Sweden put in a, well, Swedish performance in this World Cup. Never incompetent but never exciting. Their performance against England was as unremarkable as the Colombians' was eccentric.
I'm not sure what it is about Sweden that makes it so laid back - after all the Swedish winter presumably requires some determination to get through each year. But laid back they are. All the passion in our local IKEAs comes from the queuing customers from Britain.
When I visited Sweden some years back I did encounter some laid back elements in things spiritual. Yet there were exceptions, and one especially glorious one.
I went to a church that caters for people like me by running parts of the service in English. It included Believer's Baptism and the Pastor asked just one simple question of each candidate. It wasn't, in one sense, the most satisfyingly theological baptismal question, yet a strangely fundamental one,
"Will you follow Jesus all the days of your life, and not turn back?"
Was he young and naive? Hardly - he was a Doctor. In that man I glimpsed the kind of faith that changes churches, communities and countries. This bewildering, to the outsider, commitment to things not seen is commented on in Hebrews chapter 11;
How did they do it? They saw it way off in the distance, waved their greeting, and accepted the fact that they were transients in this world. People who live this way make it plain that they are looking for their true home. If they were homesick for the old country, they could have gone back any time they wanted. But they were after a far better country than that—heaven country. You can see why God is so proud of them, and has a City waiting for them.
Am I, I ask myself, a competent Christian or an of course Christian?
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