The Hawkins family reunion will be at noon Sunday, Sept. 14 at Kickapoo State Park. Bring a covered dish.

There was a time when divorce was not a subject talked about at church.
Divorces still happened, but they were so negatively perceived they simply weren’t a part of religious discussion outside of condemnation.
But that’s changed in some churches.
While the modern Christian-based church will never likely condone breaking the sacred union of marriage, it has recognized the high rate of divorce as a sign of the spiritual need to be filled.
“The stance is, ‘Divorce is a sin, but there are a lot of sins,’” said Scott Jacobson, leader of the Divorce Care seminar being conducted at Ridgeview Baptist Church in Danville. “It’s something we have to face and improve on.”
The group uses a faith-based approach in dealing with the aftermath of divorce, including its effects on the family and scriptural advice on correcting personal problems that may have led to or contributed to the break-up.
“We are taught that time heals all wounds, but it only covers all wounds,” he said. “Only Christ can heal wounds.”
Several local churches have held Divorce Care seminars, a nationally based, 13-week system that uses group discussion, workbooks and daily devotionals to show divorcees how to move on with their lives as individuals.
Tricia Denney, who helps teach the course with Jacobson, said she first attended a course at Southside Nazarene soon after she was divorced in 2006.
“You do go through a time when you do feel kind of desperate to get help,” she said. “Then you start to see that divorce was an incident, but it doesn’t define your life.”
She said the approach is Christ-centered and aimed at “re-establishing yourself as an
individual.”
People get divorced for a number of reasons, from infidelity to violence, but the program goes after some of the core psychological issues that are common in almost every divorce, the two agreed.
“It’s amazing the common ground we all have,” Denney said.
Her children were 9 and 6 years old when she and her husband separated, leaving her wondering if she could raise the family on her own.
“I was scared to death,” she said. “We were all totally uncertain of where we would be or if we could survive. But we don’t walk on egg shells anymore.”
Jacobson got so much out of completing his first session after he was divorced in 2003 he decided he wanted to teach the course to others going through a similar experience.
“God laid it on my heart to teach it,” he said. “The thing I got most out of it was the small-group environment. You learn pretty quickly you’re not alone. There are common issues that everybody deals with, like loneliness and depression. It’s a tough time because you have all of these things and emotions hitting you at once.”
Having a male and female teacher helps provide the group some perspective from both sexes.
“Sometimes the female’s perspective is the same, sometimes it’s entirely different,” Jacobson said. “The common problem is how society looks at things these days: It’s all about feeling rather than commitment.”
Denney said there are even common lessons among the children’s branch of Divorce Care, which her children attended at another church to help them through the loss of their full family unit. She said she would like to see the program at Ridgeview expand in the future to include children, though many more volunteers would be needed.
“What I’ve learned is you need to know your center identity,” Denney said. “Then everything else can fall away.”
Those interested in attending a Divorce Care seminar at Ridgeview, held from 6-8 p.m. Mondays, may call 442-2210. A registration fee of $15 covers materials and first-time attendees may come at any stage of the
session.

The Watson family reunion will be a western hoe down at noon Sept. 6 in the White Oak Barn at Kennekuk County Park.

Bring a covered dish. The meat will be provided.

The descendants of William and Hester Potter will their 90th reunion with a basket dinner at noon Sunday, Aug. 17 at the Shirley Hawkins Hidden Paradise.

The Verhoeven-Bremer reunion will start at noon Aug. 30 at White Oak Barn in Kennekuk County Park. Participants should bring a covered dish.

The Thornsbrough family reunion will be at 12:30 p.m. Aug. 10 at Rotary Point at Kennekuk County Park. Bring a covered dish.

Pastor Ernest Leroy Shelton was recently diagnosed with cancer and had been hospitalized multiple times, thereby accumulating substantial financial obligations.

His friends and family along with fellow churches will host a gospel benefit service at 6 p.m. Aug. 8 at the New Life Church of Faith, 1419 N. Bowman Ave. He had been an integral part of the Danville community for more than 20 years. He was a licensed barber employed at Phil's Barber Shop and served as an interim pastor in Tolono.

He touched the lives of many within the community and surrounding vicinity.

If you would like to participate in the benefit, call 446-6532, 443-6237 or 443-9186.

 

The annual Barrett reunion will be Aug. 9 at Mallard Point in Kennekuk County8 Park.

A basket dinner will be at 1 p.m.

The Pettice family reunion will be at noon Aug. 3 at the Hideaway at Kennekuk County Park on Henning Road. For information, call 748-6243.

The descendents of Otho and Minervia Allison will have their 93rd annual Allison reunion at 1 p.m. Aug. 3 at Twin Points Shelter at Kennekuk County Park.

Bring a basket lunch to share, lawn chairs and items for the white elephant auction. Lemonade and table service will be provided. Games and fellowship will follow the lunch.

