Winslow

July 30

It’s Bethany’s birthday today. I’ve been thinking about her all day and hoping she’s having a good birthday. She’s 7 today! I wanted to call her but haven’t found phone card opportunities yet so I’ve given up. I managed to borrow some expensive internet time and sent her a quick email. Speaking of internet…I’m annoyed! This hotel we’re staying in here does not have free wireless access. All other hotels, even Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey and itty bitty wine country town in France have free wireless internet. But in Britain you have to pay an arm and a leg for it. $12 for an hour!! So I’m just going to have to do without for a while. It’s good that I can still keep journaling here on this computer and then post it later.

Today in some ways was a little harder than yesterday’s airport extravaganza. I’m tired of sitting on a bus and today we spent 2 hours getting to the village we were visiting and then of course 2 hours back. So I was antsy and bored, despite the beautiful countryside. I decided earlier that it would be nice to get a cool, old apartment in Strasbourg and now also a nice old English country cottage maybe with a thatched roof. Lilian thought it would be great to have a place in all corners of the world and take turns visiting them. I concur!


We were in Winslow. The congregation there welcomed us very warmly with tea and biscuits. It was so nice and hospitable and English. Some of the ladies stayed and participated in our lecture/program time. I thought that was so great. The church had beautiful needleworked kneelers that were a big hit and brought warmth and added colour to the place. People in the town were generally nice anyway. They chatted with us in the streets. One man took Woldy on a little tour. The highlight was the visit to Benjamin Keach’s chapel. It looked like a chapel you might find in a North American pioneer village which is unusual to still have in England. Keach was a dissenter of the church in the 1600s and a champion of simple, puritan, spiritual worship. I imagine it was mainly the dissenters, the religiously persecuted, who would have immigrated to the New World. Keach brought back the singing of congregational hymns into worship. The hymn writer Isaac Watts was also of this Baptist background and we sang his hymn “When I survey this wondrous cross” in that little chapel. It was very moving.