1. The will of God is always best and shall be done forever; and they who trust in Him are blest; He will forsake them never. He helps indeed in time of need; He chastens with forbearing. They who depend on God, their friend, shall not be left despairing. 2. God is my comfort and my trust, my hope and life abiding; and to His counsel, wise and just, I yield, in Him confiding. The very hairs, His Word declares, upon my head He numbers. By night and day God is my stay; He never sleeps nor slumbers. 3. Lord, this I ask, o hear my plea, deny me not this favor: when Satan sorely troubles me, then do not let me waver. O guard me well, my fear dispel, fulfill Your faithful saying: all who believe by grace receive an answer to their praying. 4. When life’s brief course on earth is run and I this world am leaving, grant me to say, “Your will be done,” Your faithful Word believing. My dearest Friend, I now commend my soul into Your keeping; from sin and hell, and death as well, by You the victory reaping.
(lsb #758)
Greetings from Pretoria,
And the time flies and I wonder where it went. And, then I wonder, what happened because I can’t really remember. The days run together with the same monotonous routine. I am so loving it. I like routine and sameness and boring, boring, boring (even though it gives me nothing to write about). However, amongst all this same boringness the Jacaranda’s are blooming adding splashes of beautiful purple to the sameness. I find myself taking detours on school runs just to drive down the streets that are lined with blooming, purple Jacaranda’s. I wish I could capture the amazing beauty of it all but I just haven’t managed it with my camera. The pictures I attached to the end of this letter will have to suffice.
To “spice” things up a bit in our life we took a quick, spontaneous trip to Kruger National Park to view African wildlife. Thanks to some friends we had two tents so everyone had a place sleep, a plug in cooler/freezer to keep our meat from going bad (the cooler plugs into the car and runs on the cars battery so we had it plugged in while we were driving around )and some amazing binoculars so that we could see the wildlife that wasn’t on the side of the road. Our goal was to see the big five (Elephants, rhino’s, lions, buffalo, and leopard) and so we did. Most people don’t get to see a leopard and I had the opportunity to see two of them. The first leopard we saw was just luck. It was at the end of 6 hours on the road seeing the same old thing. Up ahead there were a bunch of cars pulled over and people were pointing a tree. We thought it was just another owl and were going to keep going but at the last minute Glenn decided to pull over and ask someone. They pointed out a leopard sitting in a tree but could only be seen using binoculars. We all took a minute or to look through the binoculars at the behind of a leopard and thought the whole thing totally cool. The other leopard siting was on our night drive. We forked over the money and three of us went on a night drive which proved to be pretty boring with nothing to see until the end. There on the side of the road was a leopard. We could have reached over the side of the safari vehicle and touched it, thats how close we were. Unfortunately, the leopard didn’t stick around long. It was very irritated at being disturbed so it walked off into the bush. I didn’t even have time to fetch my camera out of my jacket pocket.
Some of our other close encounters involved a giraffe, a hippo, and some rhinos. Getting pretty bored with not finding anything Glenn decided to up the speed going from 20 kilometers an hour to 30. Just after hitting top speed we passed by some thick trees and startled a giraffe that was going to cross the road. We startled him and he startled us. We were very lucky that we didn’t hit him. A bit later we came up on a car just sitting in the middle of the road. It was at a standstill because two rhinos were blocking the path. They were just standing there, in the middle of road, staring down the car, daring it to go forward. After about 10 minutes the car won the stare down and the rhinos headed off into the bush. After the first leopard encounter we decided to call it a day and head back to camp. We were not going to stop for any vehicle sitting on the side of road to see what they were viewing because we had seen all we cared to see. Unfortunately, at one point a truck was stopped so Glenn slowed down to go past. We were all looking at the side of the road at the monkeys we thought the truck had stopped for. But, no, the truck had actually stopped because the people inside had spotted a hippo making its way through the bush. Just as Glenn was about to pass the truck a hippo runs out of the bush onto the road and to the other side. I’m not sure why the hippo had left the water and gone so far into the bush but he was in a hurry to get back to the water.
We also watched a hyena “following” an impala and several other hyenas were told, in no uncertain terms, that they were not strong enough to take down a giraffe. The giraffe made it clear he wasn’t worth their time so the hyenas just kept on walking. We also saw two giraffes “fighting”. We call it fighting but we aren’t sure. It was more like some sort of weird neck dance with them butting heads every once in a while. I guess there was a victor as one of the giraffes gave up and walked off to eat lunch.
Our Kruger adventure turned out well and everyone, including Glenn, had a good time. On the way home we drove up and over the “mountains” through Graskop and ate at Harry’s pancakes. I’m glad we took the extra hour to go a different way because the scenery was amazing and we learned a little more about South Africa.
On the family front, term 4 is under way. Samuel is playing water polo, Abigail is swimming, Jesse does whatever the school will offer until 2pm when I pick up the other kids and Caleb is doing gymnastics and chess. Glenn has two more weeks of classes (1 and a half by now) and exam weeks are coming up. We have less than 6 weeks to go before we head back to the U.S. for some family time (and fundraising time). We are counting down the days.
In Christ
Susan Fluegge
(Glenn, Samuel, Abigail, Caleb, Jesse, Eliana)
