June 10, 2005

NEVER Call Your Pastor Back (Help me guest posters, you're my only hope!)

NOTE: Boring personal info below explaining why blogging will be light and why I need my guest-posters and collaborators to pick up the slack today.

Yeah, I go to church. Think of my as a Universalist, but without all the Korean mass-marriages and wussy pacifism. You wanna fight about it? Anyway, last night my wife and I got a sitter and went out to dinner. When we got back I noticed that our pastor had called and wanted me to call him back.

Of course, I didn't call him back. Duh, what do I look like, an idiot? When your pastor calls it can only be bad news. Either he's looking for someone to do a job in the church (and we have several vacancies that I absolutely don't want to do which is why I didn't call him back) or he's looking to help someone move-in or move-out and knows you're one of 3 people who has a flexible work schedule.

I thought the bullet was dodged, I could, after all, blame the whole not calling him back thing on the sitter. But nooooooo. The guy is three steps ahead of me! He gets a friend from church to call me knowing I would take his call.

So, if I'm not around much it's because some one is moving into the area from an affiliated church and they need some help. *Sigh*

Here's a moral question: It appears that the family moving in rarely attended at their old church. That is, they were members of the congregation in name only. Their old pastor asked my pastor to help them out. Now, I'm all about that whole helping people out thing that the dude Jebus I keep hearing about on Sunday talked about, but I feel a little bit of resentment here.

It seems to me that at some level (I'm sure there are tons of other reasons) the reason for organized religious bodies is to establish voluntary mutual aid societies. But isn't helping out those who are members in name only kind of defeating the 'mutual aid' part of the equation? That is to say, I never see slackers like this helping out the regular attendees when they move, but I always see the regular attendees helping the slackers out when they are moving or have other needs like that.

Am I being selfish for begrudging them?

Anyway, I'm off to help move them in. But I swear to Allah that if there isn't a pizza and a six-pack of ice-cold Dr. Pepper waiting for me than I will issue a fatwa against helping slackers move!!