First Covenant Church has grown by two little sets of feet!  Addison Diemer was born to Sara and Eric on Wednesday, and Zane Doremus was born to Kim and Cody on Friday.  Please keep both families in your prayers as babies, parents, and siblings all get used to the “new normal” in their homes...

Stress is a funny thing.  It can give you headaches, it can raise your blood pressure, it can precipitate heart attacks and strokes, and it can even make you gain weight.  It can make you snap at the people who love you, it can make you jump to conclusions that you shouldn’t, and it can make you stare up at the ceiling when what you really need to do is sleep so that you’re at your best when you need to be...

I realize that several of you are already bemoaning the cooler weather, but please understand that, for a lot of us, Autumn is our favorite time of year.  So basically, I’m loving the dropping temperatures.  I will, however, miss the regular crop of fresh tomatoes from our garden...

We had a great day in the Lord this Sunday!  Working backwards, a number of us went out to lunch and had a wonderful time interacting over a meal together, enjoying good fellowship.  Let me encourage everyone to join us this coming Sunday for our monthly Brown-Bag-It lunch in the Fellowship Hall downstairs after the service, because it’s so important to be able to spend quality time together as a family -- even a church family...

Thank you so much for the time off for our family vacation -- we had a great time of fun, rest, and relaxation, but it’s also good to be back home with everyone that we love.  We made it a point to kind of drop off the face of the planet for two weeks and enjoy swimming, caving, and snuggling in large chunks of time...

Man, everyone is still more or less fried from VBS, but it was totally worth it.  But my family is going on vacation for the next two weeks, so we should have plenty of time to rest up and recuperate from all of the fun and excitement...

We had a wonderful week at our Vacation Bible School here at First Covenant Church!  We had the most volunteer workers that we’ve ever had for a VBS -- which turned out to be crucially important, since A) we also ended up with a record number of children in attendance, and B) several of our VBS workers developed major issues at the last minute...

Today was our first day of this year’s Vacation Bible School, and everyone seems to be holding up okay.  Well, Kristi’s cold is leaving her ears plugged up and her throat raspy, so she’s fielding her share of “deaf-mute” issues today (and, for that matter, the silly voice that I’m doing in the Finale each day kinda leaves my own throat a little sore), but other than that, we’re doing okay so far...

We’re in the home stretch of preparing for our annual Vacation Bible School here at First Covenant!  Due to last-minute health and family issues, several of our key leadership positions have just suddenly switched around, so please be praying for leaders who are now suddenly preparing for completely different duties than they’d originally planned to be in charge of.  On the plus side, everyone’s going to come at things from a decidedly fresh perspective...

Before I forget, let me retroactively wish all of you reading this a Happy Independence Day!  Hopefully, you had the opportunity to blow things up (or at least watch things being blown up) in honor of our freedom here in America.  We often take that freedom for granted -- especially freedom of religion -- and tend to forget the value of things that we take for granted...

Welcome to Summer!  (Note: I’m writing this on an overcast day whose temperatures are the lowest in the past month, so I think that the people who are labeling the seasons are clearly confused -- in fact, we got a hailstorm on Monday, so I fully expect a balmy Winter to balance things out...)...

Before I forget, let me retroactively wish all of you reading this a Happy Father’s Day!  This year, we took inspiration from our Youth Group’s Mother’s Day service back in May (when they prepared a video of each of the kids sharing about their Moms) and opened the morning up for testimonies from people about their Dads (or “father figures”), and how God has used those men to bring them to where they’re at today.

I made the mistake of wishing someone a happy Summer the other day in a store, and he tersely corrected me that Summer doesn’t start until Tuesday, June 20.  So please ignore the Condition 90 temperatures and high humidity that we’ve been experiencing this week, and remind yourself that we’re still just enjoying a perky Spring...