May 11, 2009
This past week has been fairly normal, I’m pretty settled in to a regular routine. This weekend was busy though. Saturday morning I went with a couple of the other Ambassadors staff to volunteer at a deaf school soccer tournament in the morning. There were teams from 5 different deaf schools in the area. Unfortunately, they were a little late in arriving, and I had to leave early, so my job was mostly limited to set up and preparation. I did get the chance to hear a friend give his testimony to the kids, and it is a pretty powerful testimony full of God’s grace and forgiveness.
I went straight from there to coach the reserve team. We played probably the best team in the league and were tied 1-1 at half time. The girls showed a lot of potential and were working well together (the 1st team was watching and made some comments about how impressed they were). Unfortunately, the other team was just too much to handle and we ended up losing 7-1 (although, we didn’t have our usual goal keeper, which didn’t help). I think the other team had 2 Americans playing for them, but I didn’t get a chance to talk to them after the game, because I had to quickly run off to the 1st team game. That game went much better, winning by a score of 7-1. I scored one goal, my second of the season, and I was pretty happy with it. One of the other girls on the team kept commenting about how fun the game was, it wasn’t even our highest scoring game, but she said she thought the team played really well against a another skilled team, so we really earned the score.
Sunday morning one of the girls asked me if I wanted to run in a 10K race with her. She told me it was supposed to be one of the most beautiful races in Cape Town (they actually have a lot of races, Africans love to run), so I agreed. It was a pretty venue. It was right along the Atlantic shore, next to a lighthouse, and on the side of a mountain. That meant that there was about a 2.5K uphill stretch up that mountain side, but it did make for some nice views. I kept reminding myself to enjoy the scenery and made sure I was looking around as much as I could. At one point the song “All Creatures of our God and King” started playing on my iPod and I looked up with the shore to my right, a rocky mountain ahead of me, and another mountain to my left and I just praised God for it. When the line “Praise, praise the Father, praise the Son, and praise the Spirit three in one, oh praise Him, oh praise Him, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah...” was being sung, I almost raised my hands up in the air while I was running, but I didn’t want to kill my momentum. I did however fly up that hill with considerable ease (although it was much shorter than the first 2.5K hill).
Did I mention I won? I won a gift certificate to some farm village outside of Cape Town. I don’t know what they have there, but it was a nice prize. Actually, that prize had nothing to do with the race. I ran 10K in 55 minutes, which is respectable, I think, considering I did no training prior and played a game the day before, but nowhere near the winning time. Some college girl won the race. I just won a random drawing after the race. They gave away about 30 prizes, mostly water bottles and small stuff. My prize was the second to largest prize (worth about $50). The largest prize was a two night stay for two guests at a local hotel. It was only accommodations, no food or other package, which would pretty much be useless to me, so I’m actually glad I didn’t win that.
Please continue to pray for both of my soccer teams. I still need a couple of players for the team I coach and am looking for opportunities to reach out to the players. I’m also still trying to build relationships with the girls I am playing with as well. Yesterday, because of the race, I was able to spend about 6 hours with one girl, and that was a blessing, but there are others I would love to spend time with as well. I’m praying also for the girls at the homeless shelter; they haven’t been very committed to coming to our program. We are lucky to get 10 when we could be getting 20. The next couple of weeks are really important for relationship building, because I’m going to be busy in June with a few other projects and may not be around much. The last two weeks in June will be particularly busy, as I’m joining an international team of players to do ministry around Johannesburg for the Confederations Cup. It is a big tournament being held in South Africa this year with 8 men’s national teams, the best from each region. (For anyone who cares, the US will be playing).