Daily devotions

Sunday

Early Sunday morning in Riga, November 11

Weekly review from my point of view

Another Sunday morning. The coming week we will be visited by our successor as leader for the Salvation Army in Latvia. This will be her first vissit to Latvia, and I start to realize that our Sunday mornings in Riga will soon come to an end. From the 1st of January Christine Bailey will be the Regional Commander and we pray for every blessing on her life and ministry in Latvia.

Last Sunday we visited Borås in Sweden. The reason for the visit was the baptism of our newest granddaughgter in the lutheran church in the village of Kinna in the southern part of Sweden. That was the second time we met young Maja Baronowsky. The first time was in July this year when Maja was one day old in their family residence at Jelöy Folk High School in Norway. Maja did very well in the church.
The priest is praying for Maja assisted by Maja´s older sister
Maja and her grandmother
When the priest held his speach he spoke about the children baptism as a reservation for a place in heaven. I do not feel comfortable with explaining the baptism that way. I think there are reasons to believe that your life and your life choices counts when it comes to where you are going to spend eternity. I also think that there are reasons to believe that whoever qualifies for a place in heaven is not depending on who your parents are and if they took you to a baptism ceremony or not. Finally I think there are reasons to believe that if you choose not to live your life together with Jesus here on earth, why should you be forced to spend an eternity with him?

But, in the end of the day, it is of course not me deciding who will spend the eternity in heaven and who is not, and the service in the church had many good parts. For example the promise from the parents to pray for their child and to guide it as good as possible through life. May God bless Maja and all other children who are just about to start their exciting journey through life.

During the week we have also had a number of meetings in Stockholm. Among other meetings we have met the board for the Baltic Children Foundation and the Salvation Army Latvian Council.

During our visit to Stockholm Rut and me went for lunch in a shopping center. I went to the cashier to order our lunch and after I had paid the man turned around and shouted "Two pastas for the elderly man over here." I turned around to see if I could see any elderly men around me, but finally I understood that he was speaking about me. I must be much older on the outside than on the inside of me.
Another exciting event this week. Rut´s daily devotional book "Simple Musings for Simple Living" has been sent for printing. Sven Ljungholm has for a longer period daily translated the devotions and we have published them on the English pages of rupeba.se. Our son Stefan, has finalized the manuscript and sent it for printing. We hope to have the book ready in good time before Christmas. Ten percent of the income for each book will go to the Salvation Army work in Latvia.

Next year we plan to publish the book also in Norwegian. Marianne Spor, one of our former students at Jelöy Folk High School, has translated the book into Norwegian.

Friday evening the Becketts took us out for dinner to celebrate a birthday. In the resaurant in the old town of Riga I heard that the company next table spoke Norwegian in a special dialect which I could recognize. I turned around to the company and said: "We do not often hear that good Norwegian spoken in Riga these days. Are you from Kristiansund?" My guess was right. They came from Kristiansund. And when we told them that we belonged to The Salvation Army, one of the three ladies commented that the new corps leaders in that town were very nice people. We could confirm that, since we were in Kristiansund the other weekend for a Bible Retreat and then we met the corps leaders, Bodil and Helge. Soon we found out that they all three knew one of our former students at Jelöy Folk High School, "Lille". Her real name is Jeanette and she is a soldier at the corps. One of the ladies told us that she used to go the the baby-song-meetings at the Salvation Army conducted by Lille. We asked them to forward our greetings to Bodil, Helge and Lille when they are coming back to Kristiansund. You can read about our visit in Kristinasund HERE.

By the way, during our visit to Kristiansund, Lille told us that her eighteen year old daughter planned to go to Jelöy Folk High School next summer. The same school that Lille herself went to 1988. When she comes to Jelöy she will meet our son Daniel who is a teacher at the school. The same school where Rut and I were teachers 25 years ago. Daniel was eleven years old when Lille went to that school. In Sweden we sing a song saying "Generations follow generations" and that should be a suitable quote for this paragraph.

Yesterday, Saturday, we had a regional gathering for Women´s ministries in Riga. More than 80 people from all over Latvia attended the meetings.

Now it is Sunday morning and soon time to go down the stairs to the Sunday meeting in Riga first corps. And then, a new week.

I pray that it will be a blessed week for you.
Peter Baronowsky

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