitting on this board is that we talk way too much about internal problems. But I guess this will be the case until Jesus comes back. After all, the first Christian churches were not without issues either, so there is nothing new under the sun.

I'm quite excited, as I will be traveling to Sweden at the end of this week. There is a self-supporting place there called Stenshult, and they are going to have a special weekend seminar with Pastor Hal Mayer from Hartland. I've been in touch with him for a while, as he is speaking a lot about current political events, and I've been providing him with information about the things going on here in Brussels. He has been wanting to meet me, but so far, I've never been able to attend one of his seminars in Europe. So I thought this is a good opportunity to finally meet him and also to get to know this place. I'll be staying there for five days. So far, I've never really been in Sweden, I only travelled through during my last trip to Scandinavia. In fact, I really ought to visit this country; after all it's the land of my forefathers. Yes, I'm Swedish in the seventh generation. It was sometime in the Eighteen Hundreds when a woman from Sweden came to an island in north-eastern Germany together with her illegitimate son. She worked as a cook for a Duke residing on this island, and her son was the great-grandfather of my paternal grandmother. Quite a story. I wish I had time to do some genealogical research while there!