Crystal Pools Hike

Websites about visiting Cape Town always give you the same suggestions for top tourist sites like Table Mountain, Robbin Island, and Cape Point. But to find the diamonds in the rough you have to head off the beaten path.

The Crystal Pools hike in the Steenbras Nature Reserve is an excellent day hike to escape the holiday crowds. You must pre-book your hike as they only allow 50 people per day into the reserve. And grab a hiking buddy because you need a group of 2-10 people. You can get the permit application by emailing steenbras.naturereserve@capetown.gov.za. They will reply with a tentative booking. You can then pre-pay your R69pp entrance fee electronically or by making a bank deposit. After sending proof of payment, they will then email you the official permit.

The Steenbras Nature Reserve can be reached by taking the R44 out of Gordon's Bay. Parking for the Crystal Pools trailhead is on the right hand side of the road just after you cross the bridge over the Steenbras River. Reserve employees will be at the trailhead to check your permit.

The trail is well marked most of the way, but very rocky so good hiking shoes are recommended. They say it is for medium to experienced hikers, but the hike to the lower pools is not difficult and we saw many children doing it.

The hike begins by going up and over the hill, then down into the river gorge. The trail follows the river for a short ways before taking a short cut up over another hill then back down into the gorge. Along this stretch you will find the first of the pools, Reed Pool, a long narrow pool named after the many reeds growing alongside. Feel free to take a dip here, but it's quite small in comparison to what lies ahead. I recommend pressing on to the real treasure.

Hiking through the gorge

Reed Pool

After Reed Pool you will continue along the river.  Cross a small footbridge then turn to the right and there you will find Deep Pool, another small but picturesque pool that could be a nice shady place for a break. But again, I recommend you don't waste your time swimming here, but press on.

Deep Pool in the gorge

Deep Pool

A little ways further up the trail you will see Elena's Pool off to your right. This is the lowest of the big pools and the easiest to access. Take the small unmarked path down to the right to reach the pool. Beware of large rocks just below the surface in the middle of the pool.

Elena's Pool

Waterfall at Elena's Pool

Continue back on the trail onwards and upwards to Family Pool. You will again need to descend on an unmarked path to reach the base of the pool. There are nice rocks here to lay out on in the sun. This pool is better photographed in the morning light as the afternoon sun will cast a dark shadow over the falls.

Swimming at Family Pool

After Family pool the trail gets steep and gravelly. It is still marked and maintained, but more difficult. You will continue a little further up along the mountainside until you see a steep unmarked path down to the right toward Crystal Pool.

Crystal Pool from above

Crystal Pool

After Crystal Pool the trail turns sharply upward. It is much more steep and not for the faint of heart. That's why most people stay at the lower pools. But for the brave and experienced, the Upper Pool is a nice reward. The trail will wind its way steeply through the trees and brush up the mountain side. At some points you will also need to use your hands. At one point the trail will open up and you will see a "staircase" (which also looks like a landslide) that turns steeply up the mountain. This will take you up to a viewpoint at the top. The trail is quite steep, but there are some maintained steps you can follow. At the top the trail seems to disappear and you can just find your way to a nice viewpoint. (Or you can skip the view and proceed straight to the Upper Pool.)

Steep trail up to the viewpoint

The three large pools from above

View from the top

Back down at the split off, continue straight ahead along the unmarked trail. Eventually this trail will also disappear and you need to climb your way upriver through the boulders until you find the Upper Pool. This is the end of the gorge and from here you can look up 100 feet or so and see a lovely waterfall cascading down the gorge wall. My recommendation is to make your way quickly to this pool and hit the others on the way down. If you're lucky, all the other hikers will have stopped at the pools below and you may have this pool entirely to yourself.

Upper Pool

Falls above Upper Pool

There are a few more pools higher up, but you basically have to rock climb to get there and the rocks are quite slippery if you have wet feet. This is also a popular location for repelling (absailing) tours. I hope you enjoy the hike and the swim like we did!

Bible reading plan

For many, January 1st brings thoughts of resolutions and making life adjustments. We reflect on the past year and see all the areas where our life hasn't met our expectations or desires, then we set about in our own strength to make ourselves more like we want to be. Some of those things may be related to our spiritual lives, like wanting to pray more, memorize Scripture, or reading through the Bible in a year.

Oftentimes my Bible reading can feel a bit routine, maybe because I've read that passage many times before or I don't know how it applies to my life. Or sometimes I approach my Bible reading with many other things on my mind. So one idea that has been helpful for me is reading a devotional along with my Bible. That reading helps get my mind focused on spiritual things and helps me know how it might apply to my life.

