Wedding Bells

What a joy and a blessing it was to watch the live-stream from St. George's in Weald of our middle niece Bethy getting married to Shaun this afternoon.

It was great that Paula could be there too and it was lovely to see her lead the prayers for the newly weds.

Today was an exciting day in the life of The Gathering as we had our second ever gift day for our building fund.

Having spent the last few weeks teaching in to the Biblical principles of giving, this morning I shared a short encouragement from 2 Corinthians 8:1-15 on the Grace of Giving as demonstrated by the Macedonian church as they faithfully gave to help their brothers in Christ in Jerusalem.

24 Hours

In the 24 hours since I dropped Paula at the airport I've had quite a fun time of it...

Things began with serving 140 litres of soup at The Gathering's weekly Soup Kitchen which was another blessed time of serving generously. This time everyone got a cup & a pot to takeaway and some even hung around for seconds.

Today was doubly exciting because not only is it a Thursday and we get to serve our regulars at The Gathering's weekly Soup Kitchen,but today our Matha@Home Homework Club restarted after an almost two year furlough thanks to the pandemic.

It just felt so right to have the Homework Club operating again and the kids were really enjoying themselves and the attention they were receiving from Delena our beloved facilitator.

London Clay

London Clay by Tom Chivers is an exceptional read and one of the best books I've read recently.

Whether you pick this book up because your magpie instincts are drawn the joyously attention grabbing cover, or because the subject matter piqued your interest; be prepared to enter a London you know little if anything about. A London that is riveting, absorbing and at Tom's hands, totally accessible, even if in reality most of it isn't.

This popped up on the socials, and eleven years on it's funnier than ever.

Quite how they could claim that "the bible guarantees it" is a mystery given that Jesus himself said "But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven".

This billboard was plastered in the middle of the Helderberg for months, but funnily enough it disappeared very shortly after 21 May 2011.

Crazy Busy

The Gathering's weekly Soup Kitchen was crazily busy last night as the 100 litres of homemade Cream of Chicken Soup gone in 25 minutes!

In fact, the soup went so quickly that no one was able to have seconds and the last six people only received a cup of soup and a packet of noodles because we couldn't fill any more pots. This was quite heartbreaking, and so next week we will be dusting off our two 70lt pans to make 140 litres of soup.

The highlight of my week is always The Gathering's weekly Soup Kitchen, and today I am blessed to once again be making 100 litres of delicious homemade Cream of Chicken Soup.

These are the main ingredients but I'll also be adding a lot of salt, pepper, garlic, herbs & spices and some soup powder just to top off the flavour.

This is an exciting moment as we prepare to relaunch The Gathering's Maths@Home Homework Club after an almost two year break thanks to Covid.

The first eight children have been accepted and the letters are about to go out to their parents/carers to inform them that they can begin on Tuesday next week.

It has been said that if you can do what you enjoy for a living then it never feels like work.

Well that is definitely true for me and never truer than on a day like yesterday when I had the privilege and joy of delivering a load of food to the two Macassar Soup Kitchens which The Gathering supports.

I had a great 15k ride on my KH 26er along Strand beachfront promenade this morning, and got to enjoy the last hour of the solar eclipse.

It got truly spectacular as the rising sun just clipped the top of the moon on its way down making for some stunning views of it all.

Riding along the beachfront promenade is always a pleasant ride, but when there's such an amazing natural spectacle adding to the beauty of the place it takes on a whole different level of spectacular.

Super Sunday

The Gathering always feels like an awesome place to be on Sundays, but this morning that sense of excitement and expectation was heightened as our spiritual big sister Rose Roode came to minister to us.

It is always a joy to welcome a guest speaker but an absolute pleasure to welcome someone like Rose who is so anointed in her prophetic gift of ministering God's word to his children.

Today has been an immense blessing as some of The Gathering were able to go through to Simon's Town and serve at My Father's House and then join them for church at the beach ministering to some of the local homeless community that My Father's House are in relationship with through their Community Kitchen and Resource Centre.

Church at the beach was an exciting gathering and it felt like church that Jesus would have wanted to be a part of. 

Cape Town was recently heralded as the 3rd greatest city on Earth by The UK’s Daily Telegraph newspaper. 

In fact they went even further and declared that Cape Town is "the greatest city in the world to visit right now".  High praise indeed!

However, Cape Town wasn't ranked as the #1 city due to its appalling murder rate, which was one of the criteria taken in to consideration for each city considered.

Happy Mother's Day to all our Gathering moms and spiritual moms.

It was good to honour all the mothers amongst us as well as those who are spiritual moms and will be moms one day.

We love you all!

Paula said it best on FB so I'll leave her words here...

Business Plan

We are very excited to be in the position to hand The Gathering's Business Plan 2022 to our landlord tomorrow.

A lot of work has gone in to this, not least by Paula who put in several long hours to get our accounts up to date and ready for The Gathering's accountants to once again sign off on the church's financial accounts for 2021 & 2022.

This also means that we've been able to submit the relevant documents to the Dept of Social Development to ensure The Gathering's ongoing compliance with the terms of our registration as an NPO.

I have been hoping to write this post for a while but wasn't expecting to do it quite so soon, but I'm very happy that the day has come.

When I set out on my health & fitness journey in January 2019 I was seriously in denial about how much I weighed & unhealthy I was, and truth be told I'll never know how quite bad it got. All I can say is that after hitting 105Kgs I simply stopped weighing myself, but I know I put more weight on because I did nothing to change my lifestyle.

I'll just say it up top... this was my best A to Z Challenge yet and it was for one simple reason; I had a plan for the whole series of posts which took so much pressure off.

The other thing that made this a lot more fun than previous years was that I had all my posts scheduled to post well ahead of time. In fact the closest I ever got to being close to the actual posting date was with Y & Z both of which were completed just two days before posting.

Now I'm not renowned for being the most organized person on the planet but having a clear plan & schedule really helped me and I would heartily recommend it to anyone else participating in the A2Z Challenge.

This is one of the best books I have ever read, and on the subject of WWI it simply is the best I've ever read!

Arthur Gould Lee wrote the book based on letters he sent to his wife Gwyneth Ann, and diary entries he wrote whilst stationed in France in 1917 serving as a fighter pilot with the Royal Flying Corps (R.F.C.).

Subsequent to the war he was able to add in previously classified information and together this gives the book an amazingly in depth but humane account of what it was like to be on active service at that time.