Our Next Goal 800 Bibles

Our Next Goal: 800 Bibles

We have made two purchases in recent days of Bibles, purchasing five Bibles each time.  We have now given 737 Bibles.  These have been the Marine's, Soldier's, Sailors, Airmen's, Coastguard and several to Fire Fighters and Law Enforcement. Natalie sells the Bibles to us for the price of $19.97 each, due to my consistency with my supplier, which is now Ruth's Christian Book Store.  If we did a number, that is $19.97 times 737, you can quickly see that we have invested $14717.89.  But our expense has exceeded that because we have only been getting our Bibles at $19.97 for the past year.  Before that, we had paid as high as $26.95 and then we received a discount to $24.65, all from our original supplier.  We used to have a detailed spreadsheet of our expenses in Microsoft Excel but someone sent a virus past all of my defenses and destroyed that so I had to start over.  Fortunately, I did keep another record but without the details. I knew how many we had given so I could just start there and add to it.  We have given several hundred since then.  So, the dollar number above is an estimate but at least is the minimum amount we have spent on Bibles.

I began to write this earlier and did not finish it at the time.  I almost began from scratch right now, but then I decided to keep the 737 and just update our information.  Now, December 10, 2013, we have increased our total Bibles purchased and donated to 775 Bibles.  I had to stretch and make some other sacrifices to do that but we were able to do so.

Someone said that we had spent enough to make a car payment.  We have spent enough to have bought a car.  It isn't a complaint, it's a feeling of joy, of doing something for people I don't know.  I am proud of our small mission and how much it has accomplished.  Let us go back and use that same $19.97 multiplied times the now 775 Bibles and the total dollar number is $15,476.45; then remember that the actual dollar amount exceeds that.  When we say that amount has been spent on Bibles, it is true, for any other costs,  such as mailing, driving to deliver Bibles, thank you cards, all other expenditures are just out of my pocket.  We count only the money spent on Bibles.

I try to maintain about $200.00 in the account used for buying Bibles but I looked and had just over $390.00 in the account, so I moved $390.00 to my active account, added $109.00 to that and paid for an additional 25 Military Bibles making our total donated now 800, which was the goal we hoped to reach sometime in 2014.  Well, today, December 12, 2013, we reached 800 Bibles, which also makes our expenditure exceed $16,000.

Many will benefit from this for the Christmas season.

Merry Christmas

God bless the women and men of the Armed Forces of the United States of America.

Stephen