Preaching to myself

My prayer life has been in the dumps this past week. I'm a single dad for 8 days while my wife is away working at a church camp. The kids have been in a camp themselves in the morning, which I thought would allow me to get work done. Which it has. But, like an idiot, I failed to recognize that a half day is not enough time to get in a full days worth of work. I'm not sure how I missed that one, but miss it I did. If I'd just been paying attention, I could have either front-loaded or just plain off-loaded a lot of things and this week would have been a snap. But I didn't, and as a result I've been running around like a lunatic trying to be a parent most of the day and still get a full weeks worth of work in.

Then I got the water bill.

It seems that our water piping from the street to the house blew a hole. How big? We lost 90 gallons in 60 minutes the other day. When I told the plumber that, he winced. That's never a good sign. I'm not sure how there's even any water getting to the house, but there was. Since we're in a drought and this wasted water was costing us a lot of money, I immediately turned the water off at the street except when absolutely necessary. Since then, it's been buckets and pitchers. So on top of the lunacy of single parenting and a full time job all at once, this week I've had the added lunacy of filling toilets with buckets and having to get major plumbing work done.

All of that means that I just have not taken the time to pray. Normally, I probably would have said "haven't had the time to pray," but that's not true. I did have time. I could have found 10, 15, even 30 minutes to pray. I just chose not to. I chose to let the strain and anxiety get to me. The neat thing is how I realized that. I realized it while writing my sermon for this week, which is about (you're gonna love this) getting rid of the distractions so we can get a reading from the true GPS: God's Positioning System.

My goal with each sermon is to have it be really meaningful to just one person. One person for whom it touches their soul. I figure if I can do that, I've done well. This week, that person is me. Everyone else may think the sermon stinks for all I know, but I sure learned something, and that's pretty cool.