Adventures of a City Boy Turned Country Pastor

The new visitor said: You know the little bridge on the Stockholm Road, just past the turn-off to Stottler’s house? Our laneway is the first left after that bridge. Those were about the clearest instructions I’d ever heard since coming to northern Maine where a good number of roads are un-marked or have multiple names, and if there is a nickname for the road, no one uses the road’s real name. But these instructions were crystal clear. I’d have no trouble making a follow up visit at the home of these new visitors to our church.

So on a cold bright Wednesday winter morning I headed off to do my pastoral duty. Stockholm Road. Over the little bridge. First left. Not strange at all that I couldn’t see the house from the road. Newcomers to northern Maine loved these little run-down houses hidden back in the woods. The running joke was that newcomers to the Maine Woods were probably either actual outlaws or in the witness protection program. So I pulled into the first laneway on the left after the bridge. Then my thought process went something like: “This is a pretty laneway! They haven’t plowed in a while. This isn’t a road!” And I sank up to my axels about 50 feet down a snowmobile trail.

I temporarily gave up on finding the hidden home of our new visitors. I hiked to a house of a guy I knew who had a pickup truck and a long cable, and it ended up taking two pickup trucks choo-choo trained together to tug my car off the snowmobile trail. And since it was Wednesday, and this was a country Baptist church, of course I gathered that evening with the faithful of First Baptist Church of New Sweden. And of course there was no hiding what I had done that morning. If anyone knew, everyone would end up knowing. So I shared the story at Wednesday prayer meeting. And a good time was had by all.