Priorities

A recent meeting left me frustrated and wondering why God's people spend time arguing over the most meaningless things. To be sure, everyone has a right to their opinions, and everyone's opinion is valuable- at least to them.
My question is, as Christians, are we really to believe that all issues are created equal?

Take for instance the issue that some of my friends and I just spent hours discussing. Handclapping. More specifically, should good Christians clap in church. I dare not minimize this issues seeing as how it is very important to some people. My question is, where are our priorities? Is handclapping really what we should spend our time talking about?

I could see worship wars being a top priority if there were nothing else of any importance going on in our world. If millions of people in our world were not hungry, if families were not under attack and being torn apart, if schools were actually safe for children to attend, if Christians had no friends, neighbors, or relatives that needed to hear the gospel, then I could understand why we spend so much time arguing about worship, make-up, or the myraid other issues that seem to occupy our time. I could understand why it would be near the top our priority list to make sure that everyone adhere to a certain set of rules as soon as they came into our churches. With so much to be done before our Lord returns, however, I don't see a lot of what we spend time focusing on being priority.

As Christians and as Adventist, we have issues that are important to us. My question is, are the things that are most important to us really important at all? In my opinion, if we spend more time and energy focusing on who's wearing what, who's clapping in church and the kind of music we sing than we do sharing the gospel with those who don't know the truth about Jesus and making an impact in our communities, then our priorities are all mixed up.

It may be time to get our priorities in order, before it's too late.