ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS
September 28, 2025
So yesterday, I officiated a little wedding in the chapel—a lovely young couple. About 20 minutes before the wedding started, I got two rather large splinters from a piece of wood, right on the end of my left index finger, including one of them going under my fingernail. I was able to quickly pull out the one under the fingernail, but the other one had to stay until after the wedding. I figured I’d deal with it when I got home. But after the wedding, I sat down at the computer and started working on a couple of different things. And that small splinter was right on that part of the finger that makes contact with the keyboard. And it was surprisingly painful for something so small. In fact, I was forced to stop what I was doing, poke around the office, and search for a needle to help me dig out the splinter.
Why are some of the smallest things so irritating? In this case, something really got under my skin, but there are other things in life that can appear rather small, yet they irritate us to the point of bringing everything to a standstill. Here’s my struggle—there are times when I think that small yet annoying irritant might in fact be God trying to awaken me to something rather significant. And there are other times when the irritant can consume my attention to the point that I lose focus on what is really important. There have been times in my own life when I have made the small stuff, not only the big stuff, but the primary thing above all other things. Can anyone relate?
This is when spiritual discernment is so important. It is a practice that needs practice, using prayer, meditation, study, worship, and other spiritual disciplines, in the pursuit of God’s priorities over that one irrelevant thing that continues to irritate the snot out of me. The church, and I am talking about the Church Universal, has a bad habit of losing sight of the God stuff amidst the clamoring of what does not help pursue love, reconciliation, mercy, justice, kindness, and ultimately, salvation itself. Let’s help one another in pursuing the way of God and not the babel of the irrelevant irritant.
There is plenty of stuff that irritates us, O God of Creation, yet we seek to have a sacred awareness so that we might be irritated by the things that irritate you. And not simply to be irritated by such things, but to seek what is good and right and just. Amen.
