Preaching and Fellowship

On Sundays, Nick preaches at Sandy Bay at 8.45 am, then either at Knollcombes or Head o’Wain at 10.30 (they alternate each week), then at Jamestown at 7 pm. Then about once a month, or as determined by the pastor, I think, there is a combined service, where there is only one service on the Sunday, held at Jamestown at 2.30, with tea and fellowship (ie cake) afterwards. The tea and fellowship times always seem really odd to us. Everyone sits on the benches against the walls and that’s where they stay. The tea is served to them by whatever ladies volunteer to serve tea (always the same people) and the cake gets served as well. It’s the strangest setup. No one gets up to help themselves, and no one moves around to speak to different people. You just speak to who you sit next to, and that’s usually your brother or cousin or uncle or something like that. For the weekly bible studies, Nick goes to Knollcombes at 6 pm on Tuesday evening, then comes back for the Jamestown study at 7.30. On Thursday, he goes to Sandy Bay and Head o’wain, leaving at 5pm and returning after 10pm, by which time he is exhausted from the driving, singing, preaching and standing. Just for people who ask, Nick will be doing a short series on the Four Love Commands of Christ next (ie Love your neighbour as yourself etc), and that will take us up to Christmas and New Year, and then he will start on the book of John. That will be interesting as he hasn’t preached on it before, so it will be new for me too. Shame, he has a headache today, perhaps from all the reading he’s been doing. He might need to get his eyes checked. We still plan for him to go to the dentist and get his missing tooth sorted out. It will be considerably cheaper here than in SA.

Emma came around with her girls at 3pm, and they all had fun doing a bit of a scavenger hunt I had set up while the boys were sleeping – it was very simple, the older kids had to find seven wild animals, and the younger two had to find six dogs. They had to leave early because their boxes of stuff arrived from the ship and they had to go collect them, so Guy, her husband came for her at about 4. So now I am just playing with Caleb, hiding wild animals and he’s looking for them. He’s looking properly now, he says; so far he’s found three. Aaron is sitting here with me asking why he may not touch things, eg switch on the light.

Everyone asks what happened to Caleb, with his black eye. I told Emma that he was being naughty and so I disciplined him. She wasn’t sure if I was joking (so I told her I was). Nowadays the boys take themselves out of the bath, dry themselves, then Caleb gets dressed while Aaron runs around in the nude waiting for somebody to dress him, so they only have a short bathtime now. We’re heading towards independence though!

I suspect now I’m going to start saying really arbitrary stuff, such as Nick and I had muesli for breakfast and the boys had Pronutro (one of those South African products that is thankfully available here), or that for supper we’re having some defrosted squash concoction, left over potato mush, and some or other pasta dish, so let me rather end.