When I was sixteen I smashed my father's powder-blue Chrysler.  I had gotten my driver's license only a few months before, and that day was one of the first times he'd let me drive his car by myself.  I drove from our suburban home into the city with a friend. Backing the car out of a parking place in a high rise garage, I slammed into a large concrete abutment.   

I spent the twenty minute ride home petrified, saying over and over to my friend, "I'm gonna lie.  I'm gonna lie.  I'll just say we walked up to the car and found it smashed.  My dad can't prove I did it.  I'm gonna lie."

My father was the solo pastor of the same Presbyterian church in a small Ohio town for thirty-eight years.  He was a hands-on leader.  He attended most of the church committee meetings.  He helped set up tables and chairs for church potlucks and then helped take them down.  He was the first to arrive at the church every Sunday.  He turned on the lights, preached at both services, taught two Sunday-school classes, helped serve coffee at the reception following church, and was usually the last one to leave the building after making sure all the lights were turned off.  After Sunday dinner with his family, he'd take a nap and then make hospital calls in the afternoon.  After he retired, I asked him why he had worked so hard all the time.  He smiled, and said; "Son, I've never worked a day in my life."

            To know my father is to know where he stands.  He always wore a clerical collar on Sundays and whenever he made hospital calls.  He had been called by God into the ministry and, by God, he was proud of that.  When he walked into any room, like him or not, you knew immediately a man of God was there.

My father wanted peace in his congregation but also knew that, during times of conflict, the pastor must walk in integrity and truth-telling, even if that meant walking alone.  My father never told me, but I know these words of Jesus are written in indelible ink on his heart:  "For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world but forfeits his soul?"

My father's hands-on approach extended to developing the church budget and pledge drive.   One year (when, like most years at the church, money was tight), the CEO of a large local corporation made a generous financial pledge, and he and his wife made it clear to everyone in the congregation that their pledge came with strings attached.  So the battle lines were drawn: On the one side, a large annual financial pledge that, if accepted, meant the CEO would be the de facto spiritual voice of the congregation.  On the other side were the financial committee and the pastor.

So on Monday morning my father appeared, in clerical garb and without an appointment, at the CEO's receptionist desk.  He smiled and politely asked if he could have a moment of the man's time.  He was ushered into the office, and after a few moments he calmly walked out, head high, soul and integrity in hand, without the big financial pledge.

My father was no saint, but he sure was dedicated.  Years later at his retirement party, he told me this:  "What I'm most proud of is that, like Paul, I finished the race."

On the day I smashed my father's Chrysler, I dropped my friend off at his house and then steered the car into our driveway.  I walked into the house and I tried with all my might to lie to my father.  I'm not a saint either, but I couldn't.  I tried, I really did, but instead I told the truth.

What is truth?  Truth is being sixteen years old, with braces on your teeth, pimples on your face, making stupid mistakes with your father's powder-blue Chrysler, knowing you deserve condemnation, and at the moment of truth-telling being shocked at seeing respect looking back at you from your father's eyes.