June

Hello friends and family!

I hope you have been enjoying your summer as we have been enjoying ours. June has brought many fun events and some good, relaxing time. It is good to de-stress from the school year and to enjoy not being tired all the time!

Nick in a VBS skit at the opening of the day

I personally spent most of June teaching, although in a different way than I usually do. Our Savior has a summer program this year, and I spent two weeks in June teaching that group of students for an hour a day. It was an interesting experience, since it was mostly made up of two and three year olds, and there’s only so much teaching you can actually do with students that age. But it was fun, and it gave me a reason to spend some extra time in my classroom, getting things ready for the next school year, since August is always pretty crazy, and it will be even more crazy with having to move back to seminary the week before school starts. On top of that, I spent a week teaching at VBS at Immanuel. Nick and I, as vicar and wife, were put in charge of the Storytelling station, where students come to hear the Bible story of the day. Each day, we had about 150 kids come through our station, from age 3 through 4^th grade, with anywhere from 15-40 students in each group. Nick and I divided the duties, with me covering the younger groups and Nick leading the older groups, with the other assisting with props and costumes when not leading. It was fun to work together as a team, but we also saw that that particular job at VBS was not the one that either of us would choose, if we were given a choice. But like we’ve been told, every vicarage experience is a learning experience!

At the movie theater for Nick's birthday

The fun part was that Nick’s birthday fell on the Friday of VBS. He had also been recruited to act in the skits shown in opening and closing each day, and so he spent each day in a king costume. That Friday, all the students at VBS sang happy birthday to the “king.” Later that day, we celebrated Nick’s birthday by driving into St. Louis to see Wonder Woman at a movie theater that has comfy, reclining seats, and then went to Red Robin for dinner.

Nick has been busy with work as well this past month, as he has been preaching very regularly with pastor out of town for various events and vacation days. He has also been solely leading the summer Bible study on the history of the church, and impressing many church members with his knowledge in the process. He was, of course, involved in VBS, and is also working toward the summer basketball camp that he is leading as well.

To continue our running hobby, we signed up for a church-hosted 5K race this June. It was a fun run called the Chicken Run, held on the weekend of a local church’s big festival and chicken dinner. Nick was in much better shape than I, having just run a half marathon a few weeks before, but we ran it together and both placed in our age categories (although in a small race like that, an award is pretty much default).

Heartland of America park

After the three weeks of early mornings and teaching between summer camp and VBS, I was very happy to have a genuine summer, with days entirely free from obligations. We started that time off with a mini vacation. This was mostly in order to help us meet our goal of visiting each of Missouri’s 8 border states before we move away next summer. We visited Arkansas in February, and planned a short trip to Nebraska and Iowa last week. On Sunday, after church, we drove to Omaha (which is, thankfully, on the eastern side of the state). Omaha offers a brewery tour, so Nick ordered a booklet ahead of time, and it led us to several breweries, all different locations and styles. It was really fun to explore the different breweries over Sunday and Monday. On Monday morning, we went to Omaha’s Heartland of America park, which is a beautiful park right next to the Missouri River. As we walked over toward the Bob Kerry Pedestrian Bridge (a bridge crossing the Missouri River that also crosses the border of Nebraska and Iowa), we saw that Omaha has a bike rental program. It’s a fun little program, where you pay a small amount at any one of the bike stations, and there are lots of stations all over the city, so you can ride the bikes to get around and return them at a station, then pick up new bikes to get to the next place. We really enjoyed it, as it made it easier to get around the downtown area without having to walk everywhere or look for parking. The bikes helped us to get around, across the bridge, and to and from several different breweries.

Riding bikes around Omaha

After enjoying Omaha (and wishing we had planned more time there), we drove to Des Moines to stay there for the night. The next morning, we stopped at the John and Mary Pappajohn Sculpture Park. Unfortunately, neither of us really understand abstract art, but we had fun seeing the large sculptures and taking pictures. Along our way home, we stopped at several other places in Iowa, both at the Amana Colonies, a little town with handcrafted shops and such, and at Riverside, Iowa, which is a little town that boasts itself as the “Future birthplace of Captain Kirk.” There is a little museum with a bunch of Star Trek memorabilia and a monument, hidden behind a beauty parlor. It was fun to drive through rural Iowa – we were also lucky that it happened to be a few days of absolutely gorgeous weather. We enjoyed our little vacation together before returning to start preparing for our move.

Inside one of the sculptures at the sculpture park

We were very excited to welcome some of our seminary friends back from vicarage this weekend! We spent Friday and Saturday helping some friends move back to St. Louis, especially fun because they have two little boys who have grown up so much over the last year! We are so excited to have them back and we are looking forward to moving back into the city to be closer to all our friends for the year.

July is, thankfully, less scheduled than June (at least for me), but no less busy. We have begun preparing to move back to seminary in August, and I still have lots of work to prepare for the upcoming school year. Nick will be very busy the next few weeks, as pastor is out of town and so Nick is taking all the usual church responsibilities as well as planning a basketball camp for next week. We are especially looking forward to our upcoming trip to Washington DC and Philadelphia with my sister and her husband! And after that, time is going to fly as I start up a new school year, we move back to the seminary, and Nick begins his last academic year. Thank you again for all your prayers and support, we appreciate it more than you can imagine!

In the name of Christ our Savior,

Nick and Mikaela Duerr