I got up this morning to get ready for church, and I slipped in the bathroom and wrenched my back. I was barely able to make it back to my bed. I was thankful that Stephen was already scheduled to preach this morning. I stayed in bed until noon, and now I am sitting in my recliner, loaded up on ibuprofen and Tylenol, hoping to heal up soon. Patty has a bum knee right now and is walking with a cane and a walker, and I am walking very slowly and deliberately. We are a pair. We take turns complaining to the other. It is interesting that, in the Bible, with all the personalities and stories, you don’t read much about personal ailments.

Eli was blind and overweight; several had leprosy; David was cold in his old age, but I have never read anything about bad hips, bad knees, or bad backs. I don’t know if they were healthier than us because of all the walking and sleeping on the ground, or if they died before the ailments started. However, numerous people were mentioned who lived well past my age. Maybe it was because they considered aches and pains as normal and didn’t mention them. It is a challenge for me to obey the basic commands in the Bible to rejoice always and to grumble about nothing. I often ask for God’s strength, like every ten minutes. I have so many goals for this next month that require me to be physically healthy. I plan to work on the electrical work in the house that Mike and Sarah, our daughter and son-in-law, are building. We need to get our firewood in for the winter before it starts raining a lot. I want to finish the camper I am building for my truck. And I need to get some outside house projects done for Patty. Plus, there are still some fishing and hunting dates on the calendar. We will get it done despite the physical roadblocks, and rejoice while we limp through life. 

I love watching football. Today I watched the game between the Oregon Ducks and the Boise Broncos. It was a good game, and I am glad Oregon won. Later, I saw a picture of both teams gathered together on their knees, praying. It was a very moving picture for me. Since 1989, I have made prayer the central focus of my life and ministry. I consider every problem, every pressure, every disappointment, and every trial a motivation to pray more. I believe that the more time I spend in prayer, the more strength I will have, the more wisdom I will have, the more success in every area of life I will have, and the more blessings I will have from God. It isn’t easy to devote much time to prayer, especially for someone like me, who has so many goals to accomplish. The devil is constantly working on our minds, trying to convince us that a little prayer is good enough. He is afraid of prayer; he has no defense against prayer. When we pray, God commissions and strengthens angels to battle against the devil and his demons. When we pray with our spouse, our marriage is better; when we pray for our kids and grandkids as a couple, they are more blessed by God; when we pray for our church and with our church, it grows and becomes a powerful tool for God. Prayer is the most powerful force on the planet Earth, but we neglect prayer so much; why?

Patty loses her car keys and her cell phone almost daily. Every time she loses one or the other, I give her a lecture about always putting them in the same place without exception. Never, ever lay them down except in the designated places. I have given that lecture hundreds of times, but to no avail. I usually add at the end of my little lecture, look at me; I have never lost my keys. Yesterday I lost my keys, and they had to be somewhere very small, between my pickup truck and my recliner. I didn’t go anywhere else. I looked everywhere in the truck, and I practically took my recliner apart looking for my keys. It was terribly frustrating because it was like they had disappeared. Finally, my grandson’s girlfriend, who was visiting from Washington, found them in the garbage can near where I usually park the pickup. Evidently, I took the keys out, picked up some garbage on the floor of my truck, and when I threw the garbage in the garbage can, I also threw the keys in. I am not sure what prompted her to look in the garbage can, but I am glad she did. Obviously, I took a lot of ribbing from all of my family for losing my keys- the one who never does. The spiritual lesson is simple; the area that you become proud in will sooner or later become the area that you will fail in. 

I have done a lot of fishing this past year, but now it is time to make the switch to hunting, sorta. We are leaving on Monday for a three-day elk hunt near Prineville. This is a rifle hunt for cow elk, primarily a grandkid hunt. My 11-year-old grandson from Oahu has a tag, and my grandson Isaac, who just got married a couple of weeks ago. He is getting his wife trained for him to be gone hunting right off the bat- good boy. We will be camping right next to a lake with big trout, and I am bringing my rubber pontoon boat. On the following Friday, I leave for the Steens Mountains, where I will be archery hunting for deer. We will be camping next to Fish Lake, which has really big trout, and I am bringing my rubber pontoon boat. Who knows, I might even get in some hunting. Then, in November, I will be hunting elk with my muzzleloader in the Cascades. I have hunted since I was 12 years old. I have killed black-tailed deer, white-tailed deer, mule deer, axis deer, Rocky Mountain elk, Roosevelt elk, a bear, a mountain lion, ducks, geese, pheasants, quails, doves, and millions of squirrels. Now I am mostly into hunting for the camping and hanging out with family and friends. And, of course, fishing. The Steens Mountains are the most beautiful place on Earth, full of canyons and gorges, and they require a hunter to be in really good shape, but I bought a quad, so I am going to hunt like an old man! God has blessed my life in so many ways, and one of them is having been raised to hunt and fish. At this point in my life, I recognize that it really isn’t the hunting and fishing that was the blessing; it is being outside in God’s creation, seeing His “invisible attributes, His eternal power, and His divine nature.” Seeing God in His creation is a great way to help stay close to Him.

