Missing the mark

I sat back in the sound booth for years and was never disappointed when “upgrade” money came in for needed projects. At a previous church we had a donation for a new video projector so that the worship team could read the songs off the back wall. This seemed like a great move to me. Our currant projector was in need of an upgrade so we decided to move the old one to the back wall and use the new one in front. With the new equipment and new wiring the quote was just shy of ten grand. Wow. To those who work with the church budget this was really not such a big deal. We spend thousands on utilities every month and so on. To me this was huge. This was a lot of money. What else could we do with this same cash? If ten thousand dollars was all we had what could we do with it to directly increase the churches mission? What if we visited the homes around our church and offered to pay their utilities for a month. No strings attached. Or what if we got some guys in the church and fixed peoples cars for free. How far would that ten grand go? How many lives could be changed? I know that if we have building we will have needs and expenses. But if we spend all of our resources on us, our community will suffer and we will find ourselves missing the mark.