The sounds of swords clashing was all that could be heard. General Maximus, a brilliant warrior in his fifties, was slaying the opposing army’s men, like a lion with a blade, deadly, fast, and cunning. General Maximus’ army were defending the gates of Rome, 32 AD.

He looked into the eyes of a fresh faced warrior, not much more than 20 years old. Spears were flying around them, blood everywhere. This duel reminded him of another battle with a general when Maximus was in his forties – the day he became a Roman General. Suddenly, reality came back when Maximus’ sword flew out of his hand. ‘This young one has overpowered me’, Maximus thought as he fell to his knees…

By Leal

All you could hear was “aagh” and “I’m dying” as centurion Gleateus and his crew were gaining ground and beating the Germans.

Gleatues’ face was as red as hot chilly pepper as he quickly slayed his sword to save himself. His feet clambered up and down as he killed the closest enemy like a great leader…

By Nick

Matthew 8:5-17

When Jesus entered Capernaum, a centurion approached him and appealed to him, saying, ”Lord, my servant is lying at home paralyzed, suffering dreadfully.”  

He said to him, “I will come and cure him.”

The centurion said in reply, ”Lord, I am not worthy to have you enter under my roof; only say the word and my servant will be healed. For I too am a man subject to authority, with soldiers subject to me. And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and to another, ‘Come here,’ and he comes; and to my slave, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”

When Jesus heard this, he was amazed and said to those following him, ”Amen, I say to you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith. I say to you, many will come from the east and the west, and will recline with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob at the banquet in the Kingdom of heaven, but the children of the Kingdom will be driven out into the outer darkness, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.”

And Jesus said to the centurion, ”You may go; as you have believed, let it be done for you.” And at that very hour his servant was healed.

Jesus entered the house of Peter, and saw his mother-in-law lying in bed with a fever. He touched her hand, the fever left her, and she rose and waited on him.

When it was evening, they brought him many who were possessed by demons, and he drove out the spirits by a word and cured all the sick, to fulfill what had been said by Isaiah the prophet:

He took away our infirmities and bore our diseases.

The Daily Path: How is it that a Roman Centurion, someone of great stature and essentially an enemy of Jews and Christians alike, could display one of the greatest acts of faith ever chronicled? Yet for me, someone who professes to love the Lord, the ability to always hand my burden over to God with complete faith remains such a challenge. 

Room to Chat: Lord, please hold Dominika close in the days ahead as she resumes the battle with cancer. Take away this infirmity for with You all things are possible.

Bangalore Royal Challengers x Rajasthan Royals

It was a new pitch at Super Sports Park, Centurion and Shane Warne elects to field first, hoping to take advantage of the moisture in the pitch.  As often his bowlers and fielders did a fantastic job and limited Royal Challengers to 105. It was a nothing total. RC played without spirit, their batsmen fell one after another. It was almost like they were not too interested in playing the game. Maybe they were just in to watch the second match b/w Chennai and Punjab.  

Amit Singh, Man of the Match, once again bowled wonderfully well for Rajasthan. He got another four-for in his consecutive match. Pitch was initialy conjusive to seam bowlers, giving them good bounce and lateral movement. Amit Singh and Morne Morkel, playing his fist match of the season, extracted maximum out of the damp wicket. Ravindra Jadeja chip in with some crucial breaks, including that of Boucher, who could have held the inning in the middle overs.

Rajasthan’s Chase was very easy. They finished the match in the 15th over.  Naman Ojha came out with a cool inning. He was well supported by Smith and Yusuf Pathan. Apart from a horrible mix-up with Ojha and Carseldine, chase was pretty smooth for Rajasthan. It was one of their easiest victory of the season so far.

Chennai Super Kings x Kings IX Punjab

Dhoni won the toss and elects to bat first. It was a surprising decision given that there was a high chance of rain interruption. The rain did interfere once in the inning, but luckily for Chennai, it was a day of their batsmen.

Chennai lost Badrinath in the first ball of the day, but that did not deter Mathew Hayden and Suresh Raina fom doing their daily job – hitting the bowlers of the park on a consistant basis. I felt poor for SreeSanth who particularly came under fire from Mathew Hayden. It seems he is really enjoying his life after international cricket. Life without pressure will bring out the best in you..going by what Hayden is doing in this season. Suresh Raina just continued from the previous innings that he played against Kolkata. He was matching Hayden shot-by-shot. Both Hayden and Raina tops the TOP-RUN-GETTER list in the IPL season 2. That shows Chennai Super Kings domination over others when it comes to batting.