One of my life mottos is “Busy is good; it means you are doing something.” But busy often leads to some problems if we aren’t careful. With me, busy means I have numerous things I am trying to get done, and many of them have deadlines or at least desired completion goals. I started building my camper April 1st to take it hunting. Well, we leave for hunting on Monday, and it won’t be done by then. Wednesday night services start September 21st, and this year I am going to teach on prayer. I am going to teach the seminar we did for many years, which I stopped doing about six years ago. We will record it on video, and it will be available for other churches to use.

My goal was to have at least the first two months ready to teach before I left for hunting, but I don’t have anything ready yet. Being busy keeps me motivated to stay faithful and diligent, but it sometimes frustrates me. The problem with getting frustrated is that it usually makes me irritated and short with people. I don’t want to do that. I am always working to monitor my schedule and goals, so they motivate me to behave well rather than badly. My relationship with Jesus is the most important thing in my life, and my relationship with the people in my life is the second most important. I don’t want my goals and schedule to damage my relationships with people I care about. Deciding today that I am not going to get my camper done, even though I am so close, has taken some pressure off, so now I can focus on getting ready to go hunting. I can practice my bow shooting more. 

I put on a T-shirt the other day, and it said “Stick’s Tavern” on it. It reminded me of one of my favorite stories. In about 2011, I decided to ride a motorcycle across the United States and hit all 48 States in one month. I was going to start and end in Jefferson, so I plotted a route that stayed on all back roads, which was about 9,000 miles. The plan was to ride 300 miles each day for 30 days; I finished it in 33 days. The crazy part of this goal was that I had never ridden a motorcycle except for a small dirt bike in the pastures of our farm as a kid. I bought a Yamaha 1100 and learned to ride during the trip. When I was in Rhode Island, it was raining like crazy. I had all of my camping gear, food, and clothes in dry bags on the back of my motorcycle, but really didn’t want to camp in this rain. I stopped at a “Dunkin Donuts” place to get some hot coffee and take a break from riding in the rain.

I walked around the place asking the customers if they knew of a church in town. I planned to contact a church, tell them I was a Pastor from Oregon, and ask if I could sleep in their church. The second guy that I asked was a bit grumpy and asked me why I was looking for a church. I pointed out the window at my motorcycle and explained what I was doing. He got all excited when he heard my story, and he said, “I have a Biker’s bar, and we have two rooms with beds and bathrooms for guys who get too drunk to ride their motorcycles home, so they sleep it off in one of those rooms. You are welcome to stay in one of them if you like. I followed him to his bar and helped him clean up one of the rooms; it had recently been used and smelled like puke. He took me out to dinner, and we talked late into the night, mostly about his problems in life. I talked to him about the Lord, and he promised to start attending a local church. I don’t know if he ever did. The next morning, as I was leaving, he gave me a T-shirt with his Tavern logo on it, “Stick’s Tavern.” Stick was his last name. That T-shirt has lasted a long time. 

I am going archery hunting for deer and elk in the Steens Mountains on the last Saturday of August and will hunt for a week. The Steens is my favorite place to hunt because of its incredible beauty. I haven’t shot my bow for several years now, and in fact, I haven’t even pulled it back. I got it out a couple of days ago and had to back off the poundage a bunch before I could even pull it back. I have 16 days until I leave for hunting, so I better get with it. I shot a bunch yesterday and today, and my arms are killing me, but I did crank the weight back up to legal weight for elk. I am hoping that the camper for my pickup that I am building will be done for the trip. We camp next to Fish Lake while we are there, and I actually do more fishing than hunting. There are lots of monster trout in the lake, and I bring my pontoon boat.

Everybody has key dates in their calendar for the year. Mine have always been hunting and fishing dates. Everything else just fits in between. I am also leaving for a rifle hunting trip for elk with two grandsons on August 24th. August 24th is Patty and my 57th wedding anniversary, but we are going to celebrate it on September 24th this year. Patty is a good wife. I became a follower of Jesus and was born again when I was 13 years old on July 10th, 1962. Now that is an important date in my life, but the most important date in my life is the day I step into heaven and get my new and glorified body. There are a lot of people who have never trusted in Jesus Christ as their personal Savior, and the absolute worst day of their life will be the day they die.

