Screw It, Let's Go Watch TV

So, I've been stressed out over my sermons lately. I'm one of those guys who likes to have his sermon down to the tiniest detail. I like to have days to think out my illustrations, look for the right texts, and find just the right transitions and flow.

All of this was no problem when I had weeks to get my messages ready, but now things are a little different. I get up at 5am and don't get home from work until about 4:30pm. Then, I take care of my 2 year old and my newborn until I get them both to sleep somewhere around 9pm if I'm lucky. This leaves me about a half an hour to an hour of alone time before I have to be in bed for my seven hours of sleep before the next day of work. This means that the only time I really have for getting my sermon ready is Saturday, which happens to be my only real day off. For the last couple of months I've been locking myself away on Saturday from morning until sometime in the late afternoon to get my messages ready.

So basically, I was working straight through the week and still not feeling my messages were good enough. The idea of preaching has been weighing on me through out the week. I started getting easily bothered by things that never have bothered me before. I began to dread the weekends. Can you imagine wishing it wasn't Friday sometimes?

This Saturday I woke up dreading the day because my sermon was no where near done. I decided I'd had enough of this and planed to do something about it. First, I forgot about my sermon and hung out with my family for a few hours. Next, I continued to forget about working on my sermon and instead went and hung out with my pastoral staff, aka my best friends, and told them what was going on with me. Then, we went and loaded the church truck and continued to hang out and do nothing for the next four hours. Then, I had to perform a wedding, but I decided to take my family with me and after I was done, we went out to dinner together. We went home and instead of worrying about the sermon that I put off all day, I went to sleep. That's right, I managed a real day off and it wasn't a half bad one at that.

I woke up this morning planning on taking the amount of sermon I had done and going off to work on it alone after we set up and while the band was practicing, like I always do on the Sundays I preach. This didn't go quite as I planned it. It was Bekah's first Sunday leading vocally for us and as I was about to go down the hall and I noticed that she seemed a little nervous. I thought about it for a second and decided I should just hang out in the cafeteria and listen to her instead. I don't think it helped her at all, she was doing awesome and she had Tyson and Autumn there listening to her anyway, but it just felt like it was more important for me as a Pastor and a friend to be there showing support, rather than to work on a sermon that may or may not come together anyway. So, I said screw the sermon.

When, it was time I went up and preached. It went fine. I said what needed to be said. I didn't fall apart. No one lost their salvation.

I'm going to try not to stress about my messages anymore. I'm going to use the half and full hours I get during the weeknights to work on them and I'm going to take real days off. My sermons might not be the masterpieces I want them to be, but I think they will be better if I actually have a life to talk about. They might be a little shorter than what I'm used to, but I talk too much anyways. There are more important things than having the perfect sermon. The imperfect ones will have to do.