Things That Amuse Me

This may just be my weird sense of humour, so you may want to scroll on by for this one...

I'm always on the look out for a sign that can be misinterpreted or has a spelling mistake in it, or something that's just a bit odd, so I was thrilled to come across this error notice on the screen of the ATM in a local shop.

Whilst we were waiting to be served Joel and I happily wasted a fun few minutes discussing what might be wrong with the ATM's throat and indeed where its throat might actually be. In the end we concluded this one was lost in translation.

Muni Ride

I managed my longest ever Muni ride this morning and am feeling great for it.

I've never previously been fit enough or strong enough to go far on it before, but thanks to all the boxing training riding 5kilometres on my Muni was far easier and more enjoyable than it's ever been

On the strength of this I'm looking forward to speeding up a bit and going further on future rides. 

Blessings

Recently one of the families we gave a food hamper to suffered a catastrophic house fire and lost everything.

So it was good to be able to respond as a church and bless the family with another food hamper as well as some good quality clothes and some toys for their children which were donated by local Christian friends.

You have to love it when Christians stand together as the church and bless those in need.

Good For The Soul

"For I will satisfy the weary soul, and every languishing soul I will replenish." - Jeremiah 31:25

It's good for the soul to get away, especially at times like this when the world looks and feels so uncertain. We didn't think that our annual holiday would happen at all even just a few weeks ago, but thankfully after six months of serious lockdown, SA is beginning to open up again and traveling within the country is now a permissible activity. 

Getting There

The Gathering is gearing up for reopening on Sunday October 4th and we're busy making sure we have all the necessary health & safety protocols in place to enable us to gather safely on Sundays.

It's an exciting prospect being able to gather again with our Gathering family and we can't wait!

There are a few more things to do before the 4th but we're confident that it will all be fine for the big day.

It will be one amazing celebration! 

Oh Happy Day!

After what seems like an age, but was in fact a tad over a month, I've finally bottled my home brew!!!

It should have been ready for bottling around the 25th - 28th of August but it didn't stop gurgling until a couple of days ago. The guys who supplied the kit said this was fine and encouraged me to leave it for as long as possible before bottling, so after a mammoth wait it's a case of job done.

All I have to do now is wait for three weeks for the last bit of magic to occur in the bottles and it will be ready for drinking.

Good News!

We have some great news about The Gathering's weekly Soup Kitchen...

As of Thursday 8th October we will be reopening our venue for sit-down Soup Kitchen. Hallelujah!

No more serving pots at the door and asking people to go straight home, now we can allow folk to linger a while, take a load off and spend time in a safe and secure environment.

New Normal

So there we have it, from midnight on Sunday 20th South Africa moves to Lockdown Level 1 which according to the President is our "new normal" and won't be going anywhere anytime soon. 

The restrictions around Level 1 remain inconsistent and irrational but we should be used to that by now so I won't focus on them. Rather, there is some good stuff in there which makes for good news and more encouraging times ahead. There's more info on the government website.

The first bit of good news is that churches can reopen properly and are now limited in size by the venue rather than by numbers, meaning that we can as long as we don't exceed 50% of the venue's capacity all is okay.

Blessed Day

Today is a blessed day as The Gathering finally got a decent computer with a working printer.

The old laptop was seven years old and was so slow it was frustrating to work with, whilst the printer we had just never worked properly no matter how many times it was added & removed, switched on & off or rebooted.

It's great to know that at long last church can do its own printing without having to bring everything home to print. Hopefully our home printer won't run out of ink quite so quickly anymore.

29th Wedding Anniversary

Today we celebrate 29 years of marriage which means we're getting old and yes, Paula deserves a medal for putting up with me.

Personally, it's been an awesome adventure with some incredible experiences along the way and I wouldn't trade a moment of it for the world.

I love you more than ever Paula!

Here's to the next 29!

XXXXX

Another Free Book

I've never heard of either the author or the book but it's a topic I'm interested in and the reviews are excellent, so given that it's yet another free book it's simply too good to miss.

As ever, thank you Discovery.

Delivering Food Parcels - Round 1

We've had a fun and blessed morning delivering food parcels in Chris Nissen, Broadlands and to a rather chuffed car guard at the local mall.

One of the true joys of what we do is to be at the coal face of blessing people, and seeing the delight and gratitude of recipients never grows old.

More Food Parcels

We're very excited to be able to deliver twenty food parcels this week especially so soon after the last lot we distributed towards the end of August (see: Food Parcels).

This time we've worked in partnership with St. Andrew's, Kinson in Bournemouth in the UK who have blessed The Gathering with a substantial gift allowing for these food parcels with quite a bit left over for our planned Soup Kitchen Christmas Lunch in December.

Paula did the shopping yesterday and managed to get 17 items for each parcel to which we've added two bags of soya mince and some soap, making them some very nice parcels.

We have earmarked ten of them for folks we know are in need and the other ten will be delivered by church members to people they know in the community who are in need.

It's great to be able to share the blessings of God in such a way!

Jade Plant

I went on to our garage roof in the pouring rain to check on a suspected blocked drain pipe and was amazed to see this little fella growing in between the roofing sheets and the waterproofing (which clearly isn't doing its job!).

He has now been re-homed and will grow in to yet another spectacular Jade plant to join the many others already growing in the garden.

I do like the variegated nature of this one, the contrast between red and green is quite striking.

Read more about Jade plants here: Jade plants and Trees.

Water Water Everywhere...

This is great news! Cape Town's dams are sitting at an average of 91.3% full and are at their highest levels in six years.

The best part of this is that we're in the middle of a cold front which means more rain is due over the next 24 hours and there are more cold fronts expected later in the month, all of which will bring more rain and fill the dams that bit more.

Whilst this is good news, it doesn't mean the drought is over and we can go back to old habits with water. Cape Town's population has grown by over half a million people since 2015 which puts a huge stress on the water supply.