Yesterday I was really tired preaching. No, not tired of preaching, just tired while preaching.

I was working off of about three hours of sleep after getting back from an all day trip to New York City with the family. It was a great trip with a lot of fun experiences capped off by a Larry Norman concert in the evening. But we didn’t get home until close to 2:30 a.m., which is very late for us as a family.

Anyways, I have never preached on so little sleep before, so I was wondering what might happen. I was hoping I wouldn’t fall asleep in the middle of my own sermon.

The funny thing was that I had a feeling that I was preaching too long. This was a Communion Sunday, which meant we would need an additional ten minutes at the end of the service to celebrate Communion together. I don’t like to look at the clock while I am preaching, and I usually have a pretty good sense of the time. I felt the sermon was dragging on forever, so I began to edit on my feet. I preach from a manuscript, so at first I clipped a sentence or two here, then a paragraph, eventually whole sections!

Finally, I got to the end of the message, called for the deacons to come forward to serve Communion, and looked at the clock. Our service runs from 10:00 to 11:00, and I fully expected the clock to read 11:05 or even 11:10. The time was . . . only 10:53!

So as it turns out, I actually preach shorter on less sleep. I wonder if this means I will start getting middle-of-the-night crank phone calls from people in the church to keep me up late Saturday nights?

Related posts:

• I Am Tired of Preaching
• Family Trip to New York
• Larry Norman Concert in New York City (1)
• Larry Norman Concert in New York City (2)
• Clock Watching at Grace Community Church
• 5 things to say if you’re caught sleeping at work
• Go Soox!