We're off to Finland today and an air of sadness to leave this time. The four of us traveling today will split up: Katherine and Kassy go back to Indianapolis, Bev and I continue on to Finland. We look with anticipation to our meeting the Doh family who are refugees from Thailand taken in by the Finnish government. They live at the Arctic Circle, quite a contrast from the jungle-like environment near Mae Sot, Thailand. We looked on the Internet for weather at the Arctic Circle. The high in Kemi, Finland will be 62 degrees F which is almost a 25 degree difference from where we are at in Tartu. I hope that we have no environment issue with the baptism tonight.

As we exit the elevator at the Pallas Hotell, we are surprised by Andrus Rips waiting for us . I really appreciated him coming to see us off. He just wanted to talk a little more and I really enjoyed his company. He seems to be very excited to be part of our fellowship and wants as much contact as possible. Yesterday he spent the day working on his dacha in the country and the talk is about the intense heat here in Estonia which is so unusual. Normally the temperature in the summer barely passes the 75 degree mark and yesterday it was almost 90 degrees.

We all walk together to the bus station where we also see Imbi. She is taking a bus also at 8 am towards Viru where she is working today.

Last night I called another interested person in Tallinn by the name of Peter Schubbe. He has gotten many people on to our Bible Study Course up in Tallinn. I had never spoken to him before but found him engaging and enthusiastic.

We are planning to have the Feast of Tabernacles in Estonia open to outside the country transfers in 2007. I spoke to our hotel director Iris Allorg about this and we going to start planning and preparing for an exciting Feast that we hope to hold partly in Tartu and partly on the island of Saaraama.

We took the two hour 15 minute bus trip to Tallinn and got off at the airport. All four of us checked in. We got on board our small prop ATR and took the 20 minute flight to Helsinki where I'm writing this while we wait for our flight to Kemi .

This trip has been so helpful to consolidate a number of hanging issues with printing, the brethren here in the Baltics and happily seeing further development in the preaching of gospel. We are hopeful that all systems are on track and that we will see good fruits soon.

One more things about my meeting with the Pihlac's at the radio station. Yesterday the director of Pereeraadio Paavo Pihlac told me that Estonia is sinking further into secularism and religion becoming irrelevant. Ten years ago the government sponsored some public air time for religion, but has since withdrawn its support for religion because of disinterest from the people. Freedom of religion has not been taken away, but in Estonia which was part of the godless Soviet Union, it is now become part of a very secular European Union. He spoke with trepidation about the effect of this union that promises some benefits, but in other ways Estonia is becoming chained to something that it may not fully understand. We talked about the various scenarios of Europe uniting to counter the rising power of China in the East. I didn't realize that this was a viable issue, yet, there is growing concern about China's new economic and ideological impact reaching into Europe.

One of the programs on Pereraadio is by our friend Laurie Beekman whom LifeNets supports in producing an anti alcohol abuse newspaper for youth. You can see what we have been doing for the past few years at www.lifenets.org/ok or clicking here. The name of the newspaper is OK, a clever acronym for "Ole Kaine" which means "Be Sober" in Estonian. Laurie is a Seventh Day Adventist and has helped UCG translation on occasion.