Family, Seminary, and Matt Damon

Hello all!

Sorry for the delay since my last post! Things have been going well and it has been an exciting few weeks since my last post.

My Valentine's Day was pretty special, with my family arriving for a week-long vacation. Mom, Dad, Brent and Sarah arrived that day, and we had a great week! We really did about as much as you can do in a week, including all the touristy things, helping out at my ministry projects, and meeting some of the people I live and work with regularly here. It was great to have them here and be able to show them all the things that they are always hearing about. So that was a great week.

Also, as many of you know, I applied to seminary back in December after discovering that calling. Well, I found out a couple of weeks ago that I was accepted! So I will be starting seminary in the fall at McAfee School of Theology (Mercer Univ.) in Atlanta, working towards a Master of Divinity degree. I'm pretty excited! So that helped finish off February as a very exciting month!

Saturday was the Cape Argus bike race, which is the largest bike race in the world...35,000 people ride in it...and it does the entire Cape peninsula (110km). So we went to watch it, since it is such a big deal and we had a couple of friends riding in it. Well, we found out afterwords that Matt Damon was in it! Apparently he was riding a tandem bike with his brother. How crazy! We found out later that he is here with Morgan Freeman and Clint Eastwood filming a movie about the 1995 SA Rugby team and Morgan Freeman is playing Nelson Mandela and Matt Damon is playing the big rugby star. Apparently he and the rugby star that he is playing, Francois Pienaar, decided to ride in the race for a charity...so they did, and Matt was riding tandem with his brother. So we actually saw him...since we saw all the tandem riders (they were in a group) but we didn't know he was in it or to be looking for him so we didn't know that we saw him. Pretty crazy! It would have been cool to actually see him and know it...but, oh well...

The Music Academy continues to move forward. We've actually hit a wall with this first approach to the academy and therefore we are beginning to move into 'Phase 2'. This second approach will be to actually get involved into the schools and do very basic, large group, music classes during the breaks in the school day. From those large groups we can then create smaller classes based on age and ability to do the more focused classes. We are pretty excited about it, since it should be a much more effective approach that will also involve A LOT more kids, which is great. So, things are moving forward and continue to be exciting and encouraging. I've also been able to do some 1-on-1 lessons with Basil, doing some voice and guitar lessons, which have been great. He has such an amazing voice for a 13 year old, and is quite gifted, so its fun to be able to work with him some.

Well, that's about it for now. Like I said, it's been an exciting month. These remaining few weeks will go by quickly, but I'm looking forward to seeing what will happen.

Hope everyone is doing very well!

Cheers!