Grace Baptist Church

So much has changed in the last two weeks! The COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak in China, which for us was just a news headline a couple weeks ago, is now a pandemic which is directly affecting our lives in a big way. Daily, it seems, the Governor and/ or the President has released revised and increasing travel restrictions, and “social distancing has become a buzz word.” Everything from professional sports to spaghetti dinners have been cancelled. Education has all become home schooling, be it kindergarten or college. Signs of panic are seen in empty grocery store shelves from people hoarding, of all things, toilet paper! And with each passing day comes new reports of confirmed COVID-19 cases that are closer and closer to home. There is so much we don’t know about our future as we watch this pandemic overtake our communities, but does this mean that we have to live in fear? Read More

It was the coldest day yet this winter. As I headed to an emergency call in my veterinary truck, I glanced at the thermometer and it said -8 degrees Fahrenheit. My first call was a calving; a cow with a twisted uterus that could not deliver her calf. Upon arrival, we rolled the cow and delivered a live bull calf. Everything went perfectly –a textbook calving. I proceeded with my scheduled work that morning and then stopped at my parents’ house for a late lunch.

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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! 

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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