One of the ladies in our discipling house had to go to hospital last week. It was quite a traumatic experience, not only because she spent two days in the emergency unit sitting on a cold chair before they admitted her, but also because she has a little 11-month old son whom she wasn’t able to see this whole week. It took about 5 hours until someone actually saw to her when we brought her in. Then another few hours to get X-rays, and again a few hours to have the doctor look at the X-rays.

It’s so sad to see how under-staffed government hospitals are. Since our frequent visits to the emergency unit this week, we’ve thought about going there more regularly in future, just to pray for people and be a support. What a harvest field it is!! Let us know if you want to join us anytime.

We’ve been taking care of the little one while she’s been in hospital. It’s been an interesting week. Please pray for us, as I’ve just heard that the little one is really not doing well, and he needs to go to the hospital now (Sheralyn just came back from the doctor now and phoned me).

I am a new creation, the old has gone and the new has come!

So yesterday Z. (want to protect her identity) was discharged and came home. We had our regular evening devotions, and God led me to read Rev. 3:14-22 . It was really amazing how that totally fitted in with Z’s situation. She is from a M. background and hasn’t accepted Jesus into her life yet. But she knows that God is trying to speak to her. We shared how Jesus is knocking on the door of her heart, and she needs to let him in. To end the evening off, the Lord gave us a beautiful confirmation. As we looked at her bedroom door, we saw a verse that we had stuck up on the door quite a few months ago. It was Revelation 3:20, the same verse we had just read!! Praise God!

Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me. Rev.3:20

If you are reading this, and you haven’t made Jesus king of your life, the same goes for you!

So I started a new section on the website to put up some of my music (See the Music link at the top). For now, here’s a song I wrote some years back that got recorded by some cool people in the States. Enjoy!

So seeing as though this post gets the most hits from google on a daily basis, I just wanted to state that we did not write this… Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Hartgrove did!

Also i want to invite you to look around the rest of our blog. We stopped blogging for a while, but we have started again! ps: we believe in giving to  your local church as well as those you are in relationship with..

