December 16 - Baby Countdown

Baby boy is due January 5th, but Julie will have a scheduled c-section on December 22nd (due to some safety precautions). 

We asked our doctor what will happen if there is a power outage during the C-section (there have been frequent black-outs here in South Africa due to power plants not being in working order).

He said that the generators will kick in at the hospital but sometimes outages trip the wiring and it doesn't come back on right away. Not to worry though… He assured us he would have his cell phone flashlight with him and could do the surgery in the dark if need be.

So there you go! We may not have lights… But we take great #boyjoy in our Star Wars, Chevron, and John Deere Africa onesies. What more could we want, really? The rest is details! 

 

December 10 - Winning the Super League (then not winning the Super League)

By Karl

Ubuntu U15 Boys Team

So perhaps you saw on Facebook a few months ago that we were excited our team won the Super League title in the U15 boys division.

We won it...then we didn't win it.

The "Super League" is the top league in Cape Town, and we played against the best of the best. No team from our club had won this in over 80 years.

Note: Our U13’s and U14’s actually won it too this year…awesome!

At any rate, I’m learning about the politics of soccer here in Africa. To make a long story short, one team was mad and thought they should have won it, appealed our title and in a backroom board discussion we were declared runner up.

THE LONG STORY...For those that care about these kind of details and long stories, here is the scoop. We had played this team (let’s call them Team A) in league play twice and had beat them.  Sometime during the season they had decided not to play another team (let’s call them Team B) for fear of losing. When they didn’t show up for this game, it was rightfully counted as a forfeit against them.  They protested the forfeit at the end of the season and somehow, for reasons that seem hard to justify, won the appeal. The way the points are calculated...it affected our standing...although it had nothing to do with our team's performance.

My initial reaction was one of anger!

The decision was not "fair." My boys were the only ones in the league that had lost just one game and had, in fact, beat these "winners" twice in league play, but there is something more important than "fair."

As I processed and prayed about this, I realized that although frustrating, this was a great life learning lesson for my boys.

Our team had worked hard the entire season (and the team that was now the winner had tried and succeeded in unethical behavior)...it was not "fair" in any way.

But let's ask...what is fair? Should the focus of our life be winning and fairness?

Is it fair that parents must bury their children, or that you lose your entire home in a fire? Is it fair that some children always seem to have enough to eat and others go to bed hungry nearly every night?

The list of things that seem really unfair (against a soccer title) just really doesn’t compare.

In fact...the Bible is full of unfairness.

I wonder what Jesus' best friends (the disciples) thought when the Apostle Paul was chosen to have such a great responsibility in proclaiming the gospel? Wasn’t he the one who had hunted down Christians to be killed?

It was just not “fair!" Even with his remorse, the fair thing would be that his position would be minor. He should be reminded and pay for his transgressions for the rest of his life. 

Yet somehow he wrote 13 of the 27 books in the New Testament (this is almost TRIPLE the number of books written by Moses). Leading many missionary journeys that took him to Asia Minor, Syria, Greece, Italy, Spain, Britain, and elsewhere...he is essentially responsible for bringing Christianity to all of us non-Jews.

God does not seem very concerned about fairness. His “fair” is not ours. In fact, I’m quite confident His plan is far better than our version of “fair.”

When I stood up at the end of the season event to congratulate our boys, I didn’t have any Super League Winning Medals to pass out.

All I could give them was this advice, “Life may not seem fair but there are things much bigger than winning Super League titles. It’s about being excellent at what you do both on and off the field and knowing the truth about what you have accomplished...that can never be taken from you.”

I hope in some ways this lesson has much longer-lasting value than a Super League medal.

I am proudly the coach of the U15 Boys Super League Runner Up. 

 

December 1 - Celebrating Our 13 year Anniversary

Thanks to some amazing friends who stayed with our girls for two nights...we were able to spend some time away for our 13 year anniversary. We've decided marriage gets better every year!