BLESSED

Can I tell you how proud I am of you? I am. I am extremely proud of you. We had our annual youth dessert auction last week, and by the way, if you missed it, you missed a good one, and we raised over $2000 for the youth, wow, thank you. Also if you saw the financial report for this last month you saw that for the first time since I have been here we went in the red in our account. We were steadily taking in less than we were spending every month last year, and then January came along and giving was down, we had a 5 Sunday month but we had an ice storm and only had income for 4 Sundays. So January we spent over $2200 more than we brought in and ended up $59.45 in the red. I have never seen a negative balance in our checking account, but now I have. And then last Sunday you gave, and as you can see from the report on the back of this bulletin, our offering last week was over $6200, WOW!!! But don’t quit on us now, this isn’t enough to carry us for the entire month, let’s keep on giving with a cheerful heart as it says in 2 Corinthians 9:7 “Each one must give as he has made up his mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” (ESV)
Something else I want to brag on you about, it seems that our numbers are up some in worship, Bible study is still floating around 50, but it seems that some are coming in for church. Did you know that 82% of the people you invite to church come? 82% are pretty good odds, that means that 82 out of every 100 will come if they are asked. Did you also know that when someone is invited it makes them feel wanted? And everyone wants to feel wanted, so keep on inviting and bringing and we will keep on loving those who come.
I want you to consider something; I need some people to volunteer to visit our visitors. When we have people come and visit us for the first time we need someone to go and visit them. All you need to do is go and tell them that we enjoyed having them with us. Very simple and easy visit, takes about 5 minutes but it means so much to our visitors. Did you know that we are losing visitors because our people do not go to see them? Sad but true! Will you help?