1. Fast for the 2 billion people who live on less than a dollar a day.
2. Contact your local crisis pregnancy center and invite a pregnant woman to live with your family.
3. Ask your pastor if someone on your church’s sick list would like a visit.
4. Join an open AA meeting and befriend someone there.
5. Adopt a child.
6. Mow your neighbor’s grass.
7. Volunteer to tutor a kid at your local elementary school. (Try to get to know the kid’s family.)
8. Grow your own tomatoes–and share them.
9. Ask a small group in your community to meet regularly for intercessory prayer.
10. Build a wheel chair ramp for someone who is homebound.
11. Read the newspaper to someone at your local nursing home.
12. Plant a tree.
13. Look up the closest registered sex offender in your neighborhood and try to befriend him.
14. Throw a birthday party for a prostitute.
15. When you pay your water bill, pay your neighbor’s too (they’ll let you… really).
16. Invest money in a micro-lending bank.
17. Ask the next person who asks you to spare some change to join you for dinner.
18. Leave a random tip for someone who’s cleaning the streets or a public restroom.
19. Write one CEO a month this year. Affirm or critique the ethics of their company (you may need to do a little research first).
20. Start tithing (giving 10%) of all your income directly to the poor.
21. Connect with a group of migrant workers or farmers who grow your food and visit their farm. Maybe even pick some veggies with them. Ask what they get paid.
22. Give your winter coat away to someone who is colder than you and go to a thrift store to get a new one.
23. Write only paper letters (by hand) for a month. Try writing someone who needs encouragement or who you should say “I’m sorry” to.
24. Go TV free for a year. Or turn your TV into a pot where flowers grow.
25. Laugh at advertisements, especially ones that teach you that you can by happiness.
26. Organize a prayer vigil for peace outside a weapons manufacturer such as Lockheed Martin. Read the Sermon on the Mount out loud. For extra credit, do it every week for a year.
27. Go down a line of parked cars and pay for the meters that are expired. Leave a little note of niceness.
28. Write to one social justice organizer or leader each month just to encourage them.
29. Go through a local thrift store and drop $1 bills in random pockets of the clothing being sold.
30. Experiment with creation-care by going fuel free for a week–ride a bike, carpool, or walk.
31. Try only reading books written by females or people of color for a year.
32. Go to an elderly home and get a list of folks who don´t get any visitors. Visit them each week and tell stories, read the bible together, or play board games.
33. Track to its source one item of food you eat regularly. Then, each time you eat that food, pray for those folks who helped make it possible for you to eat it.
34. Create a Jubilee fund in your Church congregation, matching dollar for dollar every dollar you spend internally with a dollar externally. If you have a building fund, create a fund to match it to give away and by mosquito nets or dig wells for folks dying in poverty.
35. Become a pen-pal with someone in prison.
36. Give your car away to a stranger.
37. Convert your car to run off waste vegetable oil.
38. Try recycling your water from the washer or sink to flush your toilet. Remember the 1.2 billion folks who don´t have clean water.
39. Wash your clothes by hand, or dry them by hanging to remember those without electricity or running water. Remember the 1.6 billion people who do not have electricity.
40. Buy only used clothes for a year.
41. Cover up all brand names, or at least the ones that do not reflect the upside-down economics of God’s Kingdom. Commit to only being branded by the cross.
42. Learn to sew or start making your own clothes to remember the invisible faces behind what we wear. Take your kids to pick cotton so they can see what that is like (and then read James).
43. Eat only a bowl of rice a day for a week to remember those who do that for most of their life (take a multivitamin). Remember the 30,000 people who die each day of poverty and malnutrition.
44. Begin creating a scholarship fund so that for every one of your own children you send to college you can create a scholarship for an at-risk youth. Get to know their family and learn from each other.
45. Visit a worship service where you will be a minority. Invite someone to dinner at your house or have dinner with someone there if they invite you.
46. Help your church congregation create a Peacemaker Scholarship and give it away to a young person trying to avoid the economic draft, who would like to go to college but sees no other way than the military.
47. Eat with someone who does not look like you. Learn from them.
48. Confess something you have done wrong to someone and ask them to pray for you.
49. Serve in a homeless shelter. For extra credit, go back and eat or sleep in the shelter and allow yourself to be served.
50. Join a Yokefellows ministry at a prison close to you. Remember that Jesus said he would meet you there (Matt. 25).

Here’s an interesting one. The top ten keywords google finds in our website when its robots crawl it are:

1. god
2. love
3. august
4. life
5. lovemultiplied
6. jesus
7. sheralyn
8. beautiful
9. eternity
10. facebook

I’m glad God is number one on the list!

oh, and beautiful is right after Sheralyn

May God’s love be multiplied to you today… – and go ahead, share it!

Have you ever heard of the post-fertilization effect? (googleing highly encouraged!)

Basically with many ‘pills’/contraceptives, there is a possibility that you are still ovulating and that fertilization is taking place, but the fertilized ‘egg’ is not being allowed to implant in the lining of your uterus, and is being ‘dispelled’ by the body. For many Christians this could pose many questions and difficulties… like when does life begin? Fertilisation or implantation? How great is the risk of my pill? (Combination pills are generally ‘safer’). If my pill has a post-fertilisation effect how does this affect how i feel about taking the pill?

This a hotly debated topic but, I think these are questions all Christian couples need to ask. Everyone needs to be informed of this possibility and make their own decisions…

So if this is something that affects you, or may affect you.. do your research. Start googleing.

Proverbs 14v12 There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.

