Sermons and Maple Syrup

Our preacher Jamie has been working with three boys (including Jonathan) who are interested in preaching. What a gift for those boys! Phillip has also been coaching Jon along as he studied his Bible passage and had questions.

We held their sermon service Sunday night down in the church basement where our Sunday night
Bible study always meets. The crowd was more than expected though! What a blessing. Sixty-five people were there to encourage the boys.

Jackson led our music and communion time. He's currently a student at Central Christian College of the Bible. Kemper preached first (age 16). Noah was next (age 13 and a good friend of Harrison). And Jonathan preached last (18). 

Jack

Kemper

Noah

Jonathan. 

This was his first sermon. Just an excellent job. I especially loved that he used an illustration from Amos Fortune: Free Man, one of our beloved school books. 

You can watch it above.

Or go to Jon's Youtube channel and see it there. Or watch this version of the whole service. We're sure proud of all of them!

Either Pickle or Frog. I can never remember which cat is which.

This is our brave pirate Wallace. 

He lost the tip of his ear in the Arctic Blast. He's the boldest of the black kittens. He will climb up your pant leg, use your jeans to sharpen his claws, and try to get up to your shoulder. 

Phoebe has been reminiscing about the pink birthday cake she had several years as a child. So she went to the store and purchased ingredients and made one. I think it hit the nostalgia spot.

So I guess Jonathan got into tree identification because he watched a cooking video where a guy mentioned making his own maple syrup. That made Jon wonder if we might not have maples in our yard. Which led to him identifying our trees, which he found he enjoyed, so he went to other yards in town to identify those. (It's been a great Nature Study focus for his last year of school.)

It turns out we have two silver maples. 

They have a little bit lower percentage of sugar compared to sugar maples, but they can be tapped for syrup.

So it's been sugaring time around here!

The first time we got one little shot glass full which we all tasted and drank down. This time we got about 7 ounces. We have lots of trouble with wind here on the prairie, and Jon is learning a lot with having to fix all the problems he encounters. But who knew we could make our own maple syrup?

And so the days are rolling by. We're in February now. See? Winter doesn't last forever.