(curtain rises as Angie is sitting on the couch, indian style with her trusty cell phone calculator, figuring out how much 400 color laser copies will cost at approx. $.23 cents per copy, per side, if it is a double sided piece, plus paper. Add in another document that is plain black and white, but also double sided, on heavier card stock paper. The battery is getting low on her phone and she realizes that she needs to plug it in soon or it will die. This heavy math will have to wait until later).
This was the scene the night before last as I tried to figure the cost of printing a full color brochure for our trip to Iraq, plus the response cards for the giving envelopes we'll send to our supporters. Yikes! It's SO expensive to raise money!
BUT, you know what I started thinking, right? Stamps.
I mean, it worked with the stamps! God rained downed stamps from heaven - why not printing?! So I plugged in my phone, and banged out some emails. First to some pastor friends in town (and some not so in town), and then to some Christian printers in town, asking if any of them would be up for spotting this print job. Then, I just sort of prayed, "God, could you get this one too?"
:-) And we got two takers! We will have enough brochures now to be able to send to all of our supporters, and to go to a church with our presentation as soon as we find a church who will have us! The pastor who said his church would print them - I don't even KNOW HIM really! We've passed each other online over the years, but he lives in another state for goodness sake! He just said, "I could use my less than half used copy budget for it. Send it my way."
And the printer here in town - he was all over it! In fact, he said, "I know just the paper to print it on," and started into this talk about a "dull gloss heavier weight paper, lightly colored to look like sand, which would really make our brohures colors pop and stand out (not boring like most churches or missionaries just use white)...and it would be great", he said, "because the light sand color would be reminiscent of the sands of Iraq." :-) And he said, "I know you said you needed 400, but we should probably print 500, in case you find you need more along the way. You never know who you're going to meet!"
My goodness! My God's Goodness.
3 comments:
I enjoy how your brain works. You keep coming up with really creative solutions.
In case you two have forgotten, a certain Grandmother, living on the eastside of Columbus, has offered her church a couple of times. It only requires a phone call to said Grandmother!!!
Oh, in my mind, when I said, "as soon as we find a church who will have us!" I left out all of this:
"as soon as we find...one of the several churches on our list of churches who we think might have us over, (and Grandma Shirley's church is most definitely one of them))...a church who will have a us!"
We're in the process of contacting/writing/calling 10 or so churches who we think might have us, and she/they are one of them. :-) As a matter of fact, I told Bob that I'm hoping her church will go so far as to be the church that will handle our mailings while we're gone, since they seemed so interested in keeping up with him while he was gone the first time. It would be great to have a church mail our newsletters to all of our supporters each month. Maybe them? If they cared enough to call her every month and ask about him? Maybe they could do this?
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