This week's community joys & concerns from May 18, 2025

Among our joys:

• We welcome back a familiar friend, Thomas Mills who is spending some time in town for work. Welcome home! We add to our prayers, his father, Larry Pollard who is currently being supported by a ventilator enduring health challenges.

• Yesterday was full of life as two groups from FCC were celebrating God's creation; one in our support of the annual Relay for Life campaign to raise money for cancer research.

   

• The other joy to share from yesterday is the damp sea are a group of us bring to you from Deception Pass on Whidbey Island as we jetted out to search for wildlife and enjoy each other's company. No whales were spotted, but I was reminded of the presence of God that is inherent in the creation all around us and I am compelled to remind us all that such meditative communion with nature is as near as the warmth of the sun on our shoulders. Joy!

   

   

Among our concerns, we add to our prayers:

• Peter Wright, recovering from having his gallbladder removed last week.

• Cathy Helseth

• Cathy Stern's brother-in-law, Dusty Sharrock, her son, Aaron Stults and his wife, Ana, and Cathy's son-in-law, Keith Smith.

We continue to pray for:

• Pat McDaniel

• John Rembert

• Marc Master

• Dan Ledbetter

• Laura Cohthril

• Danny Jablonski

• Charlene Housman

• For the friends of our extended community and families undergoing health challenges: Raven, Nancy, Margo, and Steve

We lift up our homebound friends:

• Harry and Margaret Lobberegt

• Dorothy Beeles

• Anastasia Cox and her daughter, Lela

• Joseph Mills

• Jane Nelson

• Harriet Wright, who has entered hospice care

• And it is with deep sadness that I share with you the news of the death of a dear friend to many here and many more in our wider community, Helen Bosley, who passed away peacefully early Friday morning. Helen was a lifelong disciple, a woman whose strong faith in God was lived out in service to others, namely to the countless children she taught in Sunday school and in her involvement with Disciples Women's Ministries at Eastside Christian Church and in the community of Tacoma and beyond. We give God thanks for her life, for the love she continues to live out in this world, and we hold in our prayers, her son, Gary, and all who knew and loved Helen.

Among our local and global community:

• We pray for peace and for new avenues of reconciliation and understanding to be the path of our steps, beliefs, and decisions. We lift up those who dwell in danger, including the people of Gaza and Sudan, those in Syria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, Ukraine and Somalia.

• For the village on 6th and Orchard and for those who find themselves without shelter. We pray for the justice advocacy work done by organizations like our Tiny House Village partners, the Low Income Housing Institute, that ordinary people like ourselves would come to find the vital role each of us have in working together to solve the problems that contribute to health and wealth inequality, so that all may share in the abundance of God's resources, as God has intended.

• Finally, join us in lifting up our Global Ministries partners, this week, in Puerto Rico.

   

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If you'd like to share a prayer joy or concern, please contact Pastor Doug at doug@fcctacoma.org or by calling the church office. Please indicate whether your prayer is to be shared publicly, or if you'd like it to be kept private.

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