"You can't fail if you don't quit. You can't succeed if you don't start." - Michael Hyatt
“When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.” –Harriet Beecher Stowe
“The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Don’t wait for good things to happen to you. If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope.” –Barack Obama
I am aware of many reasons that we can't possibly succeed in building a new Sanctuary building here at Orange Coast UU Church. What I am not aware of is how IS it possible to do so. I want us all to persist in imagining it is possible and in exploring the possibilities that would allow it to be.
We have a highly qualified volunteer, Linda Spery, who has fund-raising experience and who is willing to support the exploratory efforts to determine our viability as a group who can raise the funds necessary to build a new Sanctuary. She has started this task and is presenting to the Board of Trustees at the April meeting to see if the Board will approve of proceeding further with this venture.
Linda is very enthusiastic and has many ideas about getting this venture going and has declared that she gets “butterflies” (as do I) thinking about this possibility and that she is both an optimist and a realist - in short, I think, she is the perfect person to lead us forward to determine if such a venture is possible for us.
As the author of “The Happiness Project” declares “If you are not making mistakes you are not trying hard enough.”
Shall we experiment with where we, as a congregation, discover our “mistakes” that might be made?
Fortunately, OCUUC doesn't have a mortgage as such, but we have obligations to many of our parishioners, in the form of Simple Notes, and to our Endowment Fund to pay off but it’s not impossible to transform those, at least partially, into assets that could be used with new donations to begin a program to build out a Sanctuary that will allow us to proceed to our Greater Future.
Donald Martin
president@ocuuc.org