January and February 2026 Specific Calendar Events:

* Thursday, January 1: New Year’s Day

* Monday, January 5 (9:00 a.m.): Women’s breakfast at Brady J’s

* Tuesday, January 6: Epiphany

* Thursday, January 15 (9:30 a.m.): The church book club meets in the pastor’s office; they will discuss the novel The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller.

Amazon synopsis:
There are songs that come free from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads.

This is one of them.

And so begins a story that you will never forget...

THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY

...is the story of Robert Kincaid, a world-class photographer, and Francesca Johnson, an Iowa farm wife. Kincaid, fifty-two, is a photographer for National Geographic. A strange, almost mystical traveler of Asian deserts, distant rivers, and ancient cities, he is a man who feels out of harmony with time. Francesca Johnson, forty-five and once a young war bride from Italy, lives in the hills of south Iowa with flickering memories of her girlhood dreams. Each of them is content, yet when Robert Kincaid drives through the heat and dust of an Iowa summer and turns into her farm lane looking for directions, their illusions fall away, and they are joined in an experience that will haunt them forever.

As the photographer Kincaid uses light to reveal not objects, but rather his own kind of truth, what occurs by the old bridges of Madison County becomes a prism transforming the ordinary emotions we think we understand into something rare and brilliant. The result is a passionate, deeply moving experience in lyrical prose, an achievement that puts Robert James Waller in the forefront of this country's fiction writers.

* Monday, January 19: Martin Luther King Day

* Sunday, January 25 (7:45 a.m.): Men’s breakfast at Brady J’s

* Sunday, January 25: Annual Church Meeting to review 2025 (after the worship service)

* Monday, February 2: Groundhog Day

* Monday, February 2 (9:00 a.m.): Women’s breakfast at Brady J’s

* Saturday, February 14: Valentine's Day

* Monday, February 16: Presidents' Day

* Tuesday, February 17: Mardi Gras/Shrove Tuesday

* Wednesday, February 18: Ash Wednesday (Lent begins) - service at 7:00 p.m.

* Thursday, November 20 (9:30 a.m.): The church book club meets in the pastor’s office; they will discuss the novel Twice by Mitch Albom.

Amazon synopsis: When he is eight years old, Alfie Logan discovers the magical ability to get a second chance at everything. He can undo any moment and live it again. The one catch: he must accept the consequences of his second try—for better or worse.

He grows up correcting his mistakes and saving himself from adolescent embarrassments. He even takes foolishly dangerous risks, just to see what

it’s like to come close to death, before tapping back to safety.

Eventually, Alfie turns his gift to his love life, studying his crushes and going back to make himself more appealing. In time, he falls deeply in love with Gianna, the woman he believes is the one. He seems to find contentment.

But as the years pass, Alfie’s eye begins to wander. Which is when he learns a lone caveat to his power: once he undoes a love, that person can never fall in love with him again. Knowing if he gives into to temptation, he will risk losing what he has with Gianna, Alfie makes a choice that changes his life forever.

The book begins many years later, after an ailing Alfie is arrested for allegedly cheating and winning millions at a casino roulette wheel. As a curious detective interrogates him, he slowly uncovers Alfie’s incredible story, and its most unlikely conclusion.

In Twice, America’s favorite storyteller, Mitch Albom, is at the top of his powers. A love story that is enchanting, probing, and clairvoyant in matters of the heart, Twice will make you think, weep, and overflow with love from beginning to end.

* Sunday, February 22 (7:45 a.m.): Men’s breakfast at Brady J’s

​