A House of Order?

In an anonymous foyer out there one Sunday, I heard someone say this: "everything with this ward is always last minute, off the cuff, poorly planned, and badly communicated.  I miss my old ward.  People cared.  They had consideration for the other members."

"Behold, mine house is a house of order, saith the Lord God, and not a house of confusion. D&C 138:8"

I don't know of any scripture which says we should dispense with consideration for each other's time and budgets.  Not everybody in the church has an inexhaustible supply of them.  Especially families with youth and children, and families with blue collar work schedules on bare pay.

Covenants of consecration are obligation upon ourselves -- they do not allow us to be inconsiderate of others.

When Spencer Kimball said "Do it Now," he did not mean "do things at the last minute with no preparation or forethought."

If we wish to follow that scripture, here are a couple of things to consider:

• Send emails out more than just a day or two before the event. Far more.  Not everyone checks their email multiple times per day, nor even once a week.
• If your child or youth needs to purchase things for camp or an event, especially a long list, allow families enough time to budget and shop for them. More that just a week or two.
• Reference specific times and dates. Always. Even in follow up emails.  Do not assume they are always known and remembered.
• If you send attachments you expect people to see and read, learn how to make documents and graphics that are well composed and formatted, with text large enough to read.  Learn how to operate spread sheets, pdf's, and zip compression.  Fully learn.
• Consider distances some families have to travel.  With children.
• Understand not everybody is expert at the genealogy system.  Not everybody has big supplies of names waiting around to be submitted and worked. Not everybody has super generous amounts of time to learn it, as much as we may wish we did.
• Plan activity food to be a little better than green jello and funeral potatoes put together that afternoon.

I'm sure other people have items of their own they can add to the list.  We have multiple missions in the church.  We have secular affairs.  Juggling them is not easy.

Which is why the Lord has emphasized order.