Being a good husband and being a good wife is about meeting the basic needs of your spouse that God created them with.  A man’s greatest need is respect, glory, and honor. In Psalms 8:6 it says, speaking of man, “You have crowned him with glory and majesty, and made him to rule over the works of Your hands”. Proverbs 12:4 says, “An excellent wife is the crown of her husband, but she who shames him is as rottenness to his bones”.  Patty is always praising me for things that I do, affirming me of character strengths, and responding positively to all my dreams and goals. She is careful not to argue with me, correct me, or criticize me in public no matter how small or familiar the group we are in might be. When she corrects or discusses or shares her view or opinion with me in private she is careful with her words, and is gracious and affirming as she communicates. She makes me feel strong, competent, like a man, and good about myself. 

Patty has a number of needs as well that I remind myself of and work hard at meeting. A key need for her is security. I read my Bible every day as a commitment, and I usually do it when and where she can see me keep this commitment. I have a goal and commitment to pray everyday. Being a faithful man who keeps his commitments gives my wife security because of the self-control that she sees in me. Patty has a need for unity and oneness in our relationship, and I take responsibility to keep that unity strong, and whenever there is disagreement or conflict I take it on as my responsibility to be the peacemaker, to fix the problem, even to the point of owning all the blame for a conflict. As a man humbles himself by owning the responsibility for the disunity and the responsibility to make it good again God will honor him with authority. Authority is not power or position, it is a God given ability to influence graciously. 

Patty has a need to be understood, and as impossible as that seems to me at times to do that, 1 Peter 3:7 says, “husbands live with your wife in an understanding way”. So it must be possible if God commands it. As I have worked at it I now know and understand what her spiritual gifts are and how that motivates her, I have studied her and know her temperament and how that influences everything she does. I know what her history is, and how those events have shaped her values.  She has a need for romance in our relationship, and as unromantic as I am I work at meeting that need. She has a need for intimacy brought about by communication, by far my most difficult challenge as a loving husband, but I can do it, and I will. 

God created us with needs to make us interdependent on each other. A marriage where there is true unity, oneness, love, respect, and submission is one that He will bless.

We are up at Odell Lake Lodge this weekend for a marriage retreat for our church.  I get to do some teaching here at it and it is a lot of fun. I get to tell stories about our marriage and how we have grown in our relationship over the years. We have been married for 48 years, and my humble opinion is that we have the best marriage in the world. It hasn’t always been good, but we have both wanted it to be great, so we have consistently worked at it and worked diligently at learning the principles and skills that it takes to have a really good marriage. We learned most of what know from others who have good marriages, and there have been many over the years much better than ours that we could learn from.  There are 29 couples up here all wanting to grow in the quality of their marriage, and it is so encouraging to hang around these couples who want to grow and improve. It is like so many other areas of life, if you seek wisdom diligently you will find it, and you find it primarily from other people. The primary requirement to get wisdom is humility, that is you have to be willing to learn from others. God is apposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

On Sunday mornings at 8 am I am teaching a class on the last book in the Bible, the book of Revelation. In preparation for the class I am reading in about a dozen different books on the book of Revelation and I am listening to a bunch of audio downloads from really good teachers and preachers who are or have in the past preached through this book. And I have also discovered some really good teachers and preachers who put their stuff on You Tube, and it is great to watch one of these sermons while I ride my stationary bike for an hour each evening.

Those preachers who’s sermons were preached in the last 6 months have a huge amount of current events in their messages, and they all are teaching that Jesus is coming to get us very soon. Wow, I am looking forward to that, and more every day now that I wake up with a new ache every morning, and the only cure is a new body which Jesus promised me.

Watching the sermons, reading the news, reading the book of Revelation has got me all excited about the day I head off to heaven . But I also would like a little more time so I can do some more with my life,  and bear some more fruit to benefit others, and I would like to grow some more in character, and there are so many people who don’t know Jesus, but the end is coming.

This past Sunday I started teaching a class on parenting. A subtitle for the class is raising our kids in such a way that they grow up to be champions. I enjoy teaching this material very much because as we raised our 8 kids I was always on the lookout for wisdom as a parent that Patty and I could use in our desire to raise champions. Much of this wisdom- information I got from people that had raised good kids and I would quiz them on what they did. It often cost me the price of lunch or spending several hours driving to a meeting with one of these successful parents. One of my favorite sources was a professor at a Bible College who had a dozen kids and they were the most talented, godly, well behaved kids I had ever seen. When I asked for time to talk about how he pulled that off he said that if we wanted to take a night class from him on Romans that was held one night per week for 3 months he would give us 15 minutes after each class. It was a 90 minute drive one way to this class each week, but we did it, and the information that we received was amazing in its simplicity and in its effectiveness as we used it with our kids over almost 35 years.  It is nice to be able to pass this wisdom on to other parents who want to raise champions as well. Proverbs 24:3-4. Says “By wisdom a house is built, And by understanding it is established; And by knowledge the rooms are filled With all precious and pleasant riches.” Proverbs also says “that if we seek wisdom like gold, silver and prescious treasure we will find it”. I was obsessed with seeking for wisdom on how to raise good kids. I interviewed a number of obviously successful parents, read dozens of books, went to easily at least 50 seminars, and listened to more sermons that I purchased than I can count. I knew we had one chance to get it right with each of our kids, and I didn’t want to mess up, not even a little bit. I am surprised at how few people are genuine wisdom seekers the way Proverbs describes that pursuit. I think it is probably a pride issue where we don’t want to admit someone might know more than we do, or that we don’t know much. I also believe that it is that very act of humbling ourselves to ask and seek from others that God honors as He guides and gives wisdom. 

