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.

Blessed Day

Today is a blessed day as The Gathering finally got a decent computer with a working printer.

The old laptop was seven years old and was so slow it was frustrating to work with, whilst the printer we had just never worked properly no matter how many times it was added & removed, switched on & off or rebooted.

It's great to know that at long last church can do its own printing without having to bring everything home to print. Hopefully our home printer won't run out of ink quite so quickly anymore.

29th Wedding Anniversary

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!

XXXXX

Another Free Book

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.

Delivering Food Parcels - Round 1

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.

More Food Parcels

We're very excited to be able to deliver twenty food parcels this week especially so soon after the last lot we distributed towards the end of August (see: Food Parcels).

This time we've worked in partnership with St. Andrew's, Kinson in Bournemouth in the UK who have blessed The Gathering with a substantial gift allowing for these food parcels with quite a bit left over for our planned Soup Kitchen Christmas Lunch in December.

Paula did the shopping yesterday and managed to get 17 items for each parcel to which we've added two bags of soya mince and some soap, making them some very nice parcels.

We have earmarked ten of them for folks we know are in need and the other ten will be delivered by church members to people they know in the community who are in need.

It's great to be able to share the blessings of God in such a way!