We had a church work day today. We worked on our new “Discipleship Center”. The goal is to have it finished in the next 3 weeks. Because all of our buildings are paid for as we go they take a few years to complete. We have been in a building program every year since 1977. This present building will be 10 years in the making. It will be finished by September 1st and we will begin to use it almost immediately. It was fun working with people today on a common goal who are all anxious to get this building finished and have classes in it this Fall. Over the years of pastoring at JBC I think the highlights have been the various building projcts. Not so much the building as much as the fellowship that happens during the building. We all get there and than imedietley start to drink coffee and eat donuts. I get to know people better while working with them more then any other way.

Recently a number of people have commented that God certainly has blessed me. Eight kids, 6 son-in-laws, and a daughter-in-law who all are doing well in life who love the Lord and us. A great marriage of 46 years. 22 grandchildren. A successful ministry that is growing. We have the usual trials and problems that are common in life, but we have the strength and wisdom from God to turn them into an adventure. Life is fun and fulfilling. Many tend to think that God’s blessings are random, arbitrary, and come by luck. The Bible teaches that God’s blessings are conditional, that is there is a requirement, and when we know what the requirements are and meet them God blesses. It is an easy Bible study to discover what the conditions are, just type in “bless”, “blessing”, “blessed”, and “blesses” in your computer Bible program and look up all the verses. I have done that and regularly evaluate my life on the basis of those things God says He will bless. I want God to open up the windows of heaven and pour out blessings on my life and my families life until I can’t hold them all. One of the conditions is that we would love His church. It is easy to see the reasonableness in that when we understand that the church is the “Bride” of Christ. How you treat my bride is a major factor in whether I like you or not. Loving our church is not the “in” thing right now. Church is seen as a glorified Walmart store, we go when we need something from God and we aren’t particularly interested in sacrificing much for the church, after all a bunch of hypocrites go to it. The conditions God has set for Him to bless our life aren’t hard, but they do need to be met faithfully or He won’t bless. That is pretty much how we raised our kids, do the right thing and you are rewarded for it. Do the wrong thing and there are loss of privileges and consequences. That is what loving parents do, that is what God does. Jesus loves the Church and gave His life for the church and those who love her and who are devoted to making her beautiful receive great favor from God. I love my church with all my heart. If you don’t have a church home try try JBC this weekend.

Today I attended the annual Willow Creek Leadetship Summit simulcast in Salem. It is probably the biggest such event in the world in that it is broadcasted in almost a hundred countries and over 400 cities in the U.S. I have attended it every year for about 20 years. One of the speakers this morning was Jim Collins who is considered one of the foremost experts on what it takes to be successful in business as a leader. He has studied businesses and those who lead them for years and has written many best sellers, my favorite is “Good to Great”, and for the last year he has been teaching leadership at West Point. His talk this morning was “The Five Intangible Traits of Great Leaders”. The first and most important trait of the five was what he called “Grit”. It was quite fascinating to listen to him talk about various leaders who accomplished a phenomenal amount in their lifetime because of this trait that refuses to quit or give up, rarely gets discouraged, works super hard, and has a passion for their goals that does not wane with set backs and barriers. All of the five intangible traits can be developed and made stronger and one of the ways to develope grit is to pursue a crazy physical goal like running a marathon, climbing a mountain, peddling your bicycle across the U.S. I think I will do that, pedal across the U.S. again. In March and April several of us are going to go from San Diago to St Augustine, Florida. We will average about 70 miles each day and mostly camp along the way most nights. I am building a Trike Recumbent, a three wheeled bike with 2 wheels in the front and one in the back. They are quite expensive to buy but I am building mine for a tenth of the cost of a new manufactured one. I hunted around and found a great set of plans. A friend is helping me with the welding and design. I am looking forward to developing grit in myself on this bicycle trip.

Life is like a big garden, and the major principle of life is pretty simple, “what you sow is what you reap”. It isn’t rocket science. Sow cornc seeds and corn is what you get. As we live our life everything we do and say all day long is sowing seeds. Every act is a seed. Every word is a seed. So many people think life is random, arbitrary, accidental. That kind of thinking is the ultimate in foolishness. Life is cause and effect, sowing and reaping. One of my favorite verses is from Galations, ” do not be deceived, God is not mocked, whatever you sow is what you reap. Wisdom is figuring out what are the blessings and consequences of various choices and words and choosing what we do and say with a clear understanding that God is watching and listening. Part of the problem is that when you plant a corn seed it takes 90 days before you get any crop, so it is easy to forget what you planted by the time the crop is harvested.

Learning how to manage my energy and get to the end of each day still going strong is a skill set that I am working hard to learn and acquire, and also to pass on to others. Everyone struggles with weariness, and gets tired and discouraged and burnt out by life. The Biblical admonition is “do not grow weary in well doing”, “run the race set before you with endurance”, “in due time we will reap if we do not grow weary”. One of the keys to endurance is systematic rest. Systematic rest is resting by the clock and not waiting until you feel tired. Resting when you get tired is like looking for a gas station after you have run out of gas in your car. Every hour I rest for 5 minutes. Sometimes I close my eyes and just sit, other times I pull out my IPhone and look at the pictures of my grandkids and pray for them. If I have been at my desk studying or writing I will get up and walk over to the new building and back and pray while I walk. Often I work on a memory verse or read part of my daily Bible schedule. At home I really enjoy going out where my 55 gallon aquarium is with my brooder tilapia and sit in the chair I have set there and watch them swim around. 5 minutes of variation, mind shift, something fun, distracting, silly, is very powerful in restoring energy. It is not an easy discipline to develop because we just forget to do something that short and that often. For the person who struggles with tiredness getting this discipline down is more than worth the effort. I started this about 10 years ago when I read that walking for 1 minute for every 10 minutes of running in a marathon would give you a faster time then running the entire time or walking when you got tired. I tried it and found that I did indeed finish a bit faster and I felt way better at the end of a race and the next day. Systematic rest is not just sleeping for 8 hours every 24 hours, but getting a breather all through the day on a scheduled basis.

