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.
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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 -
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HOPE Home Based Care Team -
Gathering Ground -
Staying fit as a family -
The Helderberg - The prettiest of the mountains we face
Showing posts sorted by date for query soup kitchen. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query soup kitchen. Sort by relevance Show all posts
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.
At The Gathering we happily serve all comers regardless of their size, stature or status, we're not swayed by whether folk walked, just got out of a car or maybe got a ride to get there.
We serve everyone with the same level of grace & dignity and are as generous as we can be until the soup runs out.
At The Gathering we've been praying for numerical growth for so long that now that it's happening it seems a bit surreal, but we're incredibly in awe of our faithful prayer answering God.
As Mongezi opened our gathering we were already pretty much full, but as our gathering progressed we had to get more and more chairs out from the back so that everyone had somewhere to sit.
The mice come in through the shop next door's storeroom at the back, but they don't realise there's a problem because they have a cat which keeps the mice pretty invisible on their side.
Quite why the mice bother coming through to our premises, and what it is they find so exciting is a mystery as all our Soup Kitchen foodstuffs are in plastic tubs as is pretty much everything else, so the pickings for them are quite slim.
Despite this however, things are getting out of hand for both ourselves and for the launderette next door.
The queue was one of the biggest we've ever seen and folk were patiently waiting from before 5pm knowing that we don't begin serving until 6pm.
As ever the vibe was very relaxed and despite waiting for quite a long time, everyone was very grateful for what they received.
I made 100 litres of Cream of Beef & Tomato soup for last night and though I say it myself it was rather good, and it certainly went down well with everyone because it was all gone in twenty minutes!
Paula went out and as she did so I was about to get in the shower when I heard a strange hissing noise. Initially I thought it was coming from her car, so I quickly threw my clothes back on and went out to check all was OK, but Paula had long gone, but what was that noise?!?
Respect is earnt goes the old adage, and whilst there's an element of truth in this, it also suggests that there's a time for disrespect, and I'm not so sure about that.
One of my proudest achievements as a Dad is to have raised two sons who understand the power and significance of respecting others, and I love that throughout their entire school careers we had endless comments from teachers about how respectful they both were. I've drilled my sons on respect and they know that respect is given, whether it is earnt or demanded is irrelevant.
The Gathering was on fire this morning as we celebrated Christ's resurrection from the grave, a cold & hard historical fact.
The worship was awesome and it was a joy to share a word laid on my heart a few weeks ago about the three times Jesus spoke to his Father from the cross, as well as giving a clear gospel presentation for those that don't know Jesus yet.
The Gathering's weekly Soup Kitchen remains the highlight of my week.
Whilst it's always a calm and laid back affair in which the church is able to be incredibly generous to those that come for food, it's different every week and you can never fully be sure of what you might see or hear during the course of it.
Each week we get a never ending stream of tales and stories about why we should give someone more of this and someone else more of that...
Whilst the Soup Kitchen itself passed off peacefully as usual, thank you LORD! It was chaotic outside with one of the local youngsters getting herself run over causing the driver to crash in to a parked car.
Amazingly the ambulance actually turned up (they rarely do in these communities!) followed by a fire engine (why?!?) and eventually a traffic cop showed up too.
Jim over on Missionary-Blogs.com has featured Facing The Mountain once again.
This time we're part of his Awesome God in Amazing Africa post on the Missionary Blog Watch page of the website, where Jim picks up on our post: Savouring Every Last Drop, a short post as Jim describes it "Just a little simple post of thanksgiving!".
I do try and focus on the blessings as much as possible on the blog and this particular Soup Kitchen was a tremendous blessing to us as well as to our regulars.
It's always humbling and a privilege to have any of our posts picked up and shared by others, so thanks Jim!
Following our prayerletter which we sent out yesterday and which can be read here, we want to explain a little more, give a bit more info to the background and answer a few questions...
At The Gathering we have never wanted a building for the sake of having a building, rather, we have always wanted a venue from which we can serve the local community from Monday to Saturday with Sunday Gatherings being merely the cherry on the cake.
For the first time since South Africa entered its 21 day lockdown two years ago, The Gathering has had to close its weekly Soup Kitchen because a few of us are ill with Covid.
We've done our best to ensure that word is out, especially amongst the Macassar folk to save them the walk for food later.
There's little worse than seeing our church venue locked up with no sign of life, especially when we make such an effort to be open as much as possible so community members know where they can find The Gathering when they need us.
Either way I know we're both feeling a bit rubbish, so it was nice to have a delicious Dirty Mac & Cheese with steamed broccoli for dinner, even if Paula couldn't taste it.
Once again we prepared 100 litres of delicious homemade Cream of Chicken Soup, only this time it had a slight Cape Malay curried edge to it which went down a storm.
The Gathering has been running the weekly Soup Kitchen for so many years now that we really shouldn't be surprised that yet again it was a really chilled vibe with lots of thanks and gratitude for the church's generosity in making sure everyone had their fill with plenty to take away too.
However, every week we remain incredibly thankful to God for the peace and calm that pervades the Soup Kitchen.
Thank you LORD!
South Africa has this ridiculous system called loadshedding in which the state monopoly power provider switches the electricity off at various points around the country for 2 hours at a time. Somehow they think it's all made more acceptable and manageable by having an actual schedule for this nonsense, but this schedule is adaptive depending on which particular stage of loadshedding we happen to be enjoying.
I will never tire of the joy of delivering blessings to others, especially the joy of delivering food to the two Soup Kitchens in Macassar which The Gathering supports.
This month we were able to give them a few boxes of peanut pastes, rice, soya mince, jam and washing up liquid each, plus an ice cream tub full of sweets for the kids which were left over from The Gathering's Soup Kitchen lunch back in January.
It was good to finally install some industrial quality fans in The Gathering's premises this morning.
Previously we had two domestic quality fans in the front and one at the back, and to be honest they were a bit rubbish.
So it was a blessing to be able to use some of the money left over from the Soup Kitchen Christmas Lunch to buy five new good quality fans that will do a great job at cooling us all down. It's just a shame I only got to install them at the end of summer.
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