The Pichon reunion will be from noon to 5 p.m. Saturday, June 28 at Walnut Shelter at Kickapoo State Park.

All descendants of the Pichons are invited. Bring a covered dish. Drinks and place settings will be provided.

The Watson Reunion Western Hoe Down will be at noon Sept. 6 at the White Oak Barn at Kennekuk County Park.

Bring a covered dish and the meat will be provided.

A new semester of Kindermusik classes will begin the week of Jan. 21 for children ages 5 months to 5½ years at First Presbyterian Church.

For more information and to register for classes, call Glee Cumbow at 446-7541.

There’s a reason parents fret so much about providing their kids a memorable Christmas.That’s because a Christmas memory can last a lifetime.
Just ask 97-year-old Corbit Fox, one of several residents of Vermilion Manor Nursing Home who recently agreed to share some of their favorite holiday
memories.
Fox still can remember that long-ago time when he was a kid and received a new cap gun and a roll of caps on Christmas morning.
“I can still remember, that roll of caps wouldn’t work,” he recalled, almost 90 years of frustration still evident in his voice.
The oldest of six kids and a son of a tobacco sharecropper from Kentucky, Fox said he and his siblings knew their parents would always make Christmas special each year, despite having little extra money to spend.
Instead of individual gifts, the family would usually purchase gifts they could enjoy together, like their annual Christmas fireworks display and a large holiday meal.
“We didn’t have our fireworks in July, we had them at Christmas,” he said.
He recalled that he and each of his brothers and sisters received a giant peppermint stick, an apple, an orange and a coconut every year.
“That’s about all we could afford back then,” he
explained.
Fox, who has lived in the Danville area since 1931, raised six sons in a marriage that lasted 76 years and produced many of its own Christmas traditions.
He said he never forgot the anticipation and simple joy that his family’s Christmas celebration brought each year when he was young, and that he tried to pass that appreciation on to his sons.
“I taught my boys to appreciate everything they had,” said the former laborer at the Old Soldier’s Home and St. Elizabeth’s Hospital.
“When you work six days a week and bring home $12, you don’t do a lot of splurging,” he said.
He eventually retired from a millwright’s job at General Motors.
A resident of the nursing home since February, Fox said he wasn’t sure who from his family might be visiting over the holiday.
“I found a real nice family here,” he said. “The nurses and nurses aides, just about all the people here, are making a baby out of me.”
Family season
Activity director Kelly See said the majority of residents receive holiday visitors, and that Christmas is the most likely time for family to make a visit.
“But if they don’t, we make sure that they receive a gift,” she said. “We make sure everyone has at least one good Christmas gift.”
The nursing home also has a Christmas dinner and a Christmas tea it encourages family members to participate in.
Eighty-eight-year-old Henry Robertson, who grew up in Clinton, Ind., but claims to be from “everyplace,” was the oldest of 10 children on a farm during the Depression years.
“You probably don’t know about the Depression,” he said.
“No matter what, we had a wonderful Christmas,” he said. “We had a lot to eat, being on the farm, and we always had our stockings stuffed. Most anything makes a good present. You didn’t have anything else to change your mind or compare it to.”
Robertson said clothes were a large percentage of the presents, but his father was always able to produce a $1 “store-bought toy” for each child.
“That was a big deal.”
Some still remember a specific toy they received one year.
For 65-year-old resident Barbara Jones, it was a coveted Betsy Wetsy doll that had her nervously sweating out the days before Christmas in 1953.
But it was more than nerves for Jones, who at the age of 11 was kept in quarantine at home with the measles.
“It was Christmas and I couldn’t leave the house,” she said. “I couldn’t even get out to see Santa. Every girl was getting one of these dolls.”
But Santa heard her plea, braved contamination and saved the day.
“I had that Betsy Wetsy doll for years.”
Most of the family’s presents were homemade or in edible form. The boys usually got something cowboy-related, like a gun and holster.
“We got three toys apiece,” she said. “The other things were homemade and we had a lot of good food. We were always happy with what we got.”
Mary Wise, an 86-year-old resident, said she was one of seven children and that her father worked for a large farming operation in Indiana. One year the owners brought a large box over for Christmas.
“They brought us all kinds of little trinkets and little things to play with,” she said. “There were little cars and little trains. To us it was worth a million dollars.”
Wise said her father used to tease her about behaving, reminding her throughout the days leading up to Christmas that acting up might lead to not getting presents.
“My dad kept telling me if I didn’t behave I wouldn’t get anything,” she said. “That was an awful feeling.”
For 72-year-old resident Donald Cruppenink, it was a jack-in-the-box that he remembers making a mark when he was younger.
“I got a sled once for Christmas that I remember, but that jack-in-the-box was something else,” he said.
He said he tried to keep Christmastime low-key for his kids but found himself always caught up in the season.
“They always got a lot more than I ever did,” Cruppenink said.