The Heat Is On!

This past week has been hot, hot, hot. Every time I'm outside, I remember how cold it is in the winter and count my blessings. We went on a picnic with people from church on Thursday. We didn't realize that it was a "swimming event", so we didn't have our suits with us, but we brought a frisbee and waded in the river with our brothers and sisters. Our friends Vitya and Sveta have a van and took two loads of us to the river. We got to be in the second load, which meant that we got to meet and hold their new baby, Maria, while we waited.

We also had Leif's teacher, Alexandra, and her granddaugther, Olya, over for dinner this week. Irene met Olya at English camp, and they were able to converse, which was nice. I really like Alexandra. She is such a warm person and she likes to talk about interesting things and is very interested in Christianity.

Leif and I practiced a song in Russian to sing at church today, and Leif spend much of the week preparing for a sermon he was asked to give. When we got there, there were two people already scheduled to give sermons already... so Leif suggested that he could give his another week. It takes so long to prepare a message in Russian, that it makes sense for him to give it when he's really needed. And it's probably good because it was soooo hot in church today. We were all sweating. The leader of the service today forgot about our song, too, so we'll do it next week. Living here helps us to be more flexible! And our time preparing and studying was not in vain. God has reasons we don't even know!