Proverbs 10:19  When there are many words, transgression is unavoidable,  But he who restrains his lips is wise.

One  of the things that most of us do when we are in any kind of hassle with someone is talk to much, especially if we are being accused, lectured, or blamed. Our automatic defense system seems to think that the more we talk the better we will appear to those we are talking to. But it ain’t so!  The main problem in our thinking is that we think we have to win if there is a disagreement, and the desire to win tends to shift our mouth into high gear. I like to win in checkers, chess, bicycle races, pinnocle, and poker, but I don’t have to win in a relational conflict. Jesus says that if we humble ourselves He will exalt us, but if we exalt ourselves He will humble us. So if we think we won the argument we probably lost it in the end. A relational peacemaker is one of the most esteemed people,in the eyes of God.  He gives them great blessings, and one of them is “authority”. This “authority” from God is not title or position, it is the kind of authority that Jesus had. When He spoke people listened, and when He led people followed.

In the last two blogs I have described JBC’s “Five Days of Prayer” event, and the blessings that I experience from a large amount of time spent in the prayer room praying with many different people. The ones I mentioned were Inner strength, joy, peace, and hearing from God concerning His will for my life and that of our church.

(5) Another great blessing is increased faith in God, His promises, and especially in the power of prayer. The more I pray, especially corporately with other believers, the more I believe without a doubt that when we get to heaven we will see huge crowds of people who are there because we prayed much. When that kind of faith grows praying becomes exciting, gratifying and much easier to motivate myself to do. In the book of Romans it says Abraham grew strong in faith. Jesus  main critism of His disciples was their “little faith”. I want be a man of great faith, and with every  prayer event I grow stronger.

(6) One  of the main requirements to be a good leader of a church is clear vision for the church for the days ahead.  During the “Five Days of Prayer” I get so many crazy ideas of things I should do in the future and also what our church should do, Next week I will spend at least 5 hours writing goals and vision for JBC for the next 20 years. I probabably won’t be around that long,  I will be 88 years old, but I might be so I will be ready.

(7) When you sit in a room with 20 other people praying for hours, you are praying to God, not the wall. The result is that my awareness of God’s presence grows stronger and stronger, and when the prayer event is over I carry that sense of His presence with me.  Being genuinely aware that God is with me, and that He sees everything I do, hears everything I say, and knows everything that I think makes a huge difference in daily life in the absence of fear, and the willingness to take risks.

Prayer is a great blessing, not an obligation.

I finished 27 hours of prayer this morning with 13 more to go by 10 pm tomorrow evening. There have probably been a couple hundred different people  down to pray during Our “Five Days of Prayer”, some for 1 hour and others much more, with the grand total being around 1,000 hours during the five days. We pray for lots of different people for lots of different reasons, and only God knows all that He has done for people because we took the time to pray to God on their behalf. Though all my praying is for others, I receive a lot of personal blessing as a result of the time spent.

(1) The most obvious blessing to me is energy. Not physical energy but inner energy. Probably a better word is passion and fire, the strong desire to do more and more with my life for God and others. At my age with Parkinson’s that is a huge blessing.

(2) Another very obvious blessing is peace, the total absence of anxiety, worry, and stress. Again, that is of immeasurable worth in my life. Not many people can say they are worry/stress free and know why.

(3) Joy and happiness is what most people desperately want, but they are looking for it in circumstances, events, and things. God gives joy. He gives it to those who spend time with Him. As a result of years of these prayer events I am as sure of this as I am that food gives strength and sleep gives rest.

(4) A very strong sense of what God’s will is for my life is probably my most anticipated blessing of these prayer events. In a room full of people who are all praying to God the devil and his demons will be absent and the result is a very real clarity in thought that makes it so much easier to hear God’s voice in my thoughts. I take a lot of notes while in the prayer room so I don’t forget what I am thinking which I am sure is from God.

Jefferson Baptist Church or JBC finished day 3 of our 5 days of prayer tonight. During this 5 days, Monday through Friday, we pray from 5 to 10 am and 5 to 10 pm , 10 hours each day. We pray in a room that can hold about 40 people which is about the maximum number that shows up at any one time, and we have tables and chairs with papers with things to pray about on the tables. We start praying at 15 minutes after each hour and quit praying right on the hour so we have a 15 minute break for people to come and go, chat and get a cup of coffee. During the pray time one person prays out loud at a time with the rest agreeing silently or praying silently for something else. We average about 20 people in the prayer room each hour. We have  one of these “5 day prayer events”  4 times a year.

