Just Say No

The office door to the church has had it problems recently. In fact, it got so bad that in order to close, it had to be violently slammed. Where I come from, a slammed door is a no-no (thanks Mom and Dad). On the other hand, several times people unaware of the present state of the door chose to close it gently, and while it may have appeared to be shut tightly, the door was simply putting on a facade. Any gentle nudge applied to the door would expose this facade, but oftentimes the door closer would be in too much of a rush to get out of the church and our poor church was left vulnerable (I suppose that a locked church door can be pretty symbolic of a church's inability to reach out to its community, but that is not where I am going with this).

For weeks I heard talk of someone coming in to fix this resistant door, but it just did not seem to be happening. I realize that sometimes you must be patient and allow for people to fit things into their schedules, but there came a point where I realized that if I had to hear the door slam one more time, I might become desensitized to it and all of my parents' teaching on door slamming would have been in vain. Plus, I realized that in order for me to fix the door I would need to buy a new tool, something that I jump at whenever I get the opportunity!

It took me about 10 minutes to restore the door to it's preliminary state, not a terribly huge or difficult task, but definately one that was a long time coming. Let me tell you, the sound of nothingness ringing through the office is music to my ears.

Scott, I think, is going through the same thing. He has a vision of our church's sound booth being a whole lot more than the sham it is in right now. Almost every work day for about two weeks now, he has been meeting and talking with people who have been promising to pull through to make the booth what it needs to be. I haven't seen any progress.

I suppose I could extend this idea further by pointing out all the times I hear people say directly to me that they will see me in church on Sunday, and then Sunday rolls around and I see no sign of them. I don't think that people intend this to be the case, but I fear that the world is suffering from severe flakititus (most common symptoms are talking big, delivering small, and being apathetic to the whole situation). James has something to say about this type of behavior, in v5.12 he writes, "But above all, my brethren, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or with any other oath. But let your 'yes' be 'yes,' and your 'no,' 'no,' lest you fall into judgment." If you are too busy to do a favor or a job for someone, they would be much less annoyed if you simply said no, than if you said yes and then failed to follow through. Anyone care to help me rearrange the furniture in my house???