Today is our Sabbath, a day of rest and reflection, a day for unwinding and rewinding. A time for replaying some of the week’s favorite scenes and thanking, praising the Author of life for showing epiphanies and organizing ambushes. And also for being a great Teacher and Leader…

Suzette (who started a blog) asked us to look after her cat, Whisky. Our assignment was really easy, feed the cat on Tuesday. Tuesday was an especially cold day for South Africa and on top of that Lollie was sick in bed. At 11pm I realized that we haven’t fed the cat! “No problem”, I thought, “I’ll feed the cat early on Wednesday, Suzette will never know.”

Early Wednesday morning I drove to Suzette’s house, I deactivated the beam that scans her yard, opened the automatic garage door and drove in. When I unlocked her security door and opened the front door, an alarm went off. “That’s weird”, I thought to myself “Which house’s alarm’s going off?” When I entered the house I realized that it was Suzette’s alarm … I ran to the keypad and punched the code in “2664” (don’t worry it’s not the real code).

The alarm switched off and then it dawned on me that my cover with Suzette would be blown. She will know that I didn’t feed the cat on Tuesday because the security company would phone any minute now and ask for an additional code … If you can’t give them that code, then they send armed men. As my brain went over this fact the phone ran. I answered and explained to the lady on the other side and told her that “I was only feeding a friend’s cat.” She told me that she doesn’t care about that and wanted the code. “Hold on”, I said and phoned Suzette with my cell phone. Suzette gave me the code and my lie jumped out of the closet.

After I fed the cat I confessed to God my attempt to deceive and impress Suzette, and later in the evening I told her all about it. I must say that “Impression Management” is a huge struggle for me.

The rest of the week was rich with our church praying on Wednesday (I’ll post some more about that), premarital counseling dinner on Thursday. And today a wonderful Sabbath; we phoned our very good friends in California, Tom April and Ethan Hook. My heart is bursting with thanksgiving. God is amazing. Shalom.