Fussing over insignificant things

If you are waiting for part 3 & 4 of my series on kingship (which I am sure everyone is waiting in great expectation for), they will appear next week (I said that last week) and the week after.

I drove into town this morning to pick up some cat food and sponges for a painting project that Lindsay is undertaking. After having lived in a city for a while and being able to run into Meijer or Walmart at any point of the night or morning to pick up what I want, I became a little spoiled. I find myself needing to spend a little time at my parent's rather than to drive back out to my house in the country and then back into town again. So I am writing this post this week rather than posting what I have already written on kingship.

This morning I woke up early. I went to bed last night at seven due to not feeling well. A raging storm woke me up around five this morning. Trying to figure out something to do so early in the morning, I turned the television on. I was depressed to realize that which I already knew: Nothing is on early that is worth waking up for. I ended up watching a documentary on the hurricane center in Florida during hurricane season. It showed them having all sorts of meetings and how they predict where the hurricane will go. It was a pretty boring show, but I was too tired to do anything productive and just laid there watching.

One thing struck me during the show. There was a group of around eight hurricane specialists in a room. They were arguing over whether a storm in the gulf was remnants of Hurricane Ivan or whether it was a new storm. After much heated debate, they decided (albeit not all in agreement - it appeared that one was adamantly opposed) that it was remants of Ivan and would keep the name. To them, this seemed like an extremely important task. As an outsider, it seemed very irrelevant.

Then I thought of myself. I hate special and/or designated offerings. A special offering is when a church decides to do another offering to raise funds for something specific. A designated offering is when you can tell what you want your offering to go towards during the normal weekly offering. Both drive me crazy.

But then I thought that maybe I am just like those hurricane specialists. I am arguing over nothing important at all. All that matters is that the work of the Lord is getting done in church. Nothing else matters. How that gets done isn't all that important to whether it gets done.

I was previously going to not give in the special offering next week despite it being for a good cause. Or I was going to just put all of my offering check in the special offering and ignore the regular offering. I had not decided what I was going to do yet. I still really do not know what to do. We do stretch ourselves very thin already with what we give in the regular offering.

How are special offerings supposed to work? Are you supposed to give above and beyond what you regularly give? What if you really cannot afford to give anything above and beyond?

But I have decided that I will no longer argue against special offering and designated offerings. (Okay, part of me still wants to bring it up since I am in the leadership of the church and this was not decided on in a meeting. I wonder why something that is central to what a church should be about - meeting someone's financial need - is a special offering and not just something that is taken care of out of the regular budget.) I will continue to despise special offerings, but I will keep those feelings to myself. (Then again maybe not.) I do not want to be like those hurricane specialists fussing over insignificant things. (Are special offerings insignificant?)