Sweating the small stuff
So here I am at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco. This is an enormous conference with over 10,000 attendees they tell me. Normal passes are around $3000 to attend with a number of companies (including mine) being licensees of the JVM so they are given tickets. The license for the JVM is a hugely expensive item, so the tickets are most definitely not free.
As part of the conference, we are given meal tickets. Breakfast is either bagel or doughnut with fruit, yogurt, coffee and fresh juice. The apple juice is particularly good. Lunch has been disappointing with sandwiches mostly and an occasional salad. During lunch we get a can of drink and water and iced tea near the tables.
To receive your lunch, you get into a long line where there are people whose sole function is to tell you to tear off a ticket. Then you hand it to another person, get into other lines and pick up a bag of your food of choice. At the end of the food tables, you get condiments, utinsels and the beverages on ice. I give you all this preview so you can understand what just occurred. A person grabbing lunch actually took two sodas from the bucket. And the "helpful" people tossed a fit! "Sir, only one drink, sir," they tell him. "They are all over the show floor," the nerd whined (since barrels of ice and drinks are everywhere). But the helpful person was adamant that the rules only allowed a single beverage for him.
Seems like a bit much for this multi-million dollar conference doesn't it? I mean the conference could probably pay for everybody to have an extra beverage if they just didn't hire that guy in the first place!
Do we get stuck on the small stuff at church? Have we been guilty of looking at a person's dress and making a judgement of their worth? Have we seen a person with a certain translation of the bible that we don't think is "right" and we judge them? Aren't we all guilty sometime of focusing on the small stuff and forgetting the fact that God loves this person just as they are. That sometimes just listening to their problems is all we need to do and let God work on the "defects" we notice?
As part of the conference, we are given meal tickets. Breakfast is either bagel or doughnut with fruit, yogurt, coffee and fresh juice. The apple juice is particularly good. Lunch has been disappointing with sandwiches mostly and an occasional salad. During lunch we get a can of drink and water and iced tea near the tables.
To receive your lunch, you get into a long line where there are people whose sole function is to tell you to tear off a ticket. Then you hand it to another person, get into other lines and pick up a bag of your food of choice. At the end of the food tables, you get condiments, utinsels and the beverages on ice. I give you all this preview so you can understand what just occurred. A person grabbing lunch actually took two sodas from the bucket. And the "helpful" people tossed a fit! "Sir, only one drink, sir," they tell him. "They are all over the show floor," the nerd whined (since barrels of ice and drinks are everywhere). But the helpful person was adamant that the rules only allowed a single beverage for him.
Seems like a bit much for this multi-million dollar conference doesn't it? I mean the conference could probably pay for everybody to have an extra beverage if they just didn't hire that guy in the first place!
Do we get stuck on the small stuff at church? Have we been guilty of looking at a person's dress and making a judgement of their worth? Have we seen a person with a certain translation of the bible that we don't think is "right" and we judge them? Aren't we all guilty sometime of focusing on the small stuff and forgetting the fact that God loves this person just as they are. That sometimes just listening to their problems is all we need to do and let God work on the "defects" we notice?
posted by Pastor Tom at 1:07 PM
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