"Mother's Day: Every Day Counts" (Guest Speaker Sara Diemer)

The Youth Group took over the worship service this Sunday morning, which means that it’s that time of year that I should again express a hearty Happy Mother’s Day!

It’s always a joy to have our FCC kids involved in the service, so it’s a special joy to have our littlest FCCers singing the offertory, or teens like those joining the Worship Team for the morning, or Michael Wietharn reading the announcements, Stephen Christianson leading the prayer time, or Alex Wright opening up the Community Time during the service.

Speaking of Alex, we honored our high school and junior high school graduates this Sunday, including Alex, Dakota and Caitlyn Jeffries, and Molly Kuehn (Harper Nehrig, Noah Smith, and Nicholas and Caroline Kellerstrass weren’t on hand this Sunday to get their gifts, but we’ll get those to them when we see them next).  It’s always a privilege and a joy to see young men and women who genuinely want to live out their faith as they grow, so please keep these teenagers in your prayers that God will continue to work in them, and that they will continue more and more to understand and to own their own relationship with the Lord.

In our message this week, Sara Diemer shared about the crucial importance of giving our maximum effort in everything, since everything that we do, we should do to honor Him.  We should honor Him in our parenting, we should honor Him in how we interact with other Christians, and we should honor Him in how we reach out to non-Christians.  Too often, we see that as an almost legalistic long list of “stuff we have to do,” but really, it’s simply a matter of following the commandment that Jesus gave us in Mark 12:30 -- “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”

It’s not always easy, but it is relatively simple -- are you honoring that commandment today, or aren’t you?