What is success? Who is a successful person? My definition is that success is accomplishing something with your life that is significant. A significant accomplishment is one that changes things for the better, that meets real needs in the lives of people, that has a long term impact on those that were targeted, that makes the world better even just a little bit.
In the Bible a significant accomplishment would be called fruit. In the gospel of John Jesus talks for six chapters about how to bear much fruit. The few days before He is crucified is when these dialogs by Jesus are made to His disciples. Jesus knows He is going to die on a cross, be raised from the dead and go back to heaven with the Father. He knows that His disciples will now have to carry on building the church without Him so these chapters are full of great truth on how to bear fruit, in fact Jesus says that they will bear more fruit than He did. I have read these 6 chapters over and over again wanting to glean all that is there on how to bear more fruit than Jesus. I am now in the process of memorizing these 6 chapters so the principles will not get lost or forgotten. For the next 6 weekends I will be preaching at JBC on these chapters teaching on “how to be truly successful and accomplish incredibly significant things with our life.” Services are 7 pm on Saturday night, 9 and 11 am on Sunday morning. If you don’t go to church someplace try JBC and see what happens.

Jefferson Baptist Church has been given the priviledge of adopting a small church in Bend and making it one of our daughter churches. Jonathan Henderson who has been on staff at JBC for the last 4 or 5 years, developing our Men”s ministry is going to be the pastor. He and his wife Chrystal and their 5 little girls have moved over and today was the official beginning of his ministry there. There were about 200 people who drove over from JBC for this official beginning. It was a very special time with a great sense of God’s presence. I truly believe God is going to do a great work through Jonathan in Fellowship Bible Church in Bend, Oregon. It was an amazing series of apparent coincidences that brought the two churches together in this venture, and to me it seemed obvious it was God orchestrating the whole thing. To me this was so obviously God’s doing that it creates a great sense of expectation in what is going to happen and confidence and willingness in investing time, money, and one of our staff. It is quite honoring to be given an opportunity to do something that really matters for Him. I am not doing much except for some mentoring with Jonathan, but when God gives an opportunity there is in me a strong desire to be faithful and do a good job for Him. I am looking forward to many more assignments from God in the next 10 years.

The electricity was off today for about 5 hours. It went off about the same time the fire started in the field next to our house so I was mostly focused on the fire and didn’t think anything about my 100 fish in my aquaponics system in my greenhouse. About 9 pm I went out to feed them and they were all floating on the top of the water dead. I have air pumps that pump oxygen into the water constantly and a water pump that pumps the water into the gravel grow beds to filter the fish poop out, both obviously run on electricity. I had no idea that is all the time it would take for them to die from lack of oxygen. Netted them all and put them in a cooler with ice, filleted them in my wife’s kitchen, she is a good wife. vacuum packet them and they are now in the freezer. Oh well, I guess it is time to buy some more baby fish. I was reading about a 12 volt back up system using regular car batteries that comes on automatically if the electricity goes off, I guess I better invest in one of those. Life is funny like that, just relaxing from all the excitement from the fire and woops, dead fish! It is times like this when I also need to switch into another mode of acting and thinking. It would be nice if there were some kind of program where the switch would happen automatically, but it is pretty much a choice and often a hard choice. Act happy, rejoice, be nice, don’t be grumpy, not even a little bit, sing, don’t feel sorry for yourself. Whooooeee I think I did pretty good. Got a little grumpy when Patty asked me why I wasn’t cleaning the fish outside on the fish cleaning table she got me for Christmas😄

I was sitting in my chair reading and someone drove in our driveway and started honking. The mail lady does that sometime so I thought I had a package, probably some bicycle parts I had ordered. I got up to retrieve my package and a lady had come to the door that I didnt recognize, and she was yelling “fire”!! I looked up and the grain field next to our house was on fire and it was burning pretty good and it was moving toward our house. I went in and yelled at Patty and Seth and we started moving the cars out in the orchard in the green watered grass. I got one of my heavy coats off the back porch and went out to my greenhouse and put it in my 300 gallon fish tank and got it soaking wet. The electricity had just gone out so we had no water to use. I went out and started whacking the fire with my wet coat. I was making a pretty good dent in it, and was pretty sure I could save the house though I was most worried about my 1949 Ford pickup. I saw Charles Ingles do it on an episode of “Little House on the Praire”, and he saved everything. The fire trucks started showing up so I didn’t have to save the house by myself. Wasn’t to long before the firefighters and trucks had it all out. There were trucks from Jefferson, Marion, Stayton, Scio, Crabtree, Tolbot and Aumsville. I always like a little excitement and this was a great addition to an otherwise boring day. As I was whacking on the fire with my wet coat I was thinking, now if the wind picks up and I can’t keep it back from the house and it and everything in it burns, what will be our next step? I was sort of creating a plan of action for ourselves in my head while I whacked away. I was quite impressed with the clarity and the calmness of my thinking, and I recognized that emergencies tend to kick your brains into high gear. Now everything is back to normal and I am sitting in my chair yawning feeling quit bored.