My social life has returned. It took a bit of a dive this month for various reasons, including the fact that most of my friends here seem to live the other side of town, so it's hard to meet up.

I went out on Friday night to a party, where I knew about 2 people, both of whom I'd come with! It was nice to be out, though, and I'm either getting into or just better at going to parties and places where I know no-one. Partly out of necessity, I'm beginning to see it as a good way to meet new people. Fortunately, it's quite an easy thing to do when you're an international, 'cos small talk is a cinch- name, where do you come from, what are you studying, why do you speak Swedish, what do you think of Sweden... I'm just starting to get bored of giving the same answers, though, but that's good 'cos I'm learning new words all the time so I can express those same answers in new, creative ways.

On Saturday night, I decided to invite Melvin (who I met at Heathrow on the way here) out to another party. We met at mine and sat around for a couple of hours talking and having some beer. Before he came over I thought I should ask him about his religious background so in a lull in the conversation I dropped it in. Turns out he's been brought up as a Catholic and still goes about once a month. I encouraged him to come along to Credo (the uni Christian union) and he was quite hesitant about it, but I'm going to persevere and see what becomes of it- I maintain there was a reason why we met on the plane.

Having been here for a month now, I decided on Sunday that I'd see how well I could understand a church service in Swedish and I went along to the local Pentecostal church. It went pretty well, actually, which is a good sign, 'cos there's a whole load of new words you need to know like "pray", "worship", etc. that you don't tend to learn at university...

The weirdest thing happened half way through, though. Obviously all the songs they sang were in Swedish, and to be honest I wasn't expecting anything else. Then, halfway through the meeting the Church choir got up and started singing a song in English and I began to cry.

It wasn't particularly beautiful: they weren't in tune with each other, they looked half-bored, they pronounced the words phonetically and I suspect many of them didn't even know what they were specifically singing about, but it meant the world to me.

Of all the thousands of songs they could have sung in Swedish and probably tens of thousands they could have sung in English, they chose the song that has kept me going through the last month with everything that it entailed... "Jesus, there's just something about that name" it was as if God was singing back to me, reminding me of all the times I'd chosen to sing it and telling me He'd been there all the way through. In that way, it was wonderful.

Now I realise that it doesn't matter what I think or how faithful I've been: God didn't go away or cease to exist because I didn't know if He was there. He was just waiting for me to... actually, I don't know what He was waiting for or doing really, but I suspect that the last month fits into exactly the same plan that brought me here- how alarming that last month's confidence in His plan could slip away so quickly... sometimes I am a boat tossed by waves on the ocean.