Raina fell to Chawla in midwicket boundary, but Punjab did not realise they were being getting out of frying pan into the fire. Mahendra Singh Dhoni came in and joined Hayden in decapitulating the Punjab bowlers. Its been long that I have seen Dhoni bat like this. It was crazy. At one stage, each over was costing 20+ on a consistent basis. It was sad to see Hayden getting out at 87, falling 13 short of his first century of the IPL. He definitely deserved a century for his heroics with the bat. 

Punjab just did not look like chasing down Chennai’s mammoth total. No team will find it easy to chase a total down when their Required Rate is over 10 from the outset.  Spectators had their money worth watching Chennai bat for 18 overs. What they got from Punjab inning was real bonus. Initially it was Katch who started to target Chennai bowlers. He particularly enjoyed hitting bowlers over the short-side boundaries. One special thing about Katich’s shots were they were’nt hard hitting. It was minimum of efforts for Maximum result. Just too cute to see a proper opener playing proper classical shots… making huge runs at the top of the inning. Finally when he fell to a short-pitch from Balaji, he had a strike rate of 200 with 50 runs against his name.

Yuvraj seems to like the wickets of South Africa very much. He was in murderous mood. He is definitely the best shot-maker in the cricket today. He has the typical eligance associated with a left-hander and awesome power with silken timing. He just did not allow any bowler to settle down. Even lights of Muralidhan and Jakati went out of the ground as Yuvraj start to gunning for the Chennai target. He got a life at long-on when MS Gony spilled an easy chance to grab him cheaply. Chennai paid a huge price for that spilled oppurtunity.

IPL matches are all about LUCK and that drop catch by Gony was all Yuvraj needed at that time. He and Jayawardene counter attacked with panache. Yuvraj with this muscles and Jayawardene with this timing took Punjab to the brink of a famous IPL victory. None of the Chennai bowlers looked sharp. Only aberration was Tyagi who did not bowl to either Yuvraj or Jayawardene for some strange reason.

Finally it came to a masterstroke bowling change by “captain cool”. Dhoni brought on Suresh Raina. It was a match changer. Raina with his “delayed” slowish balls, negated the momentum on the ball – making it very difficult for the batsmen to hit him out of the boundary. His two overs really changed the match. When Balaji came into bowl the final over, target was 24. Even though Jayawardene hit the first ball for a boundary, everybody knew it was a task bit too large even for in-form Yuvraj and Jayawardene at that point of time.

A fellow historian recently attended an aging conference in Switzerland, where she learned that, in Germany alone, there are over 10,000 residents over the age of 100.  One of them was quoted as saying, “I stopped worrying about my children when they entered rest homes.”

Who is your oldest relative?  What is his or her earliest memory that you find really interesting?

Today my grandmother, Carrie,  is 100 years old today. This past weekend I went back to my hometown to be with her and celebrate her life. This milestone has certainly made me think about all the growth, life and changes that my grandmother has experienced. 100 years. What a difference that can make. My grandmother has lived a rather cloistered life in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. And yet the  world she knew in her teens or early adulthood has shifted so greatly, spiraling around her nest, a sky of changing colors around her very defined world. I think about what life was like for her when she was my age. And then I think what life could be like when I am her age (yes, I think we should all plan to live as long as my grandmother).  How much the world changed in this time–both the hard world and the world of thought and action. Is there any way to prepare for “the world or tomorrow?” I think about my grandmother and the 10 children she gave birth to, the many concerns and personal trials she must have faced–yet she moved on. There is a grace and carefulness about her that I seldom see in my day-to-day life. Pehaps this comes with age. At the same time I see a playfulness and confidence that few twenty-somethings display within this little woman. I look at this picture of Carrie, my grandmother, on her wedding day (she was 15 years old) and I see in her all the power, fear and hope that rests in all of  us. We don’t know what the next 100 years will hold. Really, we don’t know what the next 5 years will hold. What we can know is how we will approach it. Head on. With the eyes and fearlessness of a strong, gentle woman like Carrie.

The Record has run two front page articles on the Waltloo Testing Station.

While I am happy to say my daughter passed her license at Waltloo yesterday, the process lead to my watching what happens at the Centurion Testing Centre for many hours. Its just as bad as or worse than the Waltloo situation.

