We had a fantastic Leadership Council meeting at church tonight. That’s not to say that all the news was easy or good. We had some disappointing financial news near the year-end. Namely, that we didn’t have the big December “push” that often comes late-year to balance out our budget.

So, we started this year in the hole. Then, despite more pledges than ever in the church’s history, we were still behind in terms of income we were hoping to have for this year.

A month ago then, at January’s Leadership Council meeting, the group left with several ideas for how to get us back to “even” financially. In the past 30 days, both our Finance and Stewardship Teams worked together on a quiet appeal to some of the church givers, in order to balance our budget.

The incredible news is that between tough-decision cuts by our Finance group, and the second appeal from our Stewardship group, last night we passed a balanced budget for the year. That’s a lot of hard work, condensed into about four or five sentences. But it was really really good work by some incredibly talented folks.

And for them, I am grateful.

(During this year, my goal is to find something new to be thankful for every single day, and to add that thanksgiving as a blog entry, under the title “My Daily Gratitude.” I started this kick back around Thanksgiving, and it’s already resulted in a favorite new song of mine. The goal of this ongoing spiritual exercise is to see if doing such a thing might inspire even more gratitude within me, and to foster general awareness of life on a deeper level.)