Working on my sermon for tomorrow’s services at Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church, I wonder how folks who consistently preach without notes deal with the waiting period between sermon prep and sermon delivery. When I was writing manuscripts, I would stop when I hit the right note and then do another two rounds of edits on Sunday morning (one at home and one in the pulpit before church). Now, when I find the right note and tone, I want to stop and have that be my last memory from prep. So I have my road map for tomorrow, but I can’t be sure I’ll be starting in the same place when I stand up to preach tomorrow. I imagine this is the skill I would have learned taking Peter Gomes’s preaching class instead of Charles Adams’s preaching class.