Showing posts with label covid19. Show all posts
Showing posts with label covid19. Show all posts

So here are the official photos of The Gathering's annual Soup Kitchen Xmas Lunch. You can see the full album here.

We had such an amazing day together with church and our volunteers and the lunch itself was an amazing time of serving and blessing our many friends who come to our weekly Soup Kitchen every Thursday.

Thank you to all our volunteers and contributors, you made the day very special indeed!

What a special time we had serving many of our Soup Kitchen regulars at The Gathering's annual Christmas Lunch.

Our volunteers were amazing and once again just got stuck in with our church family in making sure everything was well prepared and served.

We can't thank enough those who contributed towards the day in time, resources and money.

We're now very excited for The Gathering's Soup Kitchen Xmas Lunch tomorrow, but we have to be mindful of the coronavirus and the potential impact of it and the event itself.

To that end we are taking it very seriously with plenty of notices going up about wearing masks and social distancing. We are also providing each guest with a mask and all volunteers with gloves.

Oh how we would love to be more gracious this year and invite even more folk in to enjoy The Gathering's annual Soup Kitchen Xmas Lunch, especially given how much greater the need is this year. Sadly however, thanks to the coronavirus we've had to cut our numbers by a third. 😢

Still, we're going to have an amazing time serving our 80 invited guests and we're going to treat them to a royal afternoon of good food and blessings.

The planning has been quite epic and there always seems to be something else to do, but it's also exciting seeing the physical evidence of progress as stuff gets stacked in various corners of our building.

This afternoon we took delivery of 12 tables, table cloths and 80 chairs, as well as getting some final printing done, oh and a quick call to the landlord to see if he can send his plumber around to fix the leaky toilet.

Preparations for The Gathering's annual Soup Kitchen Christmas Lunch are now at 'full steam ahead' as we put together final bits of printing and making sure that nothing has been left behind in our garage at home. We now have a small army of volunteers to stand with and serve alongside The Gathering's own members and it's all getting quite exciting. 

As we build up to Sunday The Gathering has been blessed in so many ways, but one of the most useful is our brand new foot operated sanitizer dispenser. I've wanted one for church for ages so it's great to finally have one, especially as it will free us up from having to rely on someone to do the sanitizing.

That brings us to our biggest prayer request for this Sunday. We've already reduced numbers by a third down to 80 guests, we're providing each guest with a mask and sanitizer and the event is outdoors, so we're doing all we can to ensure we're compliant with the relevant Covid protocols. However, we would ask you to stand with us in prayer against any infections being a result of this event.

The end of the year always seems to sneak up on us as life becomes hectic with exams for the boys and church life ramping up a gear ready for our end of year events. This year also had the added stress of our ongoing "will we/won't we" make it to Blighty for Christmas with family, though sadly that is now definitely off.

 Joel's final Matric exams seem to be going well and we were thrilled when he described History Paper 1 as "a gift", hopefully this will have encouraged him to keep going.

School seemed to peter out for Eli, who now has an end of term farewell to look forward to on MS Teams. He's thrilled... not.

I'll try and post a bit more in the next day or two, but for now I'll leave you with this pic from my easiest early morning 10k Uni ride yet.

As we race towards the annual summer shutdown and Christmas holidays life just seems to get faster and more chaotic as plans are squeezed in to the remaining available time. For us at The Gathering life is no different and we've been very busy planning for the rest of the year, planning for next year and personally planning for our on/off/on/off who knows if it will happen trip to Blighty to spend Christmas with family.

On Thursday evening life eased up again here as President Ramaphosa opened all international borders allowing for tourism to resume. This will be a major injection for the local economy and renews our hopes of being able to travel to Blighty over the Christmas period. Sadly we're wholly dependent on the British side of things, and given how poorly managed the pandemic has been there, our hopes remain just that.

It has been great to get back to some level of normality recently, though having said that, life still remains vastly different to how it was pre-Covid. 

However there is a degree of familiarity reappearing and to be honest it is very welcome.

Life was very tough under Lockdown. Levels 5 to 3 were quite unpleasant as we endured one of the toughest lockdowns in the world. 

Valedictory

We had the joy and pleasure of attending Joel's High School Valedictory this morning and were pleasantly surprised by the awards he picked up, which included a Silver Merit for Mathematics, though the real shock of the morning was his commendation for his Afrikaans oral. Anyone who's walked the road with us over the last few years knows that this has been a battle royale for Joel, so we're super proud of him for that!

It was a strange event given the restrictions due to Covid, but False Bay High did a great job of honouring the Matric Class of 2020.

I once said that The Forsaken by Tim Tzouliadis was the most frightening book I have ever read. Well now it must be relegated to the second most frightening book I have ever read.

Midnight In Chernobyl is an extraordinarily detailed and graphic telling of the catastrophic events at  Chernobyl nuclear power plant, looking in detail at the events leading up to the meltdown and the years of fallout (no pun intended) that followed.

If you want to be scared senseless this Halloween, read one of these!

The Gathering's Soup Kitchen returned to some kind of normality last night as we were finally able to allow folk in to enjoy a cup of soup whilst taking a load off.  A total of eight chose to sit inside and it was clear that they were enjoying being able to be back inside just as much as we were all happy to have them back in again.

I was manning the door with the sanitiser and thermometer and only allowed those inside who were also wearing a mask as we are operating a strict policy of "no mask, no entry" to comply with the health & safety protocols put in place by govt.

We've been planning to get The Gathering open again in Firgrove for a while now and just before SA went in to Lockdown Level 1 we said in faith the we would reopen on Sunday 4 October.

So it was pure joy for that faith to become reality as we Gathered again after almost seven months of being unable to.

Thank you LORD!

"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.

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!
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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.

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.