I brought home 100 pounds of sockeye salmon and 50 pounds of halibut from Alaska. Patty was going to cook up a bunch of halibut and invite kids and grandkids over to eat with us. She asked me what my favorite way of eating halibut was, and I said, “The way they fixed it in Alaska when I ordered fish and chips using halibut; it was delicious, and it was expensive.” I said that I was sure that they used some kind of beer batter. She got her cell phone and said to Siri, “beer batter.” Siri thought she said “hear better,” and gave her instructions on cleaning out earwax. Needless to say, Patty was quite confused by the directions on making beer batter. She eventually got a good recipe, and we had a feast. In the Bible, the devil is called “the deceiver.” He deceived Eve, and he is always working to deceive each one of us. The word “deceive” has as part of its meaning to confuse. When we get confused, we don’t know what to do, where to go, or what to say. The key to conquering confusion and the devil is wisdom. Let me share with you my five steps in pursuing wisdom. (1) Don’t assume that you are wise now; those who think they are wise stay stupid. (2) Ask God for wisdom every day. God loves to give His wisdom to those who know they need it and pray a lot. (3) Read the Bible every day. The more you read, the more wisdom you will get. The Bible is the mind of Christ. (4) Read good books, and get counsel from wise people. Proverbs says that if you want wisdom, seek it more earnestly than gold, silver, or treasure. There is so much wisdom available to us if we would read and be humble enough to ask. (5) Journal about successes and failures. Life is full of wisdom lessons every day, but if we don’t think about life and record what we learn, it will fade away and be lost. 

I had a professor in College who used to say that the Bible is infinite in its knowledge. No matter how much you have learned from a passage, there is always more to learn, always more. I have read the Old Testament through every year since I was 13 years old, the book of Proverbs every month, the Psalms every month, and the New Testament four times each year. As I read it over and over, I remember the teaching of my college professor: there is more, but only for those who truly seek more. Tonight at Jefferson Baptist Church, Dr Matt Bain was preaching. He is one of my favorite preachers because I always learn something new from him, just like my college professor said. Tonight he said, “genealogies” are considered boring by most people, but there is a lot of information and knowledge in genealogies. I thought to myself, “I usually speed-read genealogies and sometimes skip over them altogether.” I determined that I wouldn’t do that anymore, but that I would seek more knowledge and more information from them; they are part of the God-inspired, inerrant Word of God. It is obvious that going deeper into the Word of God is not easy; otherwise, many would be doing it, but most don’t. Most Christians don’t even read it daily. A major advantage that I have in studying the Bible is that I read large volumes of it and have memorized and regularly meditate on almost 1000 Bible verses. A major law of understanding the Bible is to interpret the Bible with the Bible. I read, memorize, study, and meditate on the Bible as much as I do because I believe it is the Word of God and the mind of Christ, and God will bless those who devote themselves to it. There isn’t anything better than being blessed by God. 

I study the topic of character traits in the Bible. I preach and teach on character traits. Many verses command us to practice various character traits. God has character traits that are mentioned in the Bible. Over the years, I have arrived at a list of 26 different character traits, descriptions, and definitions for each one. The practice of these various character traits begins as a choice to obey a command or principle given to us by God in the Bible. Fulfilling these commands requires diligence, self-examination, accountability, and dependence on the Holy Spirit. As we become increasingly successful at accomplishing God’s commands to act a certain way, we begin to change on the inside, and we acquire the character trait that the command is aiming us toward. As the character trait becomes stronger, the effort required becomes less because that is who we are, and we will naturally act the way we are in character. 

An example of a character trait is patience. The Bible says that God is patient with us. We are commanded to be patient with all people, all of the time.

1 Thessalonians 5:14 We urge you, brethren, admonish the unruly, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with everyone.

Many people will say, as they attempt to justify their anger or irritation, “I am just not a patient person.” They say that as if they think they are stuck there. Patience is a fruit of the Spirit mentioned in Galatians 522-23, but we must diligently pursue it. 

2 Timothy 2:24 The Lord’s bond-servant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged. 

Love is patient. We are commanded to be patient, and if we diligently pursue it, we will become patient on the inside, in our character, and then we will be patient, because that is who we are. 

God created life and causes and controls circumstances to help us become like Jesus in character. To help us grow in patience, He created mosquitoes.