If reading a devotional could be something that's helpful for you I would recommend trying D.A. Carson's For The Love of God. His plan offers up to 4 Bible chapters to read each day, and a short one-page devotional related to one of those chapters. You can find both volumes free online at the following links:

     

OT Prophets

Many people have a hard time understanding the Old Testament prophets. They are often written in cryptic word pictures and metaphors. It’s hard to figure out if they're talking about past events, current events, or future events. But, perhaps most of all, we don’t know where or how they fit into the context of the Old Testament.

One of my fellow lecturers says that the ‘key’ to ‘unlocking’ the books of OT prophecy is the historical context, and that can often be found in the very first verse. In other words, in order to understand and interpret a particular book of prophecy we need to understand how that book fits into OT history. Thus I’ve put together the following chart to help us understand just that.

Now exact dating of OT events is notoriously difficult for various reasons. Thus the dates on the chart are just one attempt to compile the best estimates from the archeological and biblical studies of various commentators. But what we’re going for is a general sense of the context of a book, so this chart can help us succeed in that.

[Click on image for larger version]

The timeline begins on the left with the United Kingdom under King Solomon. After Solomon’s death, the tribes of Judah and Benjamin stuck with his descendants while the northern ten tribes followed Jeroboam. The yellow line follows the northern kingdom, which was called ‘Israel’. The green line follows the southern kingdom of ‘Judah’. (Occasionally two kings overlapped in a type of co-regency or power struggle.) The orange lines are the OT History books in which the above events are described.

The white colored prophets are non-writing prophets. Their messages were primarily directed to the kings. The message of the red prophets were directed primarily against other nations (Jonah and Nahum against Nineveh; Obadiah against Edom). The yellow prophets (Amos and Hosea) were directed primarily to Israel. The green prophets wrote primarily for Judah, the Jewish exiles, or the post-exilic community.

I hope this chart will be helpful for you to place the OT prophetic books in their historical context and thus understand and interpret them better.

Summer Camp

American Thanksgiving

Pretty much everything here winds to a halt in December, our summer holiday. That means all the year end celebrations happen in November. So with the last week of D-group coinciding with Thanksgiving weekend, it just made sense for us to end the year with a big American style feast. So everybody signed up to bring a dish and scoured the internet for the best American recipes. I handled the staples, the turkeys, stuffing and gravy.

As the anticipation grew and word got out, in typical African style, anybody who hears about it is invited. But isn't that what holidays are all about? Everybody should have 'family' to celebrate with where they don't need to be 'invited'.

Some pre-meal gameage

Tasty looking birds

Riko carving the birds
(now he wants an electric knife!)

Everybody chipped in to make a good lookin spread!

Been craving that drumstick since last year

We take time to share something we're thankful for.
Apparently somebody made a good joke.

The crazy Thanksgiving crew

They say all the best parties end in the kitchen

Apparently I have now created a new tradition...since clearly 2 years in a row makes something a tradition! Now everybody's already talking about Thanksgiving next year. 😁

Swakop Mission Trip

Each year at NETS we take a week out of our lecture schedule to send our students out on mission trips in various places around the country. Our purpose is two-fold: to reach out to our own population with the gospel of Jesus, and to help our students gain valuable practical ministry experience. This year we sent out four teams to Keetmanshoop, Rundu, Queen Sofia, and my team went to Swakopmund.

In Swakop we partnered with various local churches as well as just sharing the gospel with whoever we met on the street. Some of our students led Family Life workshops at two different churches, encouraging family members to treat each other with love. We met with various local pastors to both encourage them and share with them about NETS, but also to ask questions and learn from their years of experience. And on Sunday morning we participated in an ecumenical worship service including multiple churches from around the community.

"Missing the Mark" game at Youth Night

On Friday night our students organized a Youth Outreach Night and encouraged youth from various local churches to invite their friends. The evening was organized around the "wordless book" colors with a different activity focusing on each color: gold reminding us of heaven and a perfect relationship with God; black indicating sin; red pointing us to the blood of Christ; white teaching us of forgiveness and cleansing from sin; and green encouraging us to grow in our relationship with God. By the end of the night the youth had heard the whole message of the gospel!

Each day we also split up into teams of 3 to walk around the town or the beach and share the good news with whoever we came across. We would play games with children then share with them using a "wordless bracelet." Sometimes we just prayed with people. Often they were polite but disinterested, but some were open to talk. Outside the library, I was chatting with 4 young ladies who had been studying for their grade 12 exams. Their understanding of Christianity was very religious, but had little to do with their everyday lives. At one point I was encouraging them to wait for a relationship with a good Christian guy, but they told me good guys don't exist and they would rather have someone to sleep with them even if he was bad, than to feel lonely. They would rather have someone to support them and a baby even if he cheated and didn't love them, than to wait for a guy they couldn't imagine existing. I was struck by their hopelessness. They would rather cling to the temporary tangible pleasures of sin, even with lasting consequences(!), because they couldn't imagine any other option.

