Father's Day. . . My First Employer . . My Pastor

Thank God for fathers.    Just imagine how many single parents have had to be father and mother to their children.

Unique father

Last Father's Day I talked about my father. This Father's day I want to talk about a unique father and that is my deceased first employer. This employer just happened to be my pastor at the time.

Employer/Pastor

 

I was only 14 years old when I first started working as secretary at my church. I have talked about this often. Besides the fact that my pastor taught me about bookkeeping and paying bills in a timely-fashion, I realized this carried over into my adult life.  These were life lessons. He would  emphasize, “Always pay your bills on time.”    This was a good thing. It was also mandatory for all those that held paying positions of the church to tithe from their earnings received from the church. So I learned to always tithe from my earnings.

I recall my first bulletin was a disaster. Every word was misspelled just about including my employer's name. I felt so bad.  I wanted to hide, but there was no hiding place.  He did not realize when he hired me I could not type and I did not tell him, because I really wanted the job. He was very mad at me and did yell at me stating, “If you were working for someone else, you would be fired for this." “I thought to myself, “He is right.” I assured him, “I am taking typing this semester.” I do not think that was to reassuring to him at that time. Also, I spoke about how soft spoken my biological daddy was in the article http://anointedtoday.blogspot.com/2014/06/fathers-day-my-daddy.html. Well my pastor was the total opposite. He was a yeller at times, but I knew under it all he always wanted the best for me and all of his children. He always wanted things done the right way.

 

Baptist Convention

I went to my first baptist Convention with my employer/pastor, his son, and another young girl. It was in Milwaukee. I thought this was so exciting. I met other teens my age and went to classes daily. Now his son had other ideas. His son skipped class with a girl he met. My pastor found out about it and he was furious. I guess as teenagers we forget that our parents have been there and done that. Also, he never knew that his son had kept me and the other young girl up all night playing cards. We were so tired, but he kept saying, “Just one more hand.”  The young girl and I continued playing until we said, "Enough."  The exposure to this convention was just and awesome experience for me.

Oratorical Contest

My pastor entered me in my first oratorical contest. This was huge for me. He always wanted to be first seemingly in everything. I came in second place. I felt bad and hung my head down knowing that I had let him down. Surprisingly, he said, “You did a great job.” I was not expecting that from him. Now since that time, there have been many first place winners at that church while he was pastor and since he was deceased.

The events I just talked about really influenced me for the good and I am so thankful that he exposed me to that.

Root Problems

Now it does not stop there. I have to give credit to my present pastor. One day in Sunday School he asked us to write a letter to 8 people that had influenced us for the good. He was one of the person's that I wrote a letter to. My letter to him explained how he helped me through Bible Study.

Before I joined my present church I came to Bible Study for about a year. One thing that really helped me was when pastor taught about getting to the root of problems. I had many problems

when I came to my present church. We all know we may have some type of habit, but he even elaborated about habits. I always thought you get rid of a habit, but I learned you replace bad habits with healthy habits. He also taught me about cleaning up the inside of yourself with the word of God, because even though our bodies may change physically we may renew our spirit daily.

So there are father figures in the workplace, in the ministry, and many other places. Again thank you to the Fathers. Can you think of someone that is not your biological father, but has served as a father figure for you.

Photo Caption: Wikimedia Commons, Brookie, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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