Labor Day And Other Things

Yesterday we celebrated Labor Day--I guess another day off before we hit the fall. I'm not opposed to Labor Day. I like days off. It's just interesting to me that we have to make a national holiday to get a day off.

Labor Day means smaller numbers at church. Most of the time this holds true. However, the last few years at the church I serve, larger than normal Labor Day crowds have been present. This means one of two things this year. One, our people didn't want to pay for traveling gas, or two, they had traveled way too much during the summer that they felt the need to stay home.

As for other things at church--we challenged our people to help out with the hurricane relief financially through a couple of websites--www.stadia.cc and www.ides.org. We are also planning on collecting and sending a truckload of stuff in the next couple of weeks when we know more of what the people need, even though only a handful of our hundreds of people have asked about helping out or have even seemed concerned for those in the Gulf.

In a conversation with one of our people concerning this, they said, "we could have a church wide garage sale to raise money for the hurricane victims. I have plenty of junk to donate to it." Now, I know this person was being very considerate at the time. It just didn't sit well in my head. Here people are in another part of our country with nothing and all we can think about to help them is to sell garage sale type trinkets to raise money.

When are we going to get a clue and stop thinking about ourselves? When is the church going to stop serving itself and living for others? We have a lot to learn.

I have a lot to learn.