Recollections of My Father, Part Three

_{We continue this week with recollections of Elisabeth’s father, Phillip E. Howard Jr. as we learn from his heart and his practice of prayer that he lived before his children.}

“A Christian who is saturated with the Word,” he said, “is likely to have a calm, wholesome outlook on life; to be kept steady in the path of God’s will in either joy or sorrow, wealth or poverty; he is likely to be a pleasant companion, not voluble in aimless talk; and he will not be overly disturbed by world conditions.”

When the youngest of us was a grown man, he asked Dad for help in forming his own prayer list. He received this note:

1. Revise it occasionally.
2. Three columns: Organizations / People / Personal
3. A daily list, then another for each day, Monday, Tuesday, etc.
4. Any area of life where you find
   • trouble
   • mistakes
5. Don’t limit prayer only to these things—pray for things you read about in the Bible.
6. Pray about the two most important decisions:
   • wife
     • one who wants to go to the mission field, not just because you want to
     •  pray before you become involved
   • life work

My father did not us push to prayer; he led us—first by that consistent example of being a pray-er himself, then by asking the blessing (a phrase he thought more accurate than “saying grace”) at meals, and by gathering all of us together after breakfast for family prayers, as described in Mother’s article. I do not say that we always followed willingly, or with anything like spiritual hunger or understanding, not until years later for most of us. But I do say that there was no hypocrisy on his part to pull the rug out from under what he tried to teach us. Children are keen as bloodhounds to sense that. He believed what he said. We could not have doubted that. And he lived by it.

_{**Excerpt originally published in The Shaping of A Christian Family, p. 56-57.}