I am Pastor Brian, one of the newbie pastors on staff.

I'm honored to be here to be able to share God's word with you this morning in the absence of our senior pastor, Pastor.

I'm going to be talking a little bit this morning about family.

And so because I'm the newbie pastor, I figured to be a good time to share a little bit about my own family.

My beautiful wife of 24 years, Tony, she's giving me two beautiful children.

The oldest of my two children is my son Bryce.

He's 17.

But when Bryce was two, this was early.

I spent 20 years as a public educator early in my career.

I was in the classroom for a few years teaching.

And because I like to think I was one of the cool teachers, the district that I taught in,

we had a strong Israeli Jewish community.

And so I got lots of bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah invitations.

And so I was honored to go because I just wanted to show my love for the Israeli community, the Jewish community.

And so the young lady said, Mr. Shannon, would you come to my bat mitzvah?

We have a Friday night, Shabbat service, and then that Saturday morning, you come to our main

ceremony. I said, I'll be honored. I'll be there. And so that night, my two-year-old son, we get there,

and he gets to the door, and the rabbis there greeting everybody at the synagogue. And so the rabbi says,

Shabbat Shalom. And so you know how a two-year-old is. You know, he learns two new words he wants to use him he wants to tell everybody shabbat shalom

he's going on the hallway sabbath shalom he says daddy can i tell that man over there shabashlam i said

go ahead son so shabah shalom and so that night we leave he tells him the rabbi one last time

shabat shalom at the door we head out Saturday we come back to the main service and And so, you know, I'm watching and I've never been to a bat mitzvah at that time.

...