Greetings once again from the Office of Finance and Planning. I hope that each of you had a wonderful Festival of Tabernacles and that you arrived home safe, sound and spiritually uplifted.
Before launching into this month's financial report, I wish to give you an update on my wife's health.
As many of you know, earlier this year my wife, Arlene, suffered a multiple ruptured bowel with extensive abdominal contamination as a complication to a serious case of colitis.
Emergency surgery saved her life, and then a second surgery was needed to clean and remove a serious abscess that arose after the first surgery.
Although her life was in jeopardy, thankfully she survived the ordeal. Nonetheless, she experienced severe deterioration in her health, and her convalescence has been long and slow.
The good news is that she is slowly but continually regaining her strength and stamina, even though her periods of improvement are punctuated with some discouraging plateaus and even minor setbacks.
All in all, she is doing fairly well, has come a long way, and we can see the end of the tunnel, but we still need your continued prayers.
Now for an update on the church's finances. Because the headquarters offices and mail processing center shut down operations for the Feast break before the end of September, this month's report covers only up to and including Sept. 26. (A full month's report would have included two more banking days than are reflected here.)
Nonetheless, through Sept. 26 our daily average mail income rose from the disappointing August figures of $136,950 to about $146,528.
Although this number is still far under our original goals for the year, it was heartening to see this small upward movement.
As I wrote last time, however, the downturn in August led to us starting various budget cuts. In order for us to live within our means, those cuts will regrettably have to continue as planned.
Because the mail processing offices were closed during the Feast break, it will take several weeks to process the daily mail that came into the church from Sept. 21 until after the Feast break, and thus we will not have an accurate picture of our income over this period for sometime yet.
Likewise, it will take a few weeks to count and process the Holy Day offerings. However, the Festival of Trumpets offerings have been processed, and they exceeded our projection of $1.2 million by about $200,000 for a total offering of about $1.425 million.
Thank you for this offering and for all the others not yet counted. I am grateful for the prayers and financial support of all of you.
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