Congratulations to Lance and Elizabeth Marshall on their adoption of not one, but three children, a precious group of siblings between the ages of five and one years old, who, in the first week of August will join the Marshalls (Lance, Elizabeth, and Henry) as their forever family. Please join us in churchwide prayers and celebration and even a virtual “kid shower” via their Amazon wishlist. . . . First Church love and prayers and gratitude are also in order for Charme Robarts, FUMCFW Community Advocate, who will be traveling this next week to joins hands with Texas Interfaith Coalition and the Texas ACLU and various other faith-based groups to observe the court proceedings at the Texas border on cases where people are being prosecuted for the misdemeanor of entering our country. “By our presence, we hope to encourage the process and to encourage fair treatment,” Charme says. “Regardless of political persuasion, what many of us want is for those folks to have a clean place to sleep, a shower, and certainly not to be separated from their children.”  . . . the numbers are in for VBS 2019: We opened registration in February and it filled up immediately. Last week we hosted  630 children and still had 47 on the waitlist due to lack of space. In addition to 115 to 120 adult volunteers, we had 85 youth volunteers, the largest volunteer youth event the church has ever had. The kiddos had a lot of fun, learned a lot about God — and in the process, also raised $5568.48 for the Kenya Orphan Endeavor to put about 18 children through school for the coming year. Kudos to the Children’s Ministry led by Mister Mark Burrows and Janice Cooper and Heather Teems to host this spectacular annual event in which a full two-thirds of the children are not from FUMCFW families — truly a community outreach. . .  the Youth have returned from Camp Barnabas, concluding a whirlwind summer of mission trips that have once again proved beyond all doubt, as Lance Marshall observed this week, that “the young people in this church are thoughtful and spiritual and profound and deeply committed to Christ, not only in crisis moments or in tricky situations, but also in the everyday life of the people around them.”  . . . We also welcome back our adult world travelers from the mission trip to Costa Rica where they served the tiny community of to El Tigre, in their 14th annual Costa Rica Mission Trip to offer help in building, serve, worship, and vacation bible school for the community’s children.  . . Look for more in-depth coverage of children youth and adult missions in next week’s “Mission Edition” of the FUMCFW Weekly News!