Greetings in Christ! This is Trinity Sunday in our Church. It begins a sort of run over the next two weeks for us after Easter where we explore two key teachings of the Church: The Trinity (this week) and Corpus Christi (the body and blood of Christ, next week). Fr. Le and I sat down and worked on our homilies for these two big feasts together and we hope you find them inspiring and helpful.
I pray I am not driving you nuts with this, but we are soooo close to making our goal for DSA. DSA is a drive we do every year where we offer our financial support to the work of the diocese. They cannot take a collection every week like we can so they really count on us to cowboy up and do our part. If you are able to pledge or even offer a one-time gift to this fund, I ask you to please do so soon. You can grab an envelope from the pews or you can go online to https://donate.dioceseoflansing.org/DSAdonations and make a gift there. If you do that, PLEASE make sure to note that you are a member of Holy Family in Grand Blanc. That will help us chart our proximity to the goal.
Speaking of finances…Great news! We recently received two extremely generous gifts to our parish from Barbara Ann Backe LaVigne Revocable Trust. The first check of $48,677 was directed to the school and the second one of the same amount was directed to the parish for whatever we felt best.
For the school, we are putting the money into an account as the beginning of a tuition assistance fund. This would be a fund that we build up over the years in the hopes that someday, it is generating enough revenue to shave a lot of money off tuition costs. We have so many other immediate problems to deal with that we’ll need to wait for a while before we launch any kind of campaign to grow that fund.
For our parish, we are going to put it toward a Buildings and Grounds fund. It will support the efforts of the The Building and Grounds Committee we formed last year. This is a group of volunteers (mostly retired) with great knowledge of buildings, boilers, bricks, etc. We have serious issues with our grounds and buildings and we need an intelligent and prudent plan to address them in the proper way in the proper order. This money will go into a fund for just that purpose.
So, I ask you to say a huge prayer of thanksgiving for the Barbara Ann Backe LaVigne Revocable Trust and ask God to reward her generosity.
Finally, I want to thank all of you who participated in our school auction. What a ridiculous blessing it was to livestream this crazy event! We didn’t hit our goal, but we did do pretty darn good and we had a lot of fun together. It seems to me that as our society continues to abandon ancient wisdom for the newest passing fads, our school will take on more and more importance as people flee a chaotic and off kilter world. I am working hard to make sure that we raise every penny we can so that Catholic Education continues in our parish and all around us. Such a monumental task is only possible because of the hard work of our school employees and your generous sacrifice. Bless you.
I hate talking about money so much and I hope you know I try hard not to. We had quite a year and a half run here, but we simply weren’t able to do our fundraisers, which are a big part of our budget. Because of that, we’re going to be pestering you about money a bit more than usual. Any help you can offer our Parish is so greatly appreciated. I promise you that we are very careful about our spending and run everything through a committee or two so that we respect your sacrifice appropriately.
God bless you for your generous and giving hearts.
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