The Best Advice My Father Ever Gave Me

Ask ten people for the best advice they've ever received and you'll get ten different answers. Mine is one sentence from my dad.

My father is a pastor, so our house was never quiet. People came at all hours: church members, neighbors, and sometimes strangers who had visited our church once and wanted counseling or advice. As a kid I didn't think much about it. Looking back, I was watching a man carry other people's troubles on top of his own and somehow stay steady. Almost every day, I could see or hear my dad praying early in the morning, crying to God for help and guidance, not only for our family but for other people too.

The night he told me this, I was 21 and alone in Bangkok, Thailand. I had gone there to take my dad's place at the company where he had been working. He had decided to go back home to Iloilo to become the senior pastor of our church. I felt lonely and homesick, and I had no idea what my future would look like. I wasn't hiding it very well. He didn't give me a long sermon. He said something close to this:

"Biskan ano pa ang matubang mo nga problema sa kabuhi, basta ara ka kay God, ang pagtuo mo hugot, malagpasan mo gid ina tanan."

"Whatever problems you face in life, as long as you stay with God
and your faith is firm, you will get through all of it."

Honestly, my first reaction was: that's it? I wanted a plan. Steps. Something I could do with my hands. It sounded too simple.

It took me years to understand that it wasn't simple at all.

What I thought it meant, and what I think now

I used to hear "faith" as a kind of insurance, as if believing hard enough would keep the bad things away. It doesn't work like that. Jesus tells a short story in Matthew 7 about two men building houses, one on rock and one on sand. The same storm hits both. The only difference is what each house was standing on.

That changed how I read my father's advice. He never said the storm wouldn't come. He said I would get through it.

The things I used to lean on were the sand: my job, my savings, my health, what people thought of me. All of those can disappear fast. Just recently I was feeling very confident at work. I had been doing well, celebrated my third year with the company, and been promoted to a senior position. Then, in the blink of an eye, I was told my position was being removed because they no longer needed it. Just like that, poof.

When my own strength ran out

For a long time I believed that if I worked hard enough and planned carefully enough, I could avoid trouble. Then I hit a wall that no amount of planning fixed. Being told I was redundant hit me hard. I kept asking myself why this was happening. I thought I was already settled, that everything was already in place. But I prayed to God for just one thing: peace. A few weeks after my last day, one of the companies I had applied to, one of the ones I really wanted, told me I had passed the interviews and I was hired.

Philippians 4:13 is the verse everyone puts on posters, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." I used to read it as a promise of winning. Then I learned Paul wrote it from a prison cell. He wasn't saying he could do anything he wanted. He was saying he could get through hunger and plenty, hard days and good ones, because his strength wasn't coming from himself. That is the version I needed.

Peace, and hope

Peace is different from comfort. Comfort is money in the bank and no problems today. Peace is what you can still have when the money and the comfort are gone. In John 14, hours before the cross, Jesus tells his friends He gives a peace the world can't, so their hearts don't have to be troubled. I didn't understand that until I needed it. Even with the pressure of job hunting, I had peace, a calm in my heart that I can't explain. God gave me peace through the whole process, and His provision never failed me or my family.

Hope came slowly. There were stretches of grief so heavy I couldn't see the next step. But I'm still here, raising my family and still moving forward, and not because I'm especially strong. I believe in a God who is bigger than what I'm facing.

How it shows up in my life now

Most of my big decisions come back to this foundation my father gave me. The biggest test was during the pandemic, when I also lost a job to redundancy and could no longer pay my credit cards and loans. With interest, the debt piled up to about a million pesos. And on ordinary days, when my marriage and family are at stake, I go back to my faith in God.

I'm not always good at it. During the pandemic I struggled badly. I took on extra work just to pay off debts, even putting my health at risk. I was leaning on my own strength instead of remembering how big my God is. But when I'm lost, it's still the place I return to.

If you're in a storm right now

I won't give you a ten-step plan. My dad never gave me one either. If you need a place to start, here's what helped me: read a little Scripture each day, be honest with God about how you really feel, and keep a few people close who will pray for you. When things got dark, I also wrote down times God had come through for me, so I could read them back on bad days.

If you want to share the best advice you ever received, I'd love to hear it in the comments. And if you need someone to pray with you, you're welcome to reach out through the Contact page.