commitment

It was commitment Sunday at church today. Commitment Sunday is the Sunday when the congregants tell the church the amount of money they promise to give over te coming year. Being a preacher's kid, I know this estimate of giving is very important to operate the church effectively. If they never knew how much money they planned to have, they couldn't hire people or plan programs or incur debt. So when people say they don't pledge because they just "give as the spirit moves them", then they are just closing their eyes to reality.

I, however, plan to give money when I can, but did not pledge. So shoot me.

Dad's sermons on Commitment Sunday were always so intense that they blew the roof off the sanctuary. I remember one Sunday dinner, I think when we were at Dulin, when Mom told Dad, "Your sermon was so good that I put down $5.00 a week more than we had said." Dad went totally ballistic. He was furious, and said, "Honey, why did you do that? We talked about this! We decided how much we could afford!", and she said, "It was just such a convincing sermon.".

Dad was always an incredibly good preacher. He had a Palm Sunday sermon that was so good that congregants from a church he'd served in the past once traveled to his current church to hear it again. He had an illustration for his "suffering love" sermon that was so gut-wrenching that he had to warn us kids each time he used it, or else he knew we'd be in tears. (He repeated sermons we'd heard before after we would move to a new church.)

The gut-wrenching illustration is:
A little boy moved to a new town, and was given a little tiny puppy by his parents. The boy and the puppy loved each other. They played together for hours at a time, they cuddled together in bed at night, and the puppy followed the boy everywhere.

Then one day the boy had a horrible day. The other kids teased him. The school teachers yelled at him. His mom slapped his cheek for misbehaving.

When the boy got home that night, he slammed angrily into the house. The happy little puppy came leaping to greet him and jumped up on his leg. "Get out of here!" the boy shouted, kicking the puppy across the room.

The puppy yelped as it flew through the air. It hit the opposite wall and slid to the ground. The boy collapsed on the ground in tears. His tears were soon dried by the tongue of the puppy, who had limped over to him and was licking his face dry.