Page 34 - Dainfern Precinct Living Issue 8 2024

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

AMAZING GATES

B Y PETER S T OFFBERG

Family Church Ladies’ Retreat
Created for Purpose
t used to be no more than a weak joke,
teasing residents of areas that were a tad too
far outside our comfort zone, that we needed
a passport to visit them. Now it’s not so funny.
Gone are the days, too, when it was simply
a case of providing details and awaiting our OPTION 1 | R 1000
host’s confirmation. Now, we need to scan our 2 People sharing
Idriver’s license, vehicle disk, fingerprints, eyes ensuite bathroom (shower)
and perhaps even a spot of DNA, and that, just to get bedding is supplied
into the gated community around the corner.
OPTION 2 | R 1000
Access control is everywhere and it’s getting more 3 - 6 People sharing
ensuite family room
complicated. We wish it wasn’t necessary but we’re 3 bunk beds (shower)
probably all grateful for its protection, even as we’re (only 4 rooms available)
constantly striving to make it more efficient and bedding is supplied
effective. It’s nothing new either. Walls and gates
have been around for as long as humans have been OPTION 3 | R920
plagued by the desire to take stuff that doesn’t belong 6 People sharing
to them – longer actually. In 2003, Peter Agre was communal bathrooms (shower),
awarded the Nobel prize for identifying and describing DATE 3 bunk beds
gates that have always existed in biological cell walls. 2pm Fri 13 Sept please bring your own bedding
to
Cell walls keep undesirables out while these gates let VENUE BOOKINGS
pure water molecules in. Agre identified these gates 4pm Sat 14 Sept Caryn Andrews 082 3355046
Good News
as a family of proteins, now called Aquaporins. They Convention Centre caryn@andrewsacademy.co.za
are essential to the existence of plants, animals and
bacteria. Their design is ingenious and supremely College Road, Ephesians 2:10
efficient. God makes awesome stuff. Each gate Nooitgedacht “For we are God’s handiwork,
admits thousands of millions of water molecules per Muldersdrift created in Christ Jesus to do good works,
second and nothing impure gets past them. They which God prepared in advanced
for us to do.”
restrict access based on what’s actually coming
through, not on how it’s behaving, or what it appears
to be. What we’ve done, is merely evidence of what we are
(Matthew 25:31-46).
There’s another set of gates that are also the subject
of jokes, the so-called Pearly Gates. There, after we He shows us that by faith in Him and what He’s done
die, we are supposedly welcomed or refused eternal for us, He transforms us into a new creation (John
access based on whether our good outweighs our 3:1-21), one specifically designed for eternal life with
bad. This idea may have been derived from the Bible, Him. A beloved creature that has passed from death
but is not what it teaches. Jesus teaches that we into life, one who knows that we are undeserving
enter into an eternal loving relationship with God and guilty of awful offences against God and others,
based on what we are, not on what we’ve done.
imperfect, but humbly yearning for perfection. A
creature who knows that God, by His grace, will
eventually completely purify us. Eternal paradise is
only a paradise if there is nothing impure in it. Thank
God that by His grace, He’s made a real way for us to
enter, not through a gate, but through a person, His
perfect and pure son, Jesus Christ.

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32 DPL issue 8 2024