My goal each time is to pray 40 of the 50 hours. The reason is that the 5 days spent praying an average of 8 hours every day with 20 other people who are passionate, who have great faith, and desire that God work in our country and community, does amazing things for me. The most obvious is that I am significantly energized. People with Parkinson’s usually struggle with some level of depression. The time I spend praying totally coquors this problem. During the time we are praying I get a ton of idea, usually about ministry, but sometimes about bicycling across the USA. Almost all of my goals each year are written during a 5 day prayer event.

I am always sad when they are over in spite of all the time they take.

Last year I started an aquaponics operation with a greenhouse, a 300 gallon tank for fish, and two 3×12 foot grow beds full of 3/4 inch pea gravel in which I grew my plants. The tank was full of 100 Tilapia which I bought as little bitty fry and they grew up to be big fat 2 pound fish. The water from the tank was pumped into the grow beds where the gravel filtered out all the fish poop and the water was then dumped back into the fish tank. The whole process was set up with timers so it all happened automatically. The plants grew like crazy with all the fish poop, plus grow lights, and the water was heated up to 65 degrees for the fish, and it helped the plants to grow fast as well. It was a ton of fun learning about the process, building it, and then eating the vegetables and fish. I pulled the plug on the system and harvested all the fish about 10 months ago because I was getting ready to leave on my 2 month bicycle trip to Florida and I didn’t want to leave our daughter Sherri with the responsibility of taking care of it, there was always something that was going wrong and needing fixed. The whole system has sat idle since then, but I am going to get it started up again in the next couple of months, but this time I am going to raise channel cat fish instead of tilapia. The tilapia can’t survive in water under 60 degrees and it was to expensive to keep the water heated up to that temperature. Channel cat fish can handle just about any temperature of water. I will heat the water up a little bit with a solar system in the summer and I will pump the water through some coils, in my wood stove in the winter so the fish will grow faster as well as the plants. Wow, I love a project like this.

Proverbs 4:23  Watch over your heart with all diligence,  For from it flow the springs of life.

I have some cameras located around my house that record everything, and if motion is detected my phone will beep and I can look on the screen on my phone and see what is happening. It is a way of guarding my house and the stuff in it. Why would I do such a thing? Well, it does have some worth and value, and I would like to keep it, at least from someone who would steal it.

How do I guard my heart? How do I watch over my heart with all diligence?  With all diligence, that means it is very important that we do this. Our “heart” is the center of who we are. Our heart feels joy, it gets depressed, it is wicked from birth, it is transformed and changed by the power of God. Our heart is incredibly impacted by what we feed it. If we feed it stuff and philosophy of the world from poor choices on television, videos, books etc it will become selfish and prideful, but if we feed our heart the Word of God and good teaching based on the Word of God, then our heart will become strong, pure, and godly.

I took Patty on a date this afternoon to Applebee’s and they gave us a menu, from which we chose what we would eat. We need to choose carefully and with great diligence what we put into ourselves through our eye and ear gate. It is not an innocent or unimportant choice what we watch, read, and listen to. Proverbs says that those who think so are fools.

Proverbs 3:5-6  Trust in the Lord with all your heart  And do not lean on your own understanding.  In all your ways acknowledge Him,  And He will make your paths straight.

God is all powerful. God is infinitely powerful. While looking at pictures of the vastness of the universe I am reminded again of how powerful God is as I acknowledge that  He is created it all from nothing. The almighty God knows me very well. He knows every detail of my life. He knows what I am thinking and in fact knows what I will think before I think it. Proverbs 3:6 says that He will make my paths straight. That means I will know what His perfect will is for my life, that He will give me the strength to live His perfect will, that I will have the resources to accomplish His perfect will, and that I will have the courage to attempt His perfect will.

