A NOTE FROM PASTOR BOB
As a young boy I had the tendency at times to, well, not tell the truth. It wasn’t major lies I told, just small things like “stretching the truth.” But over time it became evident to me that the more I stretched the truth the more of a distance it created between me and the person I was, well, not being truthful to. I always thought I was on the right path in my young life, but things caught up to me and the next thing I knew, I was not in good standing with others.
One night after a rather “stretching the truth” kind of day, my dad sat at my bedside and pointed some things out. He said things like, “When you don’t tell the truth son, we don’t know what to believe.” And then he went on to tell me stories of how my not being in good with him and others would mean that I had to be restored to the level of trust I once had with them. I wasn’t really sure how to do that. You see, when you start “stretching the truth” it sometimes becomes muddied and you can’t quite know what is right and what is, well, wrong.
I realized at a young age I needed to seek something very important from my dad and that was “restoration.” As a young boy, I really didn’t know what that meant but in his own kind of way, my dad reminded me a great lesson. He had been working to rebuild something that had a defect to it; broken, you know? Even though it was broken, dad wanted to restore that item to its like-new qualities. In that object lesson, I learned what it meant to be restored. God does that for us too, doesn’t He? God takes our bad, our untruths, even our biggest failures and works through them and on the other side we become something new; restored.
Pastor Bob
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