Horses and Courses

On friday afternoon my boss gave us all a tip about a horse running on saturday afternoon. I thought it would be a wonderful suprise for Tess if the horse won and I could tell her: "I put money on a horse...and we won R800!!!!" So I put R50 on the horse called "The Walk". Other members of the office invested slightly more in this sure thing.

So friday night whizzed by as we got some Kentucky Fried Chicken and then crashed until 11am Saturday morning.

I went off to the Arthur household to watch NZ take down the Wallabies while Tess stayed home to prepare her lesson for the Xhosa kids.

Saturday afternoon we wandered around Vincent Park (The one and only mall in EL!) and picked up "The Incredibles" and "Totsi" for a nice price! Then home only to find out that "The Walk" had walked...apparently he was so slow they had to send a search party out to find him.
So my wonderful suprise for Tess was:" Hey love, I lost R50 on a horse!". (My apologies to those offended by my gambling.)

Saturday night we had our new good friends Andrew and Karen Marshall over for dinner and a DVD called Elizabethtown. The friends can only be described as great. The film can only be described as vague.

Sunday was a good day. A rocking profound meeting followed by lunch with Gran and a sweet soccer match in the late afternoon.

Sunday evening we spontaneously went to visit our other new good friends the Thompson's for pancakes and then home early to bed so we could rise early and continue fighting for our prayer life!! GOD is good as I awoke at 4:45am....15 minutes before my alarm!

I also manged to get some Xhosa gospel stuff for Mr Melani.. see Can I have Your Pants?

Furniture delivery

We finally had our bed, lounge suite, kist and some odds and ends delivered from Cape Town. All this kindly financed by the department of health. Yeehaaa! It was great to sleep on a decent bed again..actually so nice that I slept right through our prayer time and ended up being about 10 minutes late for work....

A braai, a kickaround and a dinner...

After the gathering we headed off for a braai at the Graham's place...incidentally they have a kid named Billy....Billy Graham. It was a lovely time with about 25 of us there. I taught some of the guys the game we played in Cape Town with a coke bottle filled with sand but here we used 2 lemons...The one where you stand in a circle, look straight ahead and then somebody throws the lemons into the air. If you look up or flinch everybody else gets to pound you. The other option is to stand dead-still, look straight ahead and run the risk of getting beaned by a lemon! It was good fun and my man of the match was a big guy called Josh who giggled like a girl everytime the lemons went skyward.....mmmm lemons don't sound very hardcore right now but they were really big...

I have found a game of footy to join which warms my heart. It was a 5 on 5 and was a good game on a nice smooth field. good stuff.

In the evening we had the great pleasure of going for dinner with Gavin and Estelle Cox who lead our church. We had roast lamb, some good laughs and quality conversation. You got to love relationship....

We're on the highway now...

A wedding and a farewell....

On Saturday we experienced or first Highway Community wedding. It was great! The same venue is used for the wedding ceremony and the reception. While the bridal couple have their photo's the people kick into gear and in around 43 minutes transform the venue into a wonderful reception venue with all the works. Those same people then sit down and enjoy the reception before packing and cleaning up the entire place! Quite a feat! This wedding had a strong indian influence due to the grooms heritage. It was wonderful. The food was good and had my stomach speaking Hindustani for the rest of the weekend. The ceremony was great with the elders and their wives praying, prophesying and releasing them into their destiny in GOD. Good stuff! Tess made herself available to do a stint of babysitting for about 45 minutes. All the children below teen-age were in the youth building with mainly the women of the church taking shifts to look after the kid. I say mainly 'cos I went down with Tess and had shortly arranged a very physical 5 on 5 indoor soccer match in which I got nicely pummeled! It has been a long time since I have played soccer at a wedding!...if ever?

That evening we hit a farewell.. met the guy for the first time and then said goodbye! It was a fun evening. One of our new friends called Andrew made the mistake of begging people to come to the farewell (which was at the digs he stays in) and then not being there himself so a couple of us promptly swopped the belongings in his room with the belongings in the garage. He got a nice surprise when arriving home at around 2am to find his bed,pc etc in the garage.

We then headed to the Windmill for Milo milkshakes which was cool and then off home to bed.

Can I have your pants?

I went to do some banking on Friday. While waiting at the teller there was a courier standing next to me( His name is Melani) . This is how the conversation went:

MELANI: Aaaish... this lady is taking too long. I am going to be late.

AL: It looks like they are quite busy today.

M: (Looking down) Those are nice pants.

A: (Thinking: What the nations?)

M: Will you give me your pants? I want your pants.

A: What will I wear back to the office if I give you my pants now?

M: (Looking puzzled... clearly not having thought about this potential complication) Did you buy those pants in East London?

A: No. Cape Town.....in 1995.

M: (Looking very impressed) Yo...those are good pants. They have lasted a long time.

A: They used to be blue.

M: Dark blue?

A: Light blue... I had them dyed black.

M: Oh.

The conversation ended with me promising to drop off a package for him at the bank. It will contain my pants which he knows about. What he doesn't know is that in the pocket will be some literature talking about the One who can save his pants! (If you know what I'm saying).

Small town radio

So I heard this very interesting song on the Christian radio station here in East London. It was just cool and I thought it would be a good thing to get hold of....so I listened really carefully to try and catch the name of the artist and song..but NATIONS.. they went straight into the news. Then I heard the song again over the weekend when the Duckhams were here and the same thing happened!!

