October 17, 2013 (Thursday)
Last night the United States Congress passed legislation that ended the shutdown of government and raised the debt limit…for a short while. The government will be funded until January 15 and the debt limit is raised until February 7. A committee was appointed to work out new methods to keep this from happening over and over and it is scheduled to report December 13.
As a pastor I have had experience with budgets. If we in the churches had operated in the same way the federal government operates, we would have diverted our attention from the mission God called us to perform to the administrative matters that should be incidental to the main work of the church.
I’m well aware that the differences in dollar amounts between our budgets and the governments are of such magnitude that there is no comparison there, but the methods of funding the various government agencies and programs evidently need revision. The nation should not have to suffer through another period of uncertainty and its employees should not have to worry about whether they have jobs or not. Many people have needlessly suffered during this unseemly period of operational chaos. It should not happen again.
As Mammy Yokum (Li’l Abner comic strip) used to say, “Ah has spoken.”