As I stood on a street corner a uniformed police officer came walking down the sidewalk. I chuckled to myself wondering what the police would think of what we were doing. Apparently it showed on my face because he playfully asked me, "What are you smiling about? Do you have some good news?" Again, I chuckled to myself in wonder that he would phrase it that way, and responded with an even bigger smile, "I have the best news!"

And that's exactly what those four girls couldn't understand. That gospel says that all the pain and damage of this sinful world...it doesn't have to be this way! That really is the best news of all, but some people just aren't interested. It's like C.S. Lewis said, that we would rather go on making mud pies in the slums because we can't imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.

Overall it was a great trip, not only for practical ministry experience for our students, but also as a stark reminder to me of exactly why I am here, because there are young people all across Namibia who are living and dying without hearing the true gospel.

Adulting is for Grown Ups

The morning started early on what I knew would be a long day. I stopped by the supermarket on the way to the venue to pick up some donuts for the team. Mine was the first car in the parking lot, but it turns out a few others had beaten me there and were already sweeping and wiping the dust from the chairs in the main hall. Other helpers started floating in and we gathered to pray before things got crazy. For months our small group had been planning and looking forward to hosting a conference on spiritual maturity for the young adults of Windhoek and now the day had finally arrived!

Registration started slow and we were wondering if we'd set our hopes too high. But by the end of the day we had over 120 people come, and perhaps more impressively, 29 different churches were represented!

We all gathered in the main hall to start the day with a welcome, introduction and worshipping together. Likewise, members of the worship band were from 4 different churches. In a nation where denominationalism is so divisive, it was important to us that the team on stage would represent the unity in diversity that we so value. They did a great job leading us in worship, each contributing a bit of their own style. I know some of the attendees were a bit stretched experiencing the music style of different worship leaders!

Our culture has a bit of a love affair with youth. From the 'fountain of youth' to anti-aging cream, etc., the idealism and, frankly, idolatry of youth has given growing up a bad reputation. Or to put it another way, it's given maturity a bad reputation. Yet biblical authors consistently exhort their readers not to stay in the immaturity of childhood, but to grow up in maturity (e.g., Col. 1:28; Eph 4:13; Heb. 6:1)! So in our opening session I gave an exhortation to press on to spiritual maturity. We cast a vision for what spiritual maturity could look like, thinking the way that God thinks, desiring the things that God desires. You can listen to the message here.

Immediately afterward we broke up into small groups to discuss what people took away from the message and how they could apply it to their lives. My favorite part about these discussion groups was that the leaders of those groups were members of the young adult small group that I help lead on Sunday nights. Thus what they experience on Sunday nights, now they were putting into practice themselves in these little discussion groups. And the feedback from all of them was how encouraging and confidence-building it was! Some of the attendees also commented how this was one of their favorite parts of the conference.

Small group discussion

One-on-one prayer time

Following discussion groups we had some fantastic food prepared by other members of our small group. I think some of the attendees may have just come because they heard there would be free food!

Long line for food at meal time. 

Serving lunch

Hanging out after lunch

After lunch we had two workshop slots where attendees could choose which topics to hear. These workshops were mostly focused outward, beyond ourselves. Immaturity is self-centered, but maturity looks outward to others. One workshop focused on missions and helping young people catch a passion for mission where they are, but also among the still many unreached people groups around the globe. Another focused on how to use your particular gifts and passions to start a ministry and reach others with the gospel. Another focused on understanding Islam and how to engage your Muslim friends with the gospel. But by far the most popular workshop was the one about maximizing your singleness for God's glory! I'm not entirely sure if attendees wanted to learn about seeking God's glory, or about who else in the group was single. ;)

"Using Your Gifts for Ministry: A Tale of Two Gamers"

"Mission is on God's Mind. And Yours?"

Another highlight of the day was the Panel Discussion with all the speakers of the day. Attendees had written down questions which were then posed to the panel to hear their thoughts. There were many insightful questions regarding topics of the day like singleness and marriage, dealing with lust, pursuing spiritual maturity, and more. One of the highlight quotes regarding singleness and dating was, "Don't start cooking until you're ready to eat!" But perhaps the greatest applause and cheers came when one workshop speaker mentioned that his wife was the one who proposed to him!

After another round of small groups and dinner, we closed off the day with a last main session. The worship team again led us well in worship. Then our final talk considered the idea that 'adulting is hard.' Pressing on to spiritual maturity is hard because Jesus asks some really hard things of us. Putting fleshly desires to death is hard. Loving God more than we love the things of this world is hard. Yet it's worth it because, like the saints in Hebrews 11, we're not home yet. We're still looking forward to our reward. You can listen to this message here.

Overall it was a fantastic day where young people experienced diverse Christian community and were challenged to continue their spiritual growth. We got lots of great feedback about the day, including descriptions like "life-changing" and "in season." Most people were even asking when the next one will be! Clearly we found a niche where God's Word is desired. Please pray for us as we continue to make ourselves available to help meet that need.

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