Fellowshipping

I had an odd evening this evening, though in some ways, it was very "normal"! We have a group of Christian expats here that meets on Sunday evenings, for prayer and Bible study and some singing and all that sort of thing. It's been running for a few years now, with varying degrees of involvement from various people along the way. Somewhere along the way, I volunteered to do some of the "administration" for the group (ie, sending out email annoucements, making sure there was a schedule for who was leading particular bits on a given Sunday etc.). And in the past, there's been a great group of people who have been involved, very informally, in the leadership of that group.

However, many of those who were lending de-facto leadership have either gone or will be going in the next few weeks. Going and not coming back. So it was falling more and more to ME to organize things. And I was feeling a bit of pressure to keep things moving along. So two weeks ago, we had a meeting on a Sunday evening, and I expressed the fact that I needed help to keep this thing going... if people, indeed, wanted it to keep going! And amazingly enough, a bunch of people stepped up and said that they would be willing to help with various aspects of keeping a group of about 30 people organized and meeting every week.

So tonight we had our first little "steering committee" meeting! What a joy it was to meet together with 4 other people and discuss the options for what the group should study next, and how we should structure things and which direction we want to go with it. And also to pray for the group together. It was great! I feel quite excited about the group again, which is good, because it's so good to have some "fellowship" (whatever that is - I don't like that word... but at 11pm, I can't think of a better word for it, and you all know what I mean!) and some studying and some learning from the Word and from each other. But it was starting to feel a bit like a burden to me, because I didn't feel like anyone else wanted to keep going with the group. Now, though, I know that people want to continue with it and I think we've got a bit of new life in the group again. It's very exciting.

Our meeting was in the home of a new family who moved here 2 months ago. Yes, that's right, I said a FAMILY. There are little blond children running around this town and living here full-time! That's a real first. Really, it's been a very long time since I've sat and played with Lego with a couple of little blond boys. And it's never before happened in Jb, that's for sure. There's just something very normal about drinking tea and having a sort of "church" meeting in a home with a couple of children running around and not wanting to go to bed.

It was all just so normal, and yet, so abnormal for this town. I'm so thankful that this place is changing and that it is becoming the sort of place that families will move to. I guess it's a bit of what happened when the Wild West started to get a bit tamed - it suddenly became a safe enough place for people to actually CHOOSE to bring their families to (of course, there are plenty of local families here - but I haven't heard of anyone who has actually chosen to move their family here in the past few years). So it's really encouraging that this young family has decided to live here. I can't wait to come back after Christmas and go over to babysit so I can get in on some more Lego action...