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
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.
After the theft of Joel's bicycle we had a further theft in which my bike was nicked along with our gas bottle. Sadly we only noticed a little while after the event when we wanted to boil the kettle during loadshedding.
Thanks to a rather lovely blessing we were able to replace Joel's bike a while ago, but we'd been waiting to replace mine, mainly due to cost.
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.
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.
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!
After several years of persistent and sometimes frightening drought, Cape Town's dams sit at a collective 100.1% full with Theewaterskloof our biggest and most important dam sitting at 100.5% full. Given that it was down to just under 20% just over a year ago that is an amazing turnaround and a huge answer to prayer.
This winter has been the wettest and coldest in all our years here and there's more rain predicted which is fantastic.
Hopefully our drought can finally be banished to the dustbin of history.
This may just be my weird sense of humour, so you may want to scroll on by for this one...
I'm always on the look out for a sign that can be misinterpreted or has a spelling mistake in it, or something that's just a bit odd, so I was thrilled to come across this error notice on the screen of the ATM in a local shop.
Whilst we were waiting to be served Joel and I happily wasted a fun few minutes discussing what might be wrong with the ATM's throat and indeed where its throat might actually be. In the end we concluded this one was lost in translation.
I've never previously been fit enough or strong enough to go far on it before, but thanks to all the boxing training riding 5kilometres on my Muni was far easier and more enjoyable than it's ever been
On the strength of this I'm looking forward to speeding up a bit and going further on future rides.
So it was good to be able to respond as a church and bless the family with another food hamper as well as some good quality clothes and some toys for their children which were donated by local Christian friends.
You have to love it when Christians stand together as the church and bless those in need.
"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.
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!
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.
