Who wants to talk to Dad?

I’m away at a conference and when I called home yesterday evening my wife said to my daughters ‘who wants to talk to dad?’ Both of them shouted MEEEEEEEE!

It’s nice to be missed and nice to have people who enthusiastically want to talk to you.

I phoned home after coming out of a session where Lynn Green (the Baptist Union General Secretary) was talking about a vision for us as ‘Baptists together’. One of the things she was talking about was our need to be filled with God’s spirit and for this, we need to invest time with talking to God.

My daughter’s shouting MEEEEEEEE! really challenged me about my enthusiasm for prayer.

All this reminded me of this trailer for the film Peabody and Sherman

Sherman is so excited about his hero who also just happens to be his dad. Listen to what he says about him:

• He’s totally famous
• He solves world problems
• He’s a creative inventor
• He takes me to school
• He feeds me
• We hang out a lot and go to awesome places
• He travels through time
• Protects us
• Can do anything
• I can call him anytime

All these things remind me of God who is all powerful at work but who is also with us in the ordinariness of life.

God has changed my life and my hope is that I can be as excited about him as Sherman is about his dad in the clip.

Sherman’s speech about his dad finishes with these words:

‘What I love most about him is that he is my dad’.

God is powerful, God is with me, but best of all is that he is my dad and he loves me.

The clip finishes with Peabody (the dad) giving his son a whistle so he could call him anytime. God our father is the same (except we don’t need a whistle and he’s not a dog!), whenever we call on him he is there. Whenever we talk to God he will listen and talk with us.

Who wants to talk with God?

MEEEEEEEE?