I was involved for a little bit today with a group asking people on the street “How do you get to heaven?” There were lots of different answers from people on what they thought. It didn’t appear that most were very concerned about whether their answers were right or not. It seems odd to me that the immeasurable, incomprehensible consequences of being wrong on this question wouldn’t produce more searching for truth and absolute certainty of that truth. It seems that all the pain, disappointment, failure, misery, and conflict that almost every person experiences would produce this deep longing for heaven, a place of joy, and peace, and beauty, a place free from war and conflict of any kind. I think about heaven all the time, especially when anything goes wrong. My faith that heaven is a real place and that I am going there is the security and the foundation on my life. I can’t imagine living life without this confidence. It seems like death would be a growing dread, not knowing for sure what is on the other side of the curtain. The Bible gives a clear and precise answer on how to know for sure that when you die you will live forever with God. After all heaven is God’s home, and He gets to make the rules not me or you.

College basketball is over for another season. We had about 8 guys st our house tonight watching the championship game between North Carolina and Gonzaga. We had tons of food, with 80 chicken wings, pizza, fried chicken, a cooler full of pop, chips, and more. I think everyone was rooting for Gonzaga so there wasn’t some of the bantering that takes place when some are on both sides. One of the obvious life observations is “winning is great and losing is awful”. I felt sad for the losers who worked hard all season to end up just short of their dream, especially the seniors, but that is life. It is interesting how losing affects people and their futures. For some losing is so painful that they never attempt to win at anything again, they just coast and never really accomplish much with their life. Many in this state will declare that they are just trusting the Lord, and whatever happens is good enough for them. 

Others seem to use losing as a motivation to try harder, aim higher, and the pain doesn’t seem to make them reluctant to take another shot at it with the possibly of loosing again. Loosing makes cowards of many, and if that is to strong a word they are at least timid of aspiring to greatness again. I often wonder about this particular bent in people  and think about ways of helping, motivating, coaching people who are timid into becoming dreamers, goal setters, champions in life. I will keep working on that one. 

One of the things that I say regularly is that the most powerful force on the planet earth is the prayer of a husband and wife as they pray together in unity. Patty and I had a nice prayer time tonight as we prayed for people in our church, our kids, and my Mom. Besides the blessing of increased power from God in our prayers, there is very few things that causes us to grow in our closeness and intimacy in our marriage as praying together does. On the surface it doesn’t appear that there is anything that special about praying with your spouse, but very few activities leave me with such a strong sense of God’s presence and His pleasure as when I spend time praying with Patty. It is that very strong sense of His presence that causes that supernatural bonding between us.

The devil seems to work very hard to keep us from praying together. As special as the prayer times that we have together are, we struggle to spend even three times each week praying together, which is my goal.  I think that the devil knows we can destroy his kingdom in our praying together, that is how much power we have together, and he is afraid of us, he has no defense against the power of our prayers. So he does the next best thing, he messes with our schedules and gets us so busy that we don’t seem to have the time to spend praying together. It isn’t going to work with us though, we are going to pray together, and We are going to do it everyday.

Proverbs 23:24  The father of the righteous will greatly rejoice,
And he who sires a wise son will be glad in him.

Our son, Seth is preaching at Jefferson Baptist Church this weekend. Tonight as he preached in the Saturday night service I felt very proud of him, and as the verse in Proverbs says, “I greatly rejoiced in the Lord” for the good work He did in the life of Seth.  We all have those “feel good moments” in our life when  someone we are associated with does well. It doesn’t have to be because of something we did well, it can be because we care so much for them that we rejoice over their good character and accomplishment. I always felt so good when the kids played basketball or volleyball well, or when they got good grades, or sang beautifully. But when they demonstrate Christ like character and maturity, and glorify Him by their service it is particularly rewarding.

4 of us drove over to Brothers in Central Oregon about half way between Bend and Burns and shot Sage Rats. The official name for these little critters is “Belgium Ground Squirrels”.  We are shooting on  a big alfalfa hay farm that has literally thousands of these ground squirrels with mounds of dirt everywhere through out the field. They are a major nuisance costing thousands of dollars to the farmers in lost hay.

I started hunting when I was 12 years old, and over the years it has been one of my favorite activities especially with my family. It was very fun to take my grandson Isaac who is 12 years old with me today, and be able to spend a day shooting with him. He hasn’t done very much hunting up to this point, and I think today he shot about 500 22 shells and had a blast doing it (pun intended).

Of all the blessings God has given me, at this point in my life my grandchildren are the best, especially as I get to be a part of their growing up and their acquiring skill, character, and  wisdom. Today helping Isaac load the gun, shoot it and eventually getting  accurate with it, and being careful and practicing good gun safety was so fun. But the best part was seeing him interact with the 4 grown men on this trip with maturity, dignity, confidence, and see him jump in and help carry gear without being told.

It was a great day! Thank You Lord.