Twenty-three years ago, I came to Port O’Connor to help three couples start a community church. God has been good, and we have seen a lot of great things accomplished for the Lord’s Kingdom. We purchased the building that housed the Intercoastal Lumber Company from Mr. Joe Bright and converted it to the church building in which we now meet. We built the Youth Room and immediately upon its dedication, we started the parsonage. We have built our fish cleaning area and our walk-in-freezer to help us with our mission’s work of providing filleted fish for the needy from many local tournaments. We converted a dry storage building into our Retreat Center that has seen several hundred people blessed as they have come and had a special encounter with the Lord.

This community has been extremely generous toward us. We have been given two mobile homes, which we have passed on to others, and just gave away the fourth RV to a worthy family. We are honored to get the opportunity of feeding a breakfast to our Warriors, and this past year, we passed out over 100 food boxes at Thanksgiving and Christmas.
We have married your children and buried your loved ones as you have allowed us to become a part of your family. We have dedicated your babies and baptized those who have accepted the Lord. I, personally, have preached about 3,000 messages in these short years, for I have learned that days may go by slowly, but years pass quickly!
We are honored that you have accepted our family as part of this community. You have welcome us and treated us with honor and we sincerely appreciate it.

Honestly, we never know how much longer we have on this side of eternity, but my heart’s desire is to spend every day I have to breathe in Port O’Connor with my wife Joane by my side and you gathered around us! Thank you, Port O’Connor for loving me, my wife, our kids, and now our grandkids. We only trust and pray that we all get to spend eternity together with Christ!

January was so busy that it seems to be just a blur! February has been equally hectic, but for many right reasons. We have been honored to host almost 30 students from Texas A&M, Corpus who are part of the Chi Alpha. Director Will Robinson led our morning service on February 4. Pastor Joane was away because she has been preaching for a congregation in Victoria. We celebrated our 23rd Anniversary and were treated to a fellowship following our evening service. We have filled the pulpit twice for Cuero Assembly. Cathy Osborn’s sister and husband (Pumkin and Grady) will minister at the Chapel on February 18 in both the morning and evening services. Our annual Meeting of the Members will be held on February 25, where we will receive reports of the Lord’s blessings over the past year and elect our Corporate Officers.

On March 4, we will host Project Hope, a group of ladies who are in a rehabilitation center in the Houston area. The Reverend Bob Jones will be ministering in the evening service on March 11. Some college students will be helping to paint one of our worship centers while on their Spring Break in mid-March.

We are planning our annual Chili Cook-off for late March, but have not set a date as of yet. We have however scheduled our Spring Revival with Evangelist Jonathan Thacker of Russellville, Arkansas. These services will begin on Wednesday, March 28 and go through Easter Sunday.

Fisherman’s Chapel has served this community with honor for many years. We continue to be a congregation of believers from many different denominations, and some from no denomination; therefore, we call ourselves interdenominational. Our goal is to help every person we can to find the joy of serving a Risen Savior. One will always find a  warm welcome at the Chapel, and all are urged to, “Come, grow with us!”

Mark your calendars now as more information about Shrimpfest will be coming.

38th Annual Shrimpfest
June 15th & 16th, 2018

Gates Open 3 pm Friday & 8 am Saturday. Gate Fee $5 on Friday and Saturday – Kids under 6 FREE (Must be accompanied by an adult). Senior Citizen and Veteran’s $3 Gate Fee.
We will be announcing our entertainment line-up in the next couple months. If you would like to volunteer, please call Chamber at 361 237 0406 or sign up on line at https://www.seadriftchamber.com/shrimpfest/.

Abbie Cady

Abbie Cady is looking forward to March 9th when she and her teammates, will attend the UCA International All Star Championship in Orlando, Florida. The UCA International All Star Championship brings together the best all star cheer and dance teams from around the globe at the most magical place on Earth – Walt Disney World. The competition is held at the prestigious ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex.

Abbie is the daughter of George and Kersha Cady of Seadrift and a sixth-grader at Seadrift Middle School. Abbie attends gym/cheer classes at Manning Gymnastics in Victoria. In cheerleading for three years, she attends class four days each week, about 12 hours per week. She is very dedicated to the sport, attending classes year-round.

This is Abbie’s second consecutive year to attend an International Competition- Disney Last year her team won 1st place for their division against teams from all around the world. This year Abbie is on two teams that will be competing in Florida. She is on Manning’s Junior Level 2 team and on Manning’s Junior Level 3 team. She has had a very successful season so far this year bringing home awards from seven competitions already. They will attend one more competition in Texas on Feb. 18th in San Antonio before they go to Internationals in Florida.

Two of Abbie’s teammates who will also be competing in the Internationals are Taylor Creamer and Laynie Wood. Taylor Creamer is 11 years old; she is in the 6th grade at Travis Middle School. She is also on two teams, Level 2 Junior and Level 3 Junior and she also attends gym four days a week. She lives in Port Lavaca and her parents are Kenny and Melissa Roberts. This is Taylor’s first time to Internationals because she took a break last year, but this is also her third year to cheer at Manning.

Laynie Wood is the daughter of Calhoun Cheer Coach Ashleigh Blinka-Wood and Brian Wood. She is 10 and is the 4th Grade at Jackson Elementary in Port Lavaca, where she also lives. Laynie is on three teams at Manning: Level 1 Youth, Level 2 Junior, and Level 3 Junior. This is her third year as a Manning Cheer Cat. She goes to gym four days a week as well. She also attended Internationals last year with Abbie and the Manning Cheer team where they won 1st.

As the years go by I realize I have probably talked about the common themes for each month or season a couple times over in the nearly six years of writing this column, especially when it comes to the holiday ‘season’ of October through February, which allows articles on Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years and of course the star of this month’s theme, Valentine’s Day.

That of course means talking about love, the one feeling that no one can really live without, no matter how much they may say they can.

But what is love?

Mankind invented the alphabet and language skills to be able to better communicate desires and intentions to the other people around us, but it is still a pretty clunky system, like doing calculations for a space shuttle launch on an abacus, especially when it comes to words that seem like such absolutes like love or its less desirable sister of hate.

Love can have many forms, from platonic love for your best friend to the unbreakable bond and love between a mother and her child or the love a fan may have for a sports team of certain genre of fiction.

All are valid forms of love and although all the above examples are varied and scattered across the human experience, they all have a string connecting them.

The emotional impact that cannot be expressed when something or someone, not even just limited to ‘things’ but when even a moment, a night, a dawn reflected in the eyes of our greatest passions can bring on a sense of all being right in the world, things just make sense for once, for that brief period people have labeled the ‘salad days’ back in the past, be it the first time you were with the love of your life or that perfect Summer of your youth that you did not know was perfect then that makes you smile.

Impacts like those are what make love and being loved one of the best experiences in life and also can cause love of the unwanted and unrequited kind bring up the opposite of feelings, so strong is the magnitude of the emotion, that it can fill us with light or leave us longing in the dark.

However, for something to be born so dark, it must have fallen from a great source of light.

Hardest of all to achieve is the greatest love of all, which is self-love and should never be mistaken for arrogance or someone who appears on the outside to be perfect and have it all figured out, but might just not be all they seem to be.

I suppose because from the time we are born till the time we all die we all look for some form of love, it makes it one of the most encompassing desires across the entire planet, taught by our prophets no matter the religion, at the heart of our wildest dreams of a perfect governmental system is the society based love we hope we one day achieve for our fellow man.

Hopefully this soon will mean that as we all desire love in one of its many guises, it should become easy to both give that love out and receive it ourselves.