The Docusen family welcomed Benjamin Daniel into our world at 12:49am on January 6th. He was 7 lbs. 12 oz and 20.5 inches long of pure cuteness. Both mommy and baby are doing great!

Dara is highly annoyed right now because she has spent the past 7 hours contracting anywhere between 5 and 15 minutes. It's now 4:35am and we're still waiting for these contractions to get more consistent so we can go to the hospital or for them to just go away so we can go to sleep.It's annoyingly awesome to be at this point right now. Annoying because we don't know exactly what to do right now. Awesome because our little precious Ben is on his way! We just don't know if it's today or a week from today.Say a prayer for Dara and Baby Ben!

This season of life for Dara and I is well documented. The challenges are great and every day is another day to choose faith over fear. However, this morning brought an encouraging observation.I have never felt closer to God. I have never heard him speak to me more clearly. I have never felt more alive. I have never known his peace to be so real in my life. I am encouraged today by the fact that I serve a God that gives strength in direct proportion to what we need for each day. If you are facing challenges today, let God show himself faithful. Talk to him about it. He really cares. I know...

I have so enjoyed this season of life. God is stretching Dara and I in ways that I have never known or experienced. We are seeing new sides of the love and provision of God that we've never seen before.You hear a lot about me and my thoughts during this season. You don't hear too often about the strength of my life on this side of heaven: Dara. We're in this together. She is a quiet type that is incredibly powerful in her faith. What takes me 100 words to express my thoughts can be said in one sentence by Dara.For instance...We just received our last paycheck. We get paid once a month out of...

I truly believe that my favorite thing that I do as a pastor is marriage counseling. I love it because Dara and I get to do these sessions together. We have enjoyed the past year of our ministry together as we have been able to do pre-marital counseling with several different couples.We started with another couple tonight and it was so much fun. This couple just started to come to Hope and they have been married for just over a year. They asked us to take them through our marriage counseling course, so we have adapted some of our stuff and jumped in! We absolutely love doing this together.To...

We will be starting a new series this coming week at Hope Church. It's simply called "HOPE". This will be the first time that we have shared the "Hope Story". It will be a great way for us to share why we do what we do, why we believe what we believe and the back story to how Hope came to be.Here's the series logo we are using:

Dara and I went to dinner and a movie tonight. Saw "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button". Great movie. Better company. I appreciate times that Dara and I can simply spend together alone. This could be our last date night before Baby Ben comes. Dara was having contractions (10 minutes apart) through the entire movie. That doesn't mean he's coming today or tomorrow, but it does mean he's coming soon! Really, really fun night!

I am reading through the book of Daniel these days. I love reading about the men and women that I consider heroes of our faith. We read about their stories because they chose to believe. They chose to have faith in the face of extreme adversity.For those of you that follow this blog regularly, my lack of blogging can be directly related to the pace of our lives. I have found myself running in multiple directions with everything at Hope Church, my new job at Caribou Coffee and the madness of the holidays in the mix. I can honestly say that the adjustment to working an outside job hasn't been...

Sunday will go down in the history of Hope Church as one of "those" moments. Mike was in the middle of his response to his message and he was saying "if you've never given your heart to Christ..." just as the digital projector that our theater uses came on. There it was, 30 feet wide, movie quotes and pre-movie advertisements. Mike had no idea what was going on behind him and as he is passionately giving his gospel presentation, Woody Allen is behind him with a famous movie quote.Some things can only happen when you do church at a movie theater 🙂

Dara and I went to the baby doctor today and got a GREAT report! We have officially reached "full term" in the pregnancy (36 weeks) and they said for us to expect Baby Ben at any point over the next couple of weeks. Dara has gone early in every pregnancy, so it's very likely that we could be holding our precious Ben sometime in the next two weeks! I can't wait to see my boy and kiss his face!