WELL, WASN’T THAT SPECIAL?
Ok, all together…deep breath in, blow it out slowly. Repeat. I am hoping you and your loved ones came through Matthew in good shape. We have the office calling as many as we can to check in on our members. We get a lot of phones not in service and a lot of voice mails. Please know that we are here and doing our best to contact everyone. A big thanks to the Connection Group leaders for staying in touch with their small groups and letting us know their groups are all safe and sound. Please let us know if there is some way we can help. Do you have a tree on the house or car, water standing, still no electricity…please let us know. The church has power, a shower and hot coffee. Come on by if you need to. We will try to coordinate volunteers with needs.
Our thanks to Marty who anchored…no pun intended…the church building during the storm. He was the first one here and the last one to leave. The church building was open as a shelter. We had a total of 17 people who stayed here including Janie and myself. We had three homeless people and one man who lived on his sail boat. He anchored his sail boat in the Stono River and rode his dingy in. Next time, we will ask him to bring the dingy to the church just in case.
MISSED A SUNDAY OF WORSHIP AND CELEBRATE RECOVERY
We were prepared for worship on the Sunday right after the storm. We had two orders of worship printed…one in case we had power and one in case we did not. As it turned out, everyone was asked to stay off the roads because of debris and live electrical wires. We were back open Monday and business as usual. Two things we would like to ask of our church family. First, the Fall Festival is less than two weeks away. We missed a Sunday to sign up and promote the event. Please go on line and sign up on our web page or sign up this Sunday. We are asking our Connection Groups to join together and help host two or three of our booths. Remember you need two people for 2 hours each. So, we would like to have at least 4 people per booth to keep anyone from working the booth all night. And keep bringing the candy.
Second, I want to thank you for remembering your tithes and offerings. JIBC is unusually blessed by having such generous givers. We are able to do so many of our outreach efforts because God so richly supplies all of our needs. Gratefully, we are able to stay in the black and not have to cut back on things like building insurance, ministries and missions. Thank you for your faithfulness. It really does make a difference.
See you Sunday, good Lord willing and the storm surge doesn’t rise!
Pastor Tom
