End of Another Sunday
We come to the end of another Sunday and I’ve been quite contentedly doing not much for most of the afternoon.
I’m sure there are different habits amongst different men who serve and love the church family as “pastors”.
It seems to work well for me to finish preparing for the teaching time on Saturday night. I then wake up early and go over the teaching I’ve prepared. I aim to be at our building at 10:00; we start an official program at 11:00; and we quite often finish at 12:30. In our church, many people hang around for an hour or so afterwards and I generally leave the building by 14:30. If we haven’t invited anyone over, I look forward to “falling into a couch” and I turn off for an hour or so.
Today, (once I’d regained a bit of oomph), I watched a replay of the Fury/Wilder event. I don’t reckon Tyson Fury understands much about the God he claims to serve, but I enjoyed seeing him win, nonetheless.
I played a few games of “find the item” with the two young neighbor girls we were looking after and then, when their parents came to collect them, Pris and I chatted with them for an hour or so over coffee.
And now I type here.
I had to put this somewhat ironic photo in this blog. Valentines Day. The couples in our church met and had a beautiful evening. For just about all of them, eating out never happens. The night before, I started feeling real crook and ended up in bed all next day. Pris, (at the table on the left), kind of picked up the pieces for the night admirably. But I did feel a touch sad for her being the only single at an evening for marrieds.
My sickness was just a tummy bug. “No biggie.” Just had to wait it out. I’ve noticed that some of the most challenging situations we face in life occur when we know a problem is fixable, and believe the ability to fix it is in our hands, but don’t know what steps to take to fix it. I have a couple of friends who have health problems which fall into this category. They know that they could spend 1000’s of dollars trying this and that… with no guarantee of success. They face a far more serious issue than I do right now with another problem I have. (Taking the risk of being insensitive), my sewage-smell-problem is just such an issue! I need to find the bad seal or cracked pipe… or sell up. Finding that bad seal/cracked pipe means chopping up walls and lots of mucking around. May God be glorified by my attitude as I fail and fail and fail and hopefully ultimately, succeed.
God is doing some nice things in the lives of the current batch of blokes in rehab. Some of them are doing absolutely super!
Andrei, the man on the left, fought in the Ukrainian army. I noticed that when I recently spoke about the unfortunate necessity that killing occur during times of war, his eyes were oh-so-attentive and head, slowly nodding. (Most Christians in Ukraine would not condone killing during time of war.) He has been with us for several months now and has just moved in to the next stage. He has an intelligent mind and a soft heart and is talking more and more about going back into the front lines as a chaplain to share of the Savior that he has believed in with the boys out there.
Valera is going “great guns”. He is doing a find job of overseeing the reconstruction of the hothouse and planting of seeds (the guys and Elle are looking over the order in the photo), and despite lots of opportunity to go back to drinking and smoking, Valera is still standing firm. The second photo shows the plowed land on which the hothouse will stand and in which the lads will soon start planting a garden. Last year, it saved us big money on grocery bills!
The wind blew our awning from over the front door down recently and I will close this off and get stuck into the repair job.
May God bless and guide.