Today's particular obstacle was perhaps the strangest to overcome...
The water in Firgrove had been off since 6pm the previous night and it still wasn't on at 11am when I needed 100 litres of water to get ready making the soup.
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The Finnie family in Blighty, December 2021
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Dean and Paula pastor The Gathering together -
The Gathering -
Baptisms at The Gathering -
Preparing to serve at The Gathering's Soup Kitchen -
Soup Kitchen Welcome To 2022 lunch
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Serving hands - the heart of The Gatheirng -
Thankful Thursdays -
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HOPE Home Based Care Team -
Gathering Ground -
Staying fit as a family -
The Helderberg - The prettiest of the mountains we face
I collected many cuttings over a few weeks, and gently nurtured them into sturdy young plants, and today we managed to dig out and plant our long desired and planned new flowerbed at the front of our house.
On Monday I underwent minor surgery on my ears, the procedure was an ear meatoplasty, which in simple terms involved the surgeon removing part of the meatus in the opening to the ear canal.
For several years now I've been battling with my hearing, especially in situations with a lot of ambient noise, but also recurring ear infections that were driving me insane.
I went to see the supposed top local ENT surgeon a few years ago, but for whatever reasons he wouldn't listen to me and said I just needed the build up of wax removing. In essence he made me feel pretty stupid.
It's a great blessing to see so much food stacked up in the church office/kitchen, especially knowing that Paula negotiated such a great deal with the shopkeeper that we got +/-1700 individual packets of noodles for the princely sum of R1.60 each (7p each in Blighty). In the local shops a cheap packet of noodles would normally cost around R5 each (22p).
What a blessing. Thank you LORD!
This picture warms my heart as it captures the very heart and DNA of The Gathering.
We don't run our Soup Kitchen as an evangelistic outreach, and we put no conditions on who can or cannot receive soup, we serve all comers.
The reason for this is that we use our weekly Soup Kitchen as a way of thanking God for all He's done for us and as such we want to share those blessings with others.
I wasn't supposed to be preaching at The Gathering this morning, but events in the week meant that it was over to me, and as ever it was a joy and a privilege to share the Word.
During the week I had briefly contemplated giving our Gathering over to an impromptu Testimony Sunday, but decided against this because I knew we would be low on numbers this morning, and partly because I knew I was being lazy in not preparing a word.
Well before I even got up to preach, God had interrupted our Gathering spectacularly and it turned in to an impromptu Testimony Sunday with testimony after testimony being shared.
So it was pure joy and a real privilege to allow two of our members to share the Word as part of our Seven Minute Challenge.
What made it even better was the fact that Jubilant had asked a few weeks ago if she could also lead The Gathering's worship on this Sunday.
Just wow!
We've been making 140 litres of soup each week for a while now, and even on our quieter evenings, the soup has all gone within thirty minutes, meaning we have had to turn some folk away.
Testimony Sunday at The Gathering is always a joy and a blessing, and this morning was no different!
The stream of testimonies of God's goodness just kept flowing. What was clear is that most had been having a tough year, but each acknowledged that it was only by God's awesome grace that they had got to where they were and were blessed because of His loving kindness.
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