Dear Church Family, Lynn and I attended the Van Gogh immersive experience in Schenectady this week. It is a wonderful introduction to Van Gogh’s life and work in a most sensory engaging way. You might want to google it. Initially, Van Gogh intended to follow his father into the ministry, but eventually found his vocation as a painter. He painted most of his works within an incredibly productive five-year period, was troubled by mental illness, and sadly committed suicide at age 37. But he left nearly 900 brilliantly colored paintings and numerous sketches. There is a lot to his story, but one thing I found fascinating was scholars now think he had a form of color blindness, and his use of brilliant, bold colors emerged as a compensation for that disability. What a beautiful demonstration of how God can use those things we may consider liabilities or deficiencies, for a greater good. Not a bad thing to consider in Advent, when we remember how God used a poor, unwed, bewildered Mary, to bring his Son into the world. We’ll be lighting the third candle on the Advent wreath, the pink, or joy candle. We meet John the Baptist again this week. The sermon is titled “Tired of Waiting” and the texts are Isaiah 65:18-19, 28 and Matthew 11:2-11. We will be having a Christmas Eve service at 7:30 p.m. on December 24. That time permits our wonderful musician Liz Allyn to be present in person to lead us musically. See you in church, Rich