Every year at Christmas-time we do a “Birthday Gift for Jesus” kind of offering, a special gift of priority for the “honoree” if you will. Sometimes we pick certain projects, sometimes we offer a catalog to choose ways to donate - we always do some kind of local thing and an international thing. This year, with the economy in the toilet, we chose to have half our offering go towards our Benevolence Fund for needy families in our church and the other half for some kind of international project, of which there are a million, you know! I stumbled upon the Advent Conspiracy and loved the idea of reclaiming Christmas and providing clean water. The video was a definite selling point - AWESOME!! We were expecting, with the economy and our history, about $20,000 in this offering - imagine how we felt as the numbers kept going up and up, finally topping $50,000!!!! In the worst economy most of us have ever seen! Wow. God is good! So….we have over $20,000 in “well” money and will likely focus on Uganda since we have a long history there. We could not be more excited and will keep you posted on the well situation and send photos of our happy village in Uganda with their new clean water provided by a bunch of suburbanites in Ohio in the dead of winter!

Cindy Schmidt
Director of Missions and Outreach
New Life Church