Grace Baptist Church

This is a question that I think all kids at some point ask, and most parents dread to answer. Amidst fanciful tales of flying reindeer and abominable snow monsters (or elves that want to be dentists) I wanted to dig deeper to see if I could find any shreds of truth behind our culture’s favorite Christmas icon. Read More

I was running late for church one morning and couldn’t find the dress pants that went with the shirt I wanted to wear. Finally, I located them and went to the door to put on my shoes when I stepped in something wet. One of the cats had left a surprise by the door! The loose stool not only soaked my sock, but was smeared all over the leg of the pants I had worked so hard to find! I was furious! Read More

While vacationing in the Adirondacks this summer, my family and I had the opportunity to drive to the top of Whiteface Mountain, one of the tallest peaks in that region. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and the visibility from the summit that day was over 50 miles. Before we reached the top though, we pulled off at a scenic overlook. There I happened to take a picture of my son Brendon standing on a large stone with the mountain in the back ground. At that point we still had around 1000 ft. of elevation to climb before we reached the peak. Looking back at my pictures from that afternoon though, it amuses me to see how from the angle of the picture, Brendon appears twice as tall as the mountain, and the stone he was standing on, as big as the mountain Read More

We hear the term “Fake News” a lot these days, typically in regards to some news report that makes one political group look worse than another. Wikipedia describes “Fake news” as “propaganda that consists of deliberate disinformation,” often “used to cast doubt upon legitimate news from an opposing political standpoint, …” Though the term “Fake News” may just recently have come in vogue in American culture, “Fake News” is not a new phenomenon. Read More

As our nations’ capital remains in gridlock, and many government employees face the fallout of a record long partial government shutdown, our dairy farmers are staggering amidst the fallout of four years of low milk prices. My job as a veterinarian brings me into the barns of dairy farmers all across western New York State, and it is nothing new for the conversation to land on the milk price. This is not surprising, since 2019 marks the fourth year in a row that many of the farms that I service have been losing money daily, and there is no indication that this trend will change anytime soon! 

Read More

I called home from work recently to see how my wife and our kids were doing. My wife’s reply was “I think I have the plague!” I guess I should not have been surprised, because the weekend before, after my son’s band concert, our family along with a bunch of relatives had met for a late night dinner a Denny’s restaurant. While the waitress was taking our order, our three year old daughter, without prior warning, turned to my wife, said her belly did not feel good, and then immediately proceeded to vomit all over my wife (profuse and seemingly unending)!  Read More

Do you ever find that your mood changes with the weather? There is something about sunshine that seems to naturally lift our spirits and something about rainy days that is a little depressing. As someone whose job it is to harvest crops though, there is more to the discouragement of raining days than just an alteration in my body’s melatonin level; I can’t combine when it is raining and I need multiple days of sunshine to dry out most of the crops that I harvest!  Read More

At the mention of Halloween, most people think of kids having fun dressing up and collecting as much candy as they can. It is a time to have some extra fun with hay rides and haunted houses. Dusk comes early and there is ample opportunity to enjoy being scared of what is imagined to be in the dark. Yet, is there more to Halloween than just fun, games, and wild imaginations? Is there really something lurking in the shadows that we can’t see? Read More

Seventeen years ago, on a picture perfect September morning, four planes took off into the beautiful blue morning sky never to return to an airport again. Nineteen men aboard these planes were set on a suicide mission to use these jets, full of passengers, as weapons of mass destruction against innocent civilians. Three planes hit their mark, one into each tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, NY, completely destroying the towers, and one into the Pentagon in Washington D.C. The fourth plane crashed into the Western Pennsylvania countryside. Almost 3000 people lost their lives that fateful day in September, in one of the most egregious acts of aggression our country has ever seen. It seemed as if we all suffered loss that infamous day, if not the loss of a friend or loved one, then the loss of naivety and a sense of security. Though terrorism was nothing new around the world, that day it became real to those of us who call the United States home. Shortly thereafter, a new phase arose in our nation’s vocabulary- “The War on Terror;” a war that has continued for seventeen years and still seems to have no end in sight.

Read More

It was a beautifully bright sunny and hot late July morning in 2017. The heavy morning dew had recently evaporated away by the heat of the sun. It was time to resume harvesting wheat, and I had no time to spare. You see, for the past couple of weeks it seemed that just about every time the wheat was dry enough to combine, it rained. The wheat was starting to sprout because of all the rain, and it needed to get out of the field and into a dry bin. As was typical for this season, the forecast for this particular day was chance of showers in the early afternoon, and I still had two other farmers counting on me to harvest their wheat after I finished this job! To top it all off, we were missing our lake side camping reservations in the Adirondack mountains, and my wife and kids were waiting for me to finish combining so that we might be able to salvage at least part of our vacation (on a dryer, “normal” year, wheat harvest would have been finished a couple weeks earlier). Read More