So last night i had a dream…( I dream alot, and its normally quite vivid.) In my dream, a group of us were driving somewhere when we saw all the animals moving off in one direction. Straight away I (in the dream) knew that some major natural disaster was going to occur and that we should all follow the animals, as they would go the safe way…

unfortunately I could not convince others of this fact. A few minutes later in the dream i am still begging people to leave (there are like hundreds of them) but they won’t budge. Suddenly it starts raining very very hard and everyone realises its going to flood. Then everyone starts to flee. But they all flee in the way that is opposite to where the animals went, because it ‘made the most sense’. I (and others) was trying desperately to get people to change direction and they kept telling me my way was illogical. In the dream I just knew they were going the way of destruction. Eventually I to had to flee (at the last moment) and I got away safe. But knew in my heart that headlines were going to tell of the mass deaths occuring…

This got me thinking this morning… about Proverbs 14v12. The application is fairly simple really:

1) A great ‘disaster’ is going to happen (death/judgement etc)
2) As Christians we know the way people can be safe from this, although it may not always seem ‘logical’.
3) We need to do everything possible to save people from this and tell as many as possible
4) People are making choices that lead to death, let pray and encourage them to chose LIFE!

So this is a disclaimer! So very often, my brain works faster than my hands or my mouth… so i end up saying half sentences, missing out whole paragraphs in writing.. Becuase my brain is already on the next thing.

This is a problem as many times things i type do not make sense, or have letter missed out of words… lol

sSOOOOOO if you see some crazy sentence somewhere.. email me and say “hey shell, so it looks like your brain went very fast, this sentences says…… and what does that mean??”

Cool disclaimer is now over!

Wow so i have about 8 different topics I want to blog about, but I just have not have the time… I will blog about them one by one, starting with the Harvest!

For the last few weeks God has really being laying Matthew 9v36-38 on my heart:

36When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. 37Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. 38Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”

This had special reference to uTHando leNkosi and children’s homes and places of safety around the world and foster and safety parents and adoptive parents etc etc (ie dealing with children in need). There is such a huge need for the church of Christ to rise up and take care of children. There are thousands of kids, children just like any other child, who want to learn, who desire to have fun, who need love, and yet there are very few people taking care of them! I really felt that God was asking me to pray for more workers to be sent out to the harvest field of children. They are rip unto harvest, they are ready for the gospel… but who will go? who shall God send?

But since then this has expanded and I am really praying for more people to be going out into all harvest fields. This weekend I was at a training session and they said, (in my own paraphrased words), ” if people are looking at the health of Christianity in an area and they find that things are hard and people are ‘non-receptive’ to the gospel. They often say the problem lies with the hard hearted individuals.. yet really the problem is that there are not enough workers, we must therefore prayer that God would send out more workers.”

This verse just keeps coming up. So are you praying for the harvest fields? are you praying for more workers? Lets do what God commanded us to do! More workers, cover more ground…

We do devotions with our people in the discipling house most nights of the week. Often we stoke up a fire in our fire place and chat about life, Jesus and the Bible. So I decided to create a new category where we’ll share with anyone who’s interested what we’re learning and talking about.

the child,  the mother,  the preacher,  the punk,  the father,  the son,  the beggar,  the yuppy,  the crack addict,  the ballerina,  the accountant,  the circus clown,  the shoplifter,  the baker,  the singer,  the climber,  the pop star,  the pimp,  the priest,  the brother,  the gaurdian,  the president,  the cook,  the cleaner,  the soccer fan,  the prostitute,  the pole vaulter,  the artist,  the magician,  the secretary,  the raggamuffin,  the boss, the undertaker,  the hair dresser,  the daughter,  the student,  the porn star,  the nurse, the colleague,  the pilot,  the neighbour,  the designer, the old man, the cashier, the street child, the CEO, the rasta, the player, the athlete, the doctor, the bully, the baby, the husband, the king, the policeman, the toddler, the samurai, the veteran, the businessman, the astronaut, the dentist, ther foreman, the gardener, the carpenter, ther director, the mayor, the televangelist, the tattoo artist, the secret agent, the missionary, the bullfighter, the librarian, the gymnast, the figure skater, the mafia boss, the architect, the musician, the banker, the surgeon, the entertainer, the boxer, the author, the mathematician, the wrestler……etc

ie. YOU