The One True Thing

There is a pumpkin festival going on in Milton, WV, down the interstate from where we live. The festival features -- you guessed it -- pumpkins. This year they have a 1192 pound pumpkin. That's alot of pumpkin.

In Richwoods, WV, they have a ramp festival. Ramps smell nasty, and the only way to survive being near a person who has eaten ramps is to eat them yourself. So I have been told.

Huntington, every spring, has a Dogwood festival. The main component of the festival is an arts and crafts show, which has nothing to do with dogwood.

Do you find that people concentrate on strange things? That our priorities can be skewed at best and completely misguided at worst?

I was listening to a sermon this week about margin. Margin is the space between what we can physically or emotionally do and what we are actually doing. Margin in our schedule means that we are not constantly going from one event to the next, with no free time - or margin -- at all.
When we run out of margin, we become tense and stressed. We worry, and we concentrate on ourselves, rather than on each other.

We need to allow God to set our priorities. We need to allow God to be our priority. When we do, we can stop concentrating on the silly things in life -- giant pumpkins, smelly ramps, and non-applicable dogwood. Instead, we can focus on the one true thing -- God.

Image: Sunrise this morning.