Grey Water

We've taken a big step forward in recent days in terms of harvesting as much of our grey water as possible.

The first picture shows the attachment for taking water from our bathroom to the garden, it's just waiting for the hose to be connected.

The pics below are of our slightly Heath-Robinson method of harvesting the water from our washing machine and dishwasher.

Table For Four

Our weekly soup kitchen was brightened up no end last week by these cheeky little chappies who brought their own table and chairs so they could enjoy their soup in a civilized and comfortable manner.

Joel and I couldn't stop laughing at the way the older girl kept bossing organising the other kids.

It's great to know that they feel comfortable enough to do this.

A Gentle Distraction...

This is the South African Post Office's latest offering of local stamps and I have to say they are very nice.

They're also quite educational given that I only knew of and seen three of these species of kingfisher.

Hopefully they are also a nice distraction from all the name calling and labeling on social media in the wake of last week's election result in the US of A

President Trump

"History repeats itself

Has to

No one listens."

Steve Turner, Poet.

So what has this picture on the right got to do with Trump winning the US presidential race?

Urgent Prayer Request

We posted earlier on Facebook about Linden, one of our church members who was stabbed late last night. We now know that he was stabbed three times, twice in the shoulder and once in the neck which severed the femoral artery.Linden is currently in ICU and is being operated on at some point this afternoon.

Sadly this incident has been brewing for a while because the family live next door to an illegal shebeen that started operating about a year ago. The family have tried many times to have the shebeen closed but without success, despite it being there illegally!

Last night at gone midnight Linden asked the few stragglers at the shebeen to leave because he had to be up for work at 4am this morning. All we know after this is that a few of the stragglers rounded on him and stabbed him.

Church + PowerPoint = Chaos

This reminds me of some of our Roadshow visits down the years.

One of the best was on the Wirral many moons ago. We had been clear with the church as to what we needed tech wise, back then it was as simple as an overhead projector, and the church had promised all would be fine. On the day there was no OHP so we had to pass our acetates around the congregation whilst we spoke. Priceless!

On another not so distant Roadshow, we were in a church where the vicar (an ardent Mac fan) decided to overrule the tech guy and interfere with the PC and our PowerPoint. Needless to say it didn't go well. 😂

I'll probably get told off for this but I don't really care I'm used to it.

Laughing All The Way...

We had a great evening on Tuesday night as The Gathering hosted a marriage enrichment evening using Mark Gungor's Laugh Your Way To A Better Marriage.

We served pizza and cool drinks with the video and settled back for a lot of laughs and some brilliant teaching.

We've been wanting to do this for a while but getting all of our couples together has been virtually impossible, so we went ahead with most of us there and we're so glad that we did.

Keep Taking The Tablets

Thankfully tablets have moved on a bit since Moses' time. So today is a very exciting day as we took delivery of our first six tablets ready for our Homework Club starting in January.

With Precious confirming that she wants to be our facilitator it's all feeling very real and very exciting.

Drought Just Got Serious

South Africa's drought just got a whole lot more serious for those of us down in the Western Cape with Level 3 water restrictions coming into force as of today. This means we have to make a minimum of 30% savings on our water consumption and for those that fail the financial cost will be quite big because all tariffs are increasing from the 1st of December.

Our consumption is so low already, thanks to the measures we've put in place, that making a 30% saving is just about impossible, but it does mean that other than using grey water we won't be watering the garden this year. It will be interesting to see how the garden looks next June!

For those of you of the praying persuasion, please stand with us in prayer for this drought to be broken.

Church Leadership Seminar

Being part of the Hillsong Network is a great blessing to us and we love joining Hillsong for mornings like this one yesterday.

It was such a blessing to hear Jentezen Franklin speaking a very simple but powerful message about Jesus washing the feet of his disciples and the fact that he did it so as to avoid causing Judas any shame or embarrassment. That's grace in action and the total opposite of religion.

School Assembly

This morning we had the privilege of speaking at Joel's high school assembly about The Gathering's Soup Kitchen.

Paula put a proposal to the school about them getting involved in our Christmas outreach by providing pizza for everyone at the kitchen and gift boxes for the children that attend.

The school have responded brilliantly and after Paula spoke so well (with the PowerPoint slides) at the assembly this morning, the Student Council are meeting later today to sort out exactly how the students will respond.