I have written various reports, which I have emailed to the City of Tshwane Customer Care Centre (in 5 separate emails to which I have not even had a single acknowledgement) and a number of other employees of Tshwane Municipality. Other than one response that probably raised more questions that it answered I have not made any progress.

What I can assure everyone is that I am not going to give up on this as it so clearly contradicts the City of Tshwane Customer Care commitment

which amongst others states:

Unfortunately they don’t deliver on any of these points.

    In Matamoros, Mexico, on this Good Friday, the plaza is full of people watching the Via Crucis enacted before our very eyes. This passion play has been reenacted annually for well over a thousand years, yet it is still charged with emotion and meaning. A young man is beaten and hung to a wooden cross directly in front of the giant Catholic church, while centurions with over-sized helmets look on and a voice recants the Gospel narrative. Offstage, a woman cries in the heat of the day. In the crowd, everyone of us has forgotten our sunglasses, the glare off the tops of police cars, the smell of elotes and raspas nearby – all of us are focused on this ultimate story of redemption.

    I enter the cool of the church, my mind filled with memories of Easters past. The palpable memory of gumming the bread and swirling the grape juice around in my mouth, newly cognizant that these elements of the Communion represented the body and blood of a man 2,000 years ago. These memories from almost 20 years ago come back to me, just as I am sure memories came to Mary as she stood at the foot of the cross. My eyes adjust to the lighting within this cathedral. Mary is at the front of the church, head down in mourning for her son lofted up on the cross. I bow my head and am overcome with the feeling of hopelessness that must have swept over the disciples. What if this were the end? What if the kingdom of God ended on Friday and was never followed by that joyous Sunday?

    Tears drying on my sunburned cheeks, I sit in the plaza reading Why We Can’t Wait by Dr. King under a gazebo. Tamale vendors, shoe-shiners, whistling chiflado kids, men selling sweet dulces. As I read these words I have read before in a new context, I am struck by its perspective on Jesus’ death that Friday so long ago. King writes,

    Suddenly the truth was revealed that hate is a contagion; that it grows and spreads as a disease; that no society is so healthy that it can automatically maintain its immunity…The words of Jesus ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of my brethren, ye have done it unto me’ were more than a figurative expression; they were a literal prophecy…We were all involved in the death of [this man]. We tolerated hate; we tolerated the sick stimulation of violence in all walks of life; and we tolerated the differential application of law, which said that a man’s life was sacred only if we agreed with his views…We mourned a man who had become the pride of the nation, but we grieved as well for ourselves because we knew we were sick.” (145)

Fresh meaning to this Gospel story I’ve read hundreds of times. In Jesus’ day, just as in our own, the poor and the stranger were being exploited by those in power. To the extent that people of faith tolerate this immoral profiting from the pain of others, we are condoning hate and the hurt of the least of these. If Jesus is present in the least of these, we must recognize his face in every stranger, legal or extralegal, every person, regardless of race. When we give into the fear and hate of our fellow man, the passion of Christ happens once more.

    The best definition of sin that I’ve ever heard is an “absence of God.” For those 3 days while Jesus lay entombed, the whole world was stuck in this negative peace without the very Son of God. In this Plaza Mayor, it occurs to me that the word for without in Spanish is sin. Without. Without.

It must be a sin that so many of these men and women around me here in this border town of close to 500,000 are without basic necessities and without hope of fair wages. Without.

It is surely sin that when these people come looking for a better life in the United States they are refused legal means, repeatedly denied family reunification, and queued in a quota system that can take from 10 years to never. Without.

It cannot be anything but a sin that 12-20 million U.S. residents live without papers, without protection of law, without insurance, without welfare, without legal protection, without basic human rights, without a means to earned citizenship. Without.

It is a shameful sin that so many bright students of mine look at a bleak future, unsure of whether they will have the right documents to attend the best universities in this country, schools they have earned the academic right to attend. Without.

May we all use these 3 days leading up to that blessed Resurrection Sunday to think of those around us who are “without.” As James 4:17 so clearly states, “Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins.” If we know the good which needs to be done, if we see the calling of God in the strangers around us, if we recognize the face of Jesus in our neighbor and do nothing, our lives are sin- sin meaning, sin purpose, sin faith, sin love, sin the chance to bring the hope of Sunday to the “least of these,” or ourselves.