At work on Monday I dropped one of the DJ's an email telling him that I listen to his show every morning from 6:46am until 6:59am.

Sidetrack: A good 6 minutes of this time is taken up by the surf report which I really enjoy and I always have a good chuckle when it is announced that the water temperature is a "chilly" 17 degrees. Coming from Cape Town 17 degrees is the temperature we set our showers at!!!

Maintrack: I told him that I am looking for the relevant details for this song, that I really enjoy the snippet of his show and is there any way that he could email me the details that I am after. A couple of days had gone by with no response and I had forgotten about the whole deal writing it off as an average experience! Then one morning I get into the car and set off for work. Next thing THE SONG comes on...as it finishes the freekin oke (Gary Gerber) says that was for me and repeats the name of the artist and song a couple of times!! It was classic! Not only did he play the song and get me the details but he did it in the only small bit of time when he knew I would be listening!

Link Fm 97.1... Big enough to count and small enough to care...

Nothing like a visitor......

Ja well no fine. So the legendary Mike and Shelley Smuts were in East London last night as they are making their way home after some mission and some holiday in Kwazulu Natal. While Shell was connecting with her brother and sister-in-law Mike popped in for a quick chat starting at 9:45pm! Now after the last 2 days (See last entry) my eyes were pulling the super scratchy manoeuvre and my bed and pillow were having that irritating magnet affect! But I fought the good fight until around 12:30am! I am personally very impressed with our endurance!

It was an awesome thing to catch up and hear about all of the Cape Town happenings.... Good friends are a blessing...

Oh and Tess and I made it to work ontime!

Life of the construction worker.....

Well I am back in East London after spending the night out on site. I had headed out with our MD in his S500 Merc....nice! Takes about 3 hours to get there and there is not much radio available in the old Transkei so there was some interesting conversation. I am convinced that nowhere in the world will you get as creative drivers as in the old Transkei... many times I wanted to lean out my window and applaud but then I might have been sucked out..you know...sudden loss of cabin pressure and all that!!

We had a meeting with all the staff there. It was my official introduction to all the guys. After the meeting we had a braai....construction style! That means rump steaks, sausage, some chicken to eat and beer to drink....with a very small percentage of cooldrinks which gets confusing because all the guys call beer cooldrink and have no word for cooldrink. Anyway it was a good time and I am expecting to get involved in their lives to a greater degree form here on in.

I slept in a small pre-fabricated room. My roommate (seperated by a small very very thin wall) decided to do a prophetic act and by snoring cut down all the remaining rainforests on this earth and anywhere else there are still rainforests! While I can appreciate his intercessional effort from a certain angle when I pulled myself out of bed @ 4am I was feeling a tad tired. So after driving through heavy mist we arrived back at the office around 8am. I headed home had a nice hot shower and crashed for 3 hours. Then back to work.....

On the prayer side Tess and I have had a couple of really good sessions and have really heard the Spirit when praying for a variety of people back in Cape Town. The feedback from them has been really encouraging and we will press on and in! Hearing the Spirit is a necessity in these days. May our ears be open!

I have started going to music group practise and have a session tonight which I am looking forward to. Tess has a 4 week sewing machine course which also starts tonight.

All good.

A weekend of Goodness.....

What a profound weekend.... except for the rugby. Although as Smutsy commented it is quite a gift to not score a point and simultaneously keep the opposition to under 50 points. I am not sure if you win any prizes for that at the world cup?

So on to the profound stuff! Tess got her first taste of "official" ministry at our new body. She has been approached to lead the Isi-Xhosa kids ministry once a month. Yesterday was her first time and it went rather well. Together with Joseph (translator) Tess preached on creation for an hour and a half.

While Tess was doing her thing I was in the main gathering which was quite amazing. There is a lady who has breast cancer. She is going for an operation to remove the lump sometime this week. The whole church went up to the front and stood around her and her family as we prayed together and sought the Lord for healing. It was very emotional with many tears shed...I must admit that I was having to hold back a bit myself.

In the evening we had a 18-30's meeting about the way forward for this generation at HCC. Graeme, the elder running this, asked me to share about our experience at MBC which was fun as I reflected on all the camps, events, groups etc over the years. There is no official young adults ministry here and I think it is going to stay like that. Currently there are about 30 people in this group and they are hungry for GOD. I am feeling pretty pumped today and I think we are going to see things happen in the near future with this group. The way forward for now looks like a retreat to seek the Lord and a general opening up of events and happenings which include braai's, farewells and pre-work prayer meetings. All good. We finished the meeting with a cranking prophesying whopper of a prayer session. YES PLEASE! We left with the call to soak this "thing" in prayer and trust GOD for the way forward and to add to our number.

On a more personal note I am beginning to write songs again which is great. Tess and I are contending for a life of prayer at the moment which includes our fight to get up early in the morning (around 5am) and pray together each day.....and what a fight it is! But I feel a shift and we are about to crack it wide open!

Catch you on the flipside... HEY YOU KIDS! No flippies off the dock!

Jumping on the bandwagon

Well after much deliberation and consultation I have decided that The Gardeners will be joining the world of blogging. So if you want to see whats happening in our lives keep checking this page.....or watch the news and check the weather in East London?!

Watch this space......