A God Planned Meetup

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This past weekend I had the most incredible experience. But let me start at the beginning...

A couple of months ago, my friend and mentor since 2007, Darrel Hofland, told me that he was planning on moving to the UK in October this year. I knew that we would need to plan a meet-up before he left as it might be a while before we had the opportunity to see each other again.

Darrel has been living in Somerset West so I decided to try and visit him there. I tried to book tickets to fly there from Pietermaritzburg, but none of our available weekends linked up.

We then found out that we would both be in Knysna at the same time in July and planned to meet-up there. Unfortunately, my ouma passed away that week and we had to postpone our trip.

He told me that he would be coming to Durban the week before he left for the UK which is closer to us, but I had already fully booked myself and had no way to get down to Durbs in time.

We realized that we only had one last chance to meet up and it would have to be in the UK next week while my family is there on a brief holiday (more on that later).

Needless to say, we've both been quite upset about the whole ordeal.

This past weekend, Mel and I joined a couple of our friends at Lake Eland near Port Shepstone. While we were chilling next to the lake on Sunday afternoon, someone cycled past us who looked extremely familiar. It took a second or two to overcome my shock and realize it was Darrel!

I couldn't believe it. I was absolutely flabbergasted. Lake Eland is 2 and a half hours from Pietermaritzburg and over an hour away from where Darrel stays on Toti. What are the chances that we would both randomly be at the same place at the exact same moment after trying so hard to meet up for most of the year? And we almost didn't even go to the Lake that afternoon...

It truly was a God planned meetup as Darrel described it.

It was such a great time catching up with one of my closest friends and enjoying life with him again.

Often we try so hard to plan our lives and then we get disheartened when those plans don't work out. But we forget to be thankful for the God-moments that we don't plan. I am so grateful for this God planned meetup!


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