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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 -
HOPE Home Based Care Team -
Gathering Ground -
Staying fit as a family -
The Helderberg - The prettiest of the mountains we face
Showing posts with label soup kitchen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label soup kitchen. Show all posts
Once again we're thankful to Jehovah Jireh, the LORD our provider for the abundance with which The Gathering has once again been blessed with.
This morning we received two pallets (150 boxes) of the much treasured peanut pastes that our Soup Kitchen regulars love so much.
Thanks also go to our dear friend Shaddie at My Father's House for sharing their blessings with The Gathering.
Our much anticipated, prayed for and planned ''Welcome to 2022" Soup Kitchen lunch was a roaring success on Sunday, and we give God all the glory for this!
As we watched the advance weather reports in disbelief, stating that Sunday was going to be the hottest day on record, we gathered people to ask God to bring the temperature down, and to specifically cover the sun with cloud from 12-3 pm, or the event would simply be unbearable for us all.
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.
This is a little mentioned part of The Gathering's ministry to the neediest women & girls in our community.
For a few years now we have regularly been collecting sanitary pads and other sanitary products to give to the neediest and most vulnerable women in the community.
Initially this was aimed at the older girls attending our Homework Club because so many teenage girls simply miss school when they're menstruating because they have little or no access to the necessary products to help.
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.
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