At any moment I must be able to preach, to pray or to die.
—Arnold Pent II (1901-1980)

Some men pay lip-service to the principle of honor. Others ignore it altogether. But then there are a precious few to whom honor is a defining principle of life — a wellspring of vision and daily encouragement. Such men have embraced what Jesus Christ described as the first command with a promise, otherwise known as the Fifth Commandment. God declares of such men that “it will be well” with them and that they will live long in the land which God has given to them. Arnold Pent III is such a man.

I never fail to be amazed at the power of courageous fatherhood or its generational impact. But listening to Arnold Pent III last week at the 2005 Vision Forum Father and Daughter Discipleship Retreat, I was blessed to the point of tears as I realized that I was not so much listening to the man at the podium, but to a message given nearly fifty years prior by a faithful father, a message which had been memorized by a devoted son who drunk deeply from his father’s wisdom and found it a wellspring of life.

It is one thing for a son to honor his father when he is nineteen (the age that Arnold Pent III wrote Ten P’s in a Pod). It is another to see that same son honor that same father forty-five years later, but this time with a lifetime of gratitude and spiritual fruit as rich testimony to the power of his father’s principle, and as a heritage to the children his father never met.

Oh, how my heart soared with thanks to the Lord. May I be such a faithful son.

Those of us who have read Ten P’s in a Pod (now on the seventh reading at the Phillips family) feel that we know the man Arnold Pent III writes about. We know, for example, that Arnold Pent II (the father) was the kind of man who feared God, not men. He was the kind of man who neighbors and relatives probably thought eccentric and extreme in his fervor for the Lord. But fifty years later, it is his legacy, not that of his critics, which is being realized in the lives of his children’s children’s children, and proclaimed to families hungry for vision throughout the land.

Like all great visionary leaders, Arnold Pent III was a man with many wonderful directives for his family. In fact, Arnold Pent III discovered something that all fathers would be well-advised to consider: True Christian leadership in the household is born in the fire of adversity. The noblest and most God-blessed expressions of biblical fatherhood are cultivated, always and only, by taking the path less traveled.

Now at the age of sixty-three, Arnold Pent III (the son) still remembers entire books of the Bible he memorized beside his father as together they travelled one million miles on a journey of evangelism and discipleship. He remembers his father’s maxims for life. He remembers the many disciplines his father modeled. What is more beautiful — he has trained his daughter Victoria (who stands there with him) to remember her grandfather’s vision as well. Together they blessed the audience with a beautiful recitation of his father’s favorite chapters from the Holy Scripture.

If you have yet to read about the one million mile journey of home education and discipleship of the Arnold Pent family, then you are missing out on one of the most encouraging and delightful stories to be released in years. Written more than forty years ago by Arnold Pent III when he was just nineteen, Ten P’s in a Pod is the story of one remarkable father of vision and his uncompromising standards.

I feel a special kinship to the Pent family. As a boy, I traveled constantly with my father, having visited forty-nine of the fifty states by the time I was eighteen. I sat with him for tens of thousands of miles and listened to books on tape, sermons, histories, and theology lectures. They were glorious times. We discussed everything, we saw great sights, and I always felt like I was a part of my father’s life-mission. He always let me know that he believed in me and convinced me that there was nothing I could not accomplish through faithful determination and the gracious blessing of God. There is no doubt in my mind that my life was shaped by a father who made it his commitment to have me by his side and to daily speak words of life and love into my heart.

I am grateful to have found a soul mate in Arnold Pent III. And today, I give thanks to the Lord for that special evening.