What Matters Most of All

I have been amazed and excited about our church for some time now. I am amazed that we have seen a growth of some 400 people over the course of the last three years. I have been even more amazed at the offering growth almost twice what it was three years ago. Without harping or ranting and raving about attendance or giving people have seen, I hope the pure motives within the church and the staff that we have assimilated to the point we understand we all have one commission and one calling to enlarge the Kingdom of God. When I think of 400 plus people coming over the past four years it is simply a God thing. It really boils down to how much we care. Do we care enough or could we care even more and no telling what might God entrust us with?

For example, on a routine visit to a busy Bellevue Hospital. A charity case if you will. A drunken homeless man had slit his throat and died. Then came the visit to the morgue by the Pastor. The derelicts name was misspelled on the hospital form, But then what good is a name when the guy' s a bum. The age was also incorrect. He was 38 not 39 and looked twice that. Somebody might have remarked, "What a shame for one so young," but no one did. Because no one cared.

The details of what had happened in the predawn of that chilly winter morning in New York were fuzzy. The nurse probably shrugged it off. They had seen thousands and were sure to thousands more.

His health was gone and he was starving. He had been found lying in a heap, bleeding from a deep gash in his throat. His forehead was badly bruised and he was semiconscious. A doctor used black sewing thread to suture the wound. Then the man was dumped in a paddy wagon and dropped off at Bellevue Hospital where he languished and died. But nobody really cared.
A friend seeking him was directed to the local morgue. There among dozens of other nameless corpses he was identified. When they scraped together his belongings, they found a ragged, dirty coat with .38 cents in the pockets and a scrap of paper in the other. All his earthly goods. Enough coins for another night in the clubs and five words, "Dear friends and gentle hearts." Almost like the words of a song, some one may have thought.

Which would have been correct, for once years ago this man had written the songs literally made the whole world sing. Songs like, "Camptown Races", "Oh Susanna", "Beautiful Dreamer", " Jeanie with the light brown hair," "Old folks at Home," "My Old Kentucky Home," and two hundred more that have become deeply rooted in our rich American heritage. Thanks to Stephen Collins Foster. The question is do we care enough to show hospitality to strangers. I said it yesterday and I'll say it again, "The world does not care how much we know until they know how much we care."