Sunday Snippet: Greetings to a Church in New York…

So you know we like to live with our tent flaps open and because of that we enjoy heaps of dinner guests and we meet the most amazing people from all over the world and from all walks of life. This past weekend we had a surprising, and unusual for us, visitor all the way from New York. He is actually a pastor and visiting our church and Cape Town for a couple of weeks and so we asked him over for dinner.

Now one of the troubles with having visitors pass through your home is that your children become really quite used to chatting and being their very crazy selves in front of folk, from all over the world. This poor man, who patiently posed, trying to get a photograph of himself and the gang… well…

Anyway he asked if we could send greetings to his church especially to the children in his church from the far side of the world. And one thing our kids have learnt is that greetings from one church to another are important… not only to all the letters in the New Testament begin with “greetings” but when we visited Lesotho a year or two back at least the first hour of the Sunday morning service was spent exchanging greetings from our church to theirs and back again… the relationship between folk attending each church became elaborately and intricately entwined as the morning wore on. Of course, time in rural Africa is a different thing to time in the western world and a congregation meeting for an hour “exactly” on a Sunday morning would be considered a very strange and unnatural thing for a Sunday service in a church in a village on the slopes of a Mountain in Lesotho..

So to the children in a church in the heart of New York, who enjoy a city life filled with things beyond our imaginings… we greet you. We live in a relatively small beach town south of Cape Town and we know very little about big city life.

Your well traveled pastor had so many interesting tales to tell, when he could get a word in. We did discover that you have lovely parks to play in and that you enjoy walking dogs in your part of the world. We tend to walk on the beach. We don’t have a dog – though many folk do have pet dogs here. The animals that we encounter on a daily basis could possibly be a little different to the ones that you encounter. There are in fact quite a few things that are quite different about our life under an African sky… and your life in an American city… but their are probably just as many similarities. Here are some questions that lots of children all over the world have written to us and asked us about living here:

We took your pastor for a walk on the beach, so that he could see a little bit of our neighbourhood. What he really wanted was for you all to see our kitchen, which is so much more enormous than the kitchens you have in your part of the world.

We did knock a few walls down when we moved in so that we could have such a big kitchen. We are really blessed with a big kitchen, it is perfect for when we have tons of friends over to cook and hang out… and so that their is plenty of room to spread ourselves around while we do our school work. Anyway we just wanted to stop by and say hello…

And we did eventually take a break in all the chatting to east dinner, under the stars…

And that’s us… wishing our friends in New York all the very best and thank you for lending us your pastor for a time. There will be a letter winding its way to you across the ocean… you can start to look out for it in a couple of weeks…