Greetings in Christ all!
In these crazy days, God is doing amazing things. As I shared a bit last week, this time has been challenging, but incredible. Personally, I don’t recall any time as a pastor where I have been so free to be a priest. We are reaching out and touching lives in the name of Jesus in a way I never thought we’d be able to.
All of this is happening because of your prayers, your support and your interest in our family and I simply cannot thank you enough.
I do want to ask a favor of you if you are able.
Right before this crisis hit, I announced at every Mass my intention to push us hard on DSA. I shared with you all how important it was for us to do our part as one of the larger members of the Diocese of Lansing family.
In the last 7 or 8 years, we have not come close to hitting our goal or even, in the last 4 years, hitting 50% of our goal.
I would love to see us do better and I’m asking everyone to pray about it. Our support is the only way our diocese can function. People have shared with me in the past the ways that they feel the diocese has let them down and trust me, I get it. However, I want to share with you some of the things they’ve done for our family in the year and a half that I’ve been here to help you see how vital they have been for us.
First, the houses. Tearing down the houses was a project that began before I got here and froze because of unex-pected asbestos issues. The diocese gave us almost $70,000 to tear those down…not a loan, not a grant, they simply gave us a gift.
Second, our Church. To put it bluntly, the diocese took a major gamble on us being able to fund building the Church. Without their help and their promise to load us whatever overage happened, we would not be building our new Church. They gave us a ton of irreplaceable wisdom in this process. Every call I’ve made downtown has been answered and I couldn’t even begin to cover the innumerable ways that they have saved us money in this project.
I’m running out of room, not examples. To put it bluntly, we owe our diocese a great deal and its time for us to cowboy up and do our best to faithfully meet our goal.
Please pray about it.
If you are able and feel called to support the DSA effort, please go to https://www.dioceseoflansing.org/DSA. At this present time, gifts and pledges that are sent to Holy Family will be secured until our office and The Catholic Foundation are running at full staff. They can only process ONLINE gifts and pledges for right now.
I love you all and thank God that I get to be your priest.
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