The Finnie family in Blighty, December 2021
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
Serving hands - the heart of The Gatheirng
Thankful Thursdays
HOPE Home Based Care Team
Gathering Ground
Staying fit as a family
The Helderberg - The prettiest of the mountains we face
Printing is done, stickers are ready, goody bags have been lovingly decorated by hand and are ready to be stuffed to the top with some delicious sweets . The food is prepped and ready, so now there are just a few last minute jobs to be done as we pull it all together in the morning ready for service at 1pm.
It's a joy to be in the latter stages of getting things together for The Gathering's fourth annual Soup Kitchen Christmas Lunch, though this year it's a Welcome to 2022 Lunch.
The goody bags are shaping up very nicely and we hope they will be a real blessing to each person we serve at the lunch on Sunday 23rd.
Thanks to some incredibly generous donations we're able to go even further this year in blessing our Soup Kitchen regulars, and that is really exciting us even before the lunch itself!
This scripture is the guiding principle of The Gathering's Thankful Thursdays, and sometimes it's easy to forget about it, so it was good to be reminded of it so starkly yesterday, a day of phenomenal blessings and heartbreak.
The blessings had begun on Wednesday when I drove over to My Father's House in Simon's Town to collect a very generous food donation from them.
Since we've taken the Soup Kitchen up to a minimum of 100 litres each week our consumption of the basics has rocketed meaning that keeping on top of it all and ensuring we have enough to prepare and serve the soup each Thursday has become a bit of a mission in itself.
Given how wet and cold it was, it was even more of a blessing knowing the The Gathering's Soup Kitchen had more than enough to make sure that no one went hungry, and everyone could have as much as they needed.
The 140 litres certainly went a long way and it was one of the few Soup Kitchen's in recent times in which we've not had to turn anyone away because the soup was finished.
Our Soup Kitchen is always a chilled and laid back affair, but everyone seemed to know there was more soup than usual and so our regulars were more than happy to take their time over being served, even if it meant standing out in the wet and cold for a bit longer than usual.
This morning I drove through to Cape Town to pick up a second 70lt pot for The Gathering.
So this Thursday will be quite a monumental one as our Soup Kitchen moves beyond our dream of serving 100 litres of soup each week to serving 140 litres.
It feels so right to be expanding in this way to help meet some of the need amongst the more vulnerable members of our community and we hope & pray that this is a real blessing to those that come for soup on Thursday.
Last night at The Gathering's weekly Soup Kitchen I think we might just have found a way to communicate the levels of hunger...
For some time now it has been a dream of mine to increase The Gathering's weekly Soup Kitchen to 100 litres so that we can be even more generous with our soup than we currently are. Most weeks we have been serving 70lts and sometimes just 50lts depending on how close we are to the social grants having been paid.
Over the last few weeks we've just been using our 70lt pot and a couple of times we've had to turn folk away because we had run out, and that never feels good.
So it was great to be able to be our usual generous selves and then some, as we had plenty to go around tonight and by the time the queue had fizzled out we had just a single one litre pot and a cup left.
One of the unintended consequences of the pandemic and lockdown is our involvement with other local Soup Kitchens.
We never intended to get involved with any others as we were quite happy focusing on The Gathering's own outreach.
However it has been a joy and a privilege to be able to serve and build a relationship with two local Soup Kitchens being run by two amazing ladies in Macassar.
I know it's Friday today, but sadly April hasn't been too cooperative with its alignment of days and letters.
Ever since we planted The Gathering we have encouraged the church to join in with our Thankful Thursdays in which we focus on giving thanks for all that God has done and is doing in our lives.
The gathering has been running a Homework club for a few years now and it was an effective programme in terms of assisting local kids with their mathematics and seeing their grades rising across all subjects. Most teachers and educationalists will readily admit that when a pupil is confident in Maths it generally reflects on the rest of their schooling, so it has been great to be helping some of the local kids. It was also an effective piece of outreach in that it allowed us regular contact with their families and we loved serving the community in this way.
K is for Kilograms
Actually, that would be 6000 of them as The Gathering took delivery of six pallets of the peanut pastes we've been busy giving out lately.
Once again it was a total blessing to be able to receive such a huge food delivery and it's an even greater blessing knowing that we have already allocated all 432 boxes and they will be gone by Friday afternoon.
Life got a little hectic as we knew certain items would be banned from sale for the duration, and so many people went crazy with hoarding, and it wasn't just loo rolls!
Further to my post a couple of days ago on Rejects Become Blessings, I've uncovered a little bit more of the story and I find it quite perplexing.
As I said in that post, some of the boxes we received were indeed rejected due to the odd leaky sachet, but the bulk of the boxes we received on Friday have been rejected for far stranger reasons.
I was on my second trip collecting the peanut paste sachets and pootling along with a loaded trailer at 75kph (a little under 50mph) when the trailer started snaking. I think it was a combination of the wind, the weight, and a poorly serviced trailer that caused the snaking.
Yesterday afternoon I was left feeling very deflated after once again running in to an unhelpful & unyielding branch of South African bureaucracy.
This morning I was blessed by the joy of borrowing a friends trailer and driving out to Muizenberg to collect 47 boxes of the peanut paste sachets that are so popular amongst our Soup Kitchen regulars.
It was pure joy and a real privilege to spend a few hours with my mate Shaddie this morning serving My Father's House as they prepare the food for their daily feeding programme providing for the most vulnerable members of the Simon's Town community and beyond.
I love what My Father's House are doing and their vision and motivation behind it all, so it's probably a good thing that we don't live any closer because I would invest more of my time in to their vision and work to the detriment of my main focus.
It's been a while since we were able to deliver any food parcels, so it was a joy to be able to package up just enough food today to be able to bless our HOPE Home Based Care ladies in Chris Nissen with a decent hamper each.
Despite the government recently easing our lockdown restrictions, life is still very tough for the poorest, so it was a privilege to be able to put a smile on the HOPE ladies faces as they received their hampers.
