So, tonight we fly to South Africa for a month serving with our friends in Harrismith. We have a colossal amount of baggage, more than enough to live indefinitely in international waters.

I write this from Heathrow airport, with a grumpy Joen perched on my lap. He and Katherine are participating in a frequently repeated battle over our desire to provide him with nourishment. His opinion is that if he wanted something unpleasant in his mouth, he would put it there himself: a point underlined by his frequent oral intake of fistfuls of dog hair.

The latest tactic, in his attempt to be the first chubby, anorexic, one year old, is squealing whilst throwing his spoon on the floor. Then, when Katherine stoops to pick up the spoon, he grasps my neck with surprisingly sharp fingernails. When Kat brings the spoon back into play he then starts again from the top. We suspect his eventual aim is to exasperate us to the point of agreeing never to feed him again: tonight those terms sound increasingly appealing.

Our request from you all, is prayer for peace as we embark on a 12 hour flight to South Africa.

More from us soon!
x Chris, Katherine & Joen

Thought I’d share something Christian, this being Lent. Both myself and Katherine are trying to spend some set time daily in prayer over the next few weeks, something organised by Phil, the pastor at our church.

So, check out the video below.

Try to look past the irritating commercialism of the first and last minute, and fair enough, the presentation style might not be quite to your taste; but still, wouldn’t it be great to go up to thy neighbour and say “F YOU!”

As you may have realised, I failed my medical finals last month, and thus my exciting summer web design to do list has dramatically altered. In fact, more than altered, I would say it’s been devastated. What once was a bright, shining list of potential future achievements has now become:

• Don’t do any fun stuff any more.
• Revise.

Since it is easy to spend a month revising without covering anything important, I have made a revision timetable, which I am sticking to (I hope). My resit exams are on the 21st and 26th June, so prayer is appreciated, as are gentle/unsolicited reminders to knuckle down and get on with it (thanks Lois!).

The timetable is below:

Please click it for a bigger version, or visit http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigonroad/4669302192/sizes/l/.

We have a new housemate. She is called Pudding. And she’s an 8 month old lab/collie cross. On the right is a picture of her with the chickens.

We are also (potentially) getting a new housemate. Not going to say what she is called, but she is moving in for a week as a trial run.

Prayers, as ever, appreciated!

As you are hearing, I had a bad week, this week. Today we had a meeting with a woman from the Health Department. We wanted to say to her; if you could have money in any area what would it be. This was so that we could prepare a proposal that addresses the areas that need work in our district.

We did ask her that question. Unfortunately, she didn’t listen. After 20 minutes of her telling us that the Health Department will never give us money to employ staff, despite the fact that we just had a briefing meeting with them, where they explained what they want to do is give us money to employ staff. And she just wouldn’t listen.

It was annoying, but welcome to officialdom within Africa. We actually found out the next day that the compulsory meeting regarding the proposal had been moved, without anyone telling us, from the 23rd to Friday! So the woman, instead of lecturing us on rubbish, could actually have shared the information that she definitely knew.

This afternoon, Grant came round to play Splash, which I won very narrowly. First game I failed at, but the next two were fine, taking me to a great victory. Unfortunately the weather here has not been very sunny, so the pool is freezing. It needs three or four warm days to become warm. On the plus side, if you have have 4 hot days, then the next is cold, all day the water is still warm.

In the evening I went to cell group. Rather than any program, tonight a woman shared her pain. Her husband has been an alcoholic for 12 years, and her life is misery. It was a hard evening, but everyone shared her pain, with prayer for the both of them, with advice and with love.

I spent at least an hour afterwards just lifting up the husband to God, going over and over the qualities of an elder from Titus, asking God to bring those qualities forward.