The promise that He will make my paths straight is conditional, that is I have to do something first and then He will do His part. My part is to trust Him. Once while on a mission trip to Vietnam a group of us went on a tour of Hanoi in pedicabs, which is a bicycle with a seat on the front. I  sat in the seat and this old, skinny, very small Vietnamese man peddled me through terrible, aweful. Unbelievable, absurd traffic. After a few minutes the old man said to me, “You will enjoy the ride more if you put all your weight in the seat”. At first it seemed like a strange statement, and then I realized that he was asking me to trust him to get me where we were going safely.

I said OK and worked at relaxing and looking at the beauty all around me of this old, quaint Vietnamese city, and began to enjoy the adventure more and more.

Proverbs 2:2-6  Make your ear attentive to wisdom,  Incline your heart to understanding;  For if you cry for discernment,  Lift your voice for understanding;  If you seek her as silver  And search for her as for hidden treasures;  Then you will discern the fear of the Lord  And discover the knowledge of God.  For the Lord gives wisdom;  From His mouth come knowledge and understanding.

One of the admonitions I would hear from my Dad periodically was “Don’t be a know it all”. It usually came when I was arguing with him about something on the farm.  He would remind me that I was 16 years old, and he was 42 years old, and had been farming for more years than I had lived. That statement ended the arguing verbally, but I still fussed in my head over what I thought were outdated farming methods. I considered myself a pretty smart dairy farmer because after all I had read every issue of the “Hoard’s Dairyman” for at least 3 years. Though his instruction “Don’t be a know it all” didn’t register on my brain much when I was a teenager, now I hear him say it in my mind all the time.

Wisdom is the main thing in life, and only those who don’t consider themselves wise will find it, or seek it with enough diligence and humility to be given it by God. It is nice to have a scale to measure how much I weigh, and it is nice to have some way of measuring how much of a “know it all” that I am. My personal scale is, “how much have I been asking others for counsel and advice about anything?” The very act of seeking wisdom from others pleases God, and keeps us humble and a learner and seeker of wisdom. It is a relatively easy goal to set, but difficult to do. I want more and more wisdom so I am committed to seeking it.

This summer I am going to do a short bicycle trip compared to the last couple of years of riding across the US to the Atlantic Ocean. This summer I am going to ride around the outside of the State,of Oregon. It will be about 1600 miles and I will start the first of August and be done and home by the 30th.

I will have everything on my bicycle in the Panniers, my little tent, sleeping bag, blow up pad, cooking stove, food, cloths and some bike parts. I will ride for 24 days averaging almost exactly 70 miles each day and I am going to be especially wimpy and ride 4 days and then take a day off, so I ride 4 and then take a day off and then ride 4 again, which results in 24 ride days and 6 off. I got the entire trip planned today, the exact route and I traveled the entire route via google earth. On every rest day I managed to work it so I am camping at a campground with a pool.

One of my reasons for these rides is my health and this year another goal is I am going to write an entire book on the trip and then attemp to market it when I get back. The book is going to have 300 pages so I will average 10 per day though I will do most of the writing on my rest days. I am still thinking about what the topic will be, but I am leaning toward a book on parenting, though I am really drawn to writing about leadership training in the church.

One of the main reasons for the Oregon trip is because a lot of people have expressed interest in going on a trip like this with me, but because of job, family, etc 4 or 5 days is about all they can do. So I will not be over 6 hours drive from Jefferson any place on my route so anybody who wants can join me at any juncture in the 30 days and ride any number of days that work. Let me know if you are interested and I will send you the itinerary.

when I was a dairy farmer I don’t ever remember debating with myself whether I was going to milk the cows or not. Of course we were going to milk the cows, that was our livelihood. If we didn’t milk the cows we would not have that milk to sell, plus forcing the cows to keep that milk in their udders another 12 hours would guarantee that they would drop in milk production after that. We did everything we could think of to get them to produce more milk not less, of course we milked the cows. The pressure to survive in business, the desire to increase the size of our farm, the need to pay our bills all motivated us to responsible behavior, of course we milked the cows, the thought that we wouldn’t seems absurd.

I read my Bible everyday. God says in His Word, ” meditate on My Word day and night…for then you will have success”. I pray everyday. I go to church every week. I examine my life and confess all known sins everyday. I present my life to Jesus and declare Him Lord,of my life every day. I do mess up and forget, get to busy, get to tired occasionally, but then I recommit and get right back at it.,There is to much at stake to be lazy and unfaithful.