Monday mid morning i received a whatsapp message from my wife, tbV: How quickly can you make it to Wynberg by train?

The answer, as it turned out, was pretty quickly… within forty five minutes she was picking me up and dropping me at The Warehouse where she offices.

Within about another thirty, lunch break was over and i found myself studying as part of the LUT group.

i’m not gonna lie, i just had to google LUT to make sure what it stands for: Leadership for Urban Transformation

KNEE-DEEP IN STUDY WATERS

Let me be honest here. i am not one of those people who is automatically magnetically pulled towards study. In fact i would go as far as saying i was ‘study adverse’ – it gets in the way of my laziness and procrastination…

But the LUT course is one i have had my eye on for the last year, despite not knowing exactly what all the letters stood for.

Because i was super jealous – the good kind – the wow-that-is-so-super-cool kind – of last year’s LUT group which contained a whole bunch of my favourite people… in fact if i could have been part of last year’s group i think i would have happily even studied ‘Pineapple and raiSINs on pizza: a doctorate study’. It was THAT good a group.

And i heard of some of the challenging conversations and uncomfortability as they wrestled with theology and cities. And people who were doing the course kept telling me just how great it was. Life-transforming. i don’t think i’ve heard a collective group of people that excited about study.

HERE I AM

Val and i had both been thinking about it last year and whether we could afford it and should we both do it and then it had somehow gotten quiet and we hadn’t heard any more. This past weekend we were away with Heidi who had done the course last year and at one point i almost asked her if she knew when it was starting this year, but it felt like it was too late and i had missed it.

Gifts are one of my love languages, according to the Gary Chapman scale of Love Languages [gifts, words of encouragement, touch, acts of service, time], and probably my number one… and it’s a joked about fact that Val would not list gift-giving [at least to me] as her strong suit although she does have a gift for telling me about amazing gifts she didn’t get me… and she has definitely gotten it right well on a number of occasions… but that phone call and later lift to the Warehouse and having spoken to the LUT crew to see if they could squeeze me in [as it started Monday morning so i missed the Intro session] will go down as one of the best gifts ever. The irony of this being her birthday week [it’s TOMORROW – make sure you message her!]

So from a week of magazine article deadlines and Race with me videos that now won’t be happening [the articles will, the video not] and a really great Hashtagging game planned [will happen, but largely without me] i have been thrust into an intensive week folllowed by a big pile of reading and a daunting assignment…

…and strangely enough, I LOVE IT!

After just two days i am super stoked. Today we are doing a drive around the city of Cape Town to get a feel for the layout of the land, including a stop at one of my favourite cafes – Jou Ma Se Kombuis in Mannenberg – and we have a really great group that includes some of my favourite people and some people i’ve been wanting to spend more time with. As well as two great facilitators in Stephan de Beer and Selina Headley [who were both contributors at the recent Justice Conference, which was an incredible gift my wife helped give to South Africa].

So bring it on study time. Laziness and procrastination, you’re going to have to wait for me… also, the rest of you are going to have to create your own controversies for just a few days…

[LUT is a five week intensive certificate course run through the University of Pretoria where the five weeks are about six weeks apart and in between them you are doing readings and assignments]