This past week has been a wonderful relaxing week. We left our town in the mountains on wednesday and on thursday we went with all of our colleagues to an island off the coast of W.A. for a 3 day retreat. Derek and I were put in charge of watching the kids while the adults gave their reports, but we were able to sit in for song and message. It was really refreshing to not have to worry about what was going on with the club, or anything else in life, and just get away. I was able to really focus on my personal time with the Lord, I read through all of Judges,and Ruth, and am currently a few chapters into 1 Samuel. He has showed me a lot through those times, and it's been really encouraging. Derek and I did all sorts of things with the kids. We spent a lot of our time swimming, in the pool and the ocean. We also built sand castles and played tug-of-war, and played some games. My favorite thing on the islands was throwing football with Sarah and Todd, just because nobody around here seems to want to throw football that often.
We came back sunday afternoon and on monday Todd, Derek, and I went out to the Market and bought jerseys, shoes, and some other things we need for soccer and living. The market is about 6 square blocks, and has everything you could ever want. We spent a couple hours there.
The Soccer team has been really rough. Tuesday rolled around the All-Star team (90% of which were our A-team players) went to play their game and Todd and Derek went to watch the game since they weren't locals they weren't allowed to coach. About 20 minutes into the game, one of our players fouled a player from the other team, and was just walking back when the player from the other team got up and ran up behind him and jumped and kicked our player in the back, and that started a brawl in which a few people including the ref were punched. The game got called after 20 minutes and got scheduled to be replayed the following day. Wednesday, Jason and his family and the three of us single guys came down to the capital for a prayer retreat, which I will talk about later, but they teams replayed the game. This time the heads of the region, the Head of Youth and Sports Culture, and many members from the FGF (Federation G-an Football) were in attendance. We got a call after the conference to update us, and apparently on wednesday there was a bigger brawl then the game on tuesday. The fallout of that is that we most likely will not be in the 3rd Division this year, or for several years to come. Our head and assistant coach both turned in their resignation and some of the players will probably be kicked off the team, while others just leave the club altogether. So you can keep us in your prayers as we get together as coaches on Thursday to talk about everything and also pray that God will give us wisdom and patience to know how to handle everything that is going on. We don't know what will happen in the next week or so but it is possible that the African coaches both leave and the American coaches take over until we can find another African coach.
Well I gotta go,
Blessings,
Mark
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