Advice from my Dad

My Father's Day tribute comes on the heels of a frustrating day yesterday. I bought some software that is supposed to make sermon prep a little easier. It has commentaries, dictionaries, different versions of the Bible. It even has a word processor built in that will cross reference your sermons to each other and passages of scripture will be cross referenced to others. Sounded pretty cool until about half way through typing out my sermon the program crashed. Dead. All my work gone. It's 10:30 Saturday night. So I restarted it and used it again really wanting all that sweet cross referencing. This time I got to within about three or four words of being completely finished and it did it again. Dead. Gone. Everything.

So now it's 11:30 and I have been working on this all week and I don't think I can do anymore and so I'm about to just go to bed and tell the congregation tomorrow what happened and maybe we can just sing alot or take testimonies or something. But I remembered what my Dad told me years ago. I called him in a similar situation on a late Saturday night before teaching Sunday School the next morning.

"Pop, I got nothing. What do I do?"
"Better get to work."
"But I mean I really got nothing. How am I supposed to do it?"

I don't know what I was expecting him to say. I guess he was supposed to tell me the magic prayer to pray and the Bible fairy will leave it under my pillow or something.

He just told me one more time, "You really better get to work then".

Then I remembered more than once years before driving by the church he pastored and seeing his office light on even in the middle of the night on Saturday night. I won't say what I was doing coming home in the middle of the night but I had to pass by there and I often saw his light on as I passed and now I knew that his words of wisdom were born of great late-night experience.

So last night I got to work and retyped the whole thing and it turned out well. I know God helps those who are diligent but sometimes he also sends a Godly father to give timely, wise advice. Thanks, Pop, and happy Father's Day.