This is the verse the lady shared, feeling that God was using them to allow her to go away for a month, to have a break:

“As for a person who stirs up division, after warning him once and then twice, have nothing more to do with him, knowing that such a person is warped and sinful; he is self-condemned.”
Titus 3:10-11

On the way home, wearing no shoes, I got trapped by a Bull Mastiff standing in the middle of the road growling. My only option was to walk an extra 2 blocks in order to avoid the dog. Still, I got home with all the skin on my legs and face still intact.

Much love,

Poopoo-le-pee

Monday blues lasted well throughout the day. Not enough work was done by any of us, nothing seemed to be working well. Despite being at work for many hours,

The best part happened when I got one of your presents, but unfortunately, I can’t tell you about that until I get back. I can talk about the drive there though – it was out in Vilgepark, which is a suburb just off the edge of Harrismith – where me and Mohau go to play pool.

Unfortunately, there are a great deal of road works going on at the moment, because the roads are shot. And why? Lorries. Harrismith is in the middle of the 6 hour highway between Jo’burg andDurban. Which means all the lorries stop here for breaks. And because a little bit of the highway is knocked out, instead of going round Harrismith, now they go through it. Thus destroying the roads.

This also means that the route to vilgepark is much longer than one would expect, with a circuituous route, and lots of queues, and doubling back. Someone was telling me how one day, on the Friday of a long weekend, they shut everything through town except one lane. The tail back was an hour and a half, just to leave town.

Anyway, I got your present then, and you will know soon. Hoever, everything else just seemed to be a bit rubbishy. You know how Mondays are.

I ended the day at the prayer and intercession meeting the church has once a week. We were praying for a lot of things, but I felt very strongly from God to pray about the church. We were praying about 3 hours, and it was really good.

One of the verses that came up was this:

“Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it.”
1 Thessalonians 5:23,24

Love you bumley,

x

Today started late. I had no excuse, I just decided not to get up, and the beauty of voluntary work is that no one can tell me off if I don’t come in.

I went for a nice long run, that ended with me the wrong side of the motorway, and having to cross it – since there was no way I was going to backtrack all the way I had come.

Do you find that you itch loads after you really sweat? I don’t know why it happens, but its pretty annoying. I had a quick shower afterwards, which cleared it up, and then off I went to work.

Only Hlingiwe was there, sleeping. I was still fairly warm after all my exercise, and its the middle of summer, and she had a plug in fire heater next to her!

I then turned my attention to the computer. And the mess that it is. I cleaned and tidied my one last night, and I realised the time had come to do it here. Through the desktop PC, there was 6 different stores of documents, many of them containing duplicates, triplicates or worse. I combined them all, to form one folder of documents that was over 10Gb!

Then I reinstalled Windows. I seem to spend my life doing this. In the book I wrote last time, I said this:

“My main job today was sorting out computers. It is a little depressing how machines designed to increase our efficiency and productivity cause us more time getting frustrated because we are achieving nothing than anything else. Urban Dictionary dot Com has a definition for computers:

“A tool designed to accelerate, and automate, errors.”

I think that’s a pretty good description of most computers. I have personally today spent more than 4 hours trying to persuade one huge, expensive bundle of wire to function in the way Satan intended.“

When I got home, I started to read a book I borrowed from church, called “God’s Smuggler To China”. I got really challenged about prayer whilst reading it. It was talking about prayer, and how people should be praying so hard that they are weeping, shouting out to God, praying continuously, and I just thought about how I don’t do that. I don’t give time to God anywhere near enough. And maybe that’s why the thing I attempt fail. Like my band – we pray every time we pray and we are flourishing.

But when was the last time I lifted up CP.co.uk in ardent prayer? DIYsheffield? Medrevise? I can’t just try to achieve things that I know God wants without asking Him to get involved too!

So I spent a long time on my bed, praying, and reading the bible, asking Him to bless every project I could think of, our relationship, my friends, my family – everything. It was good.

I also played some football later, and ate some burgers.

But the most important thing was the prayer.

“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand;

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”
Philippians 4:6

Pray!

x