I haven’t written a blog for several days because I am up in the Steens Mountains archery hunting for deer and elk with my son Seth, and there is little to no cell service. I did discover though that up at the outhouse in this campground that I get good service, so I am typing this on my phone in the outhouse. The weather has been a major challenge. The wind has been blowing so hard that I thought it was going to blow our tent over, and it has been freezing cold with snow every day. It is nice that we have a little propane heater that keeps our tent toasty. Yesterday I made a decision that was hard for me though I have been thinking about it for awhile. I am going to make hunting a done chapter in my life.  I can bicycle great, and walk on flat ground ground with no problem,  but I really struggle walking on uneven ground, and I seem to have lost the joy that I once received walking through the woods, out in the sage brush, and rimrock, simply because of the struggle to keep from falling. I enjoy the camping  a lot and intend on going on hunting trips, but I will fish, read, write  and enjoy the fellowship. Life has chapters and you go with them. 

My brother-in-law, Mike Bowers, went to heaven yesterday. His life here on this earth as we know it, ended because of cancer. It is getting to the point in my life where those I was close to, friends with, and/or family that are in heaven are more than those alive here on earth. When someone I know passes it always prompts some contemplative thinking on my part. The most significant person in my life that is in heaven is my Dad. That has been over 25 years ago but the memories of his cancer and struggle at the end is still very clear in my mind.

I have often thought that a cool way to have people die is like Jesus, not his form of death on a cross, but the fact that he rose from the dead and then over 500 people saw him and conversed with Him before He was resurrected to heaven. If I could have spent a couple of weeks with Dad after he died and had his new body before he took off for heaven, wow, that would have taken a lot of the pain away. But God doesn’t do it that way. I wonder why? I am pretty sure that the strength of my faith that Dad is in heaven, and that I am going to see him one of these days, and it is getting closer, is just as strong as if I had spent two weeks with him after he died, and before he left earth.

I know many who don’t have any faith. Death in their mind is a period at the end of a sentence. That is all there is, there ain’t no more.

Romans 1:18-20 says that God put an awareness of Him in our hearts, and people have to mentally push Him out of their hearts to not believe that He exists. The Bible also says we have eternity in our hearts, we are born with it, but that gets pushed out of many people’s hearts as well. Seems so sad to have no hope. The Bible also says that if we seek Him, we will find Him, and if we draw near to Him He will draw near to us. If I were a person with no faith in God or heaven, if I were a person with no hope I would choose to seek Him, and see what happened, yep that is what I would do.

The pastor of the church I was speaking at IN Sierra Vista, Arizona, was driving me to Tucson where I was going to catch my plane home. I am staying at a motel near the airport and will take off tomorrow morning at 8 am. There was a check point coming up, and he remembered that he had given his credit card to his secretary, and had no way to pay for my motel, so he pulled into the left lane and made a U-turn back the way we had come. About a minute later there was a border patrol car behind us, and in another minute there were two border patrol cars behind us and then they turned their lights on. We pulled over and they came up to the car on my side with big flashlights shining into the back of the car checking everything thoroughly. My pastor friend apologized for the turn, and explained what we were doing, and they said “no problem”, and off we went. It was kind of fun and added a little excitement to the day. I was impressed with how gracious the border patrol guys were considering how much flak they must get in a day, doing what they are doing. I am sure if we had been rude and belligerent we wouldn’t have gotten the same kind of treatment. It reminds me of one of my memory verses in Matthew 7:12, “However you want people to treat you, so treat them, for this is the law of the prophets”. That last phrase “this is the law of the prophets” basically means, this is a big deal to God, so pay attention. Treating people with honor and dignity as people created by God in His image is a very important discipline. Those who are rude and obnoxious will be treated accordingly, it is a law of GOD, SET IN CONCRETE.

I flew into Arizona yesterday and the pastor of the church I am speaking at today and tomorrow picked me up and was going to drop me off at the motel I was staying at after we had dinner. As we were driving into the parking lot of the motel all of the lights went out and the place went completely dark. Whow, what just happened?! I don’t know how your brain works, but mine starts going through all the possible reasons on why this just happened, and it often gets stuck on a reason that is sensational and off of the wall. I can’t help it, I just have this wild imagination that just goes off in these wild possibilities and exciting adventures. So I really couldn’t see the rest of the city, but I imagined that the lights were off everywhere, not just this motel, and a possibility that popped into my mind was North Korea shot a nuclear missile at the United States and it had knocked out all of the electricity in the entire country. I began to wonder if Jesus was coming soon, and what that was going to feel and look like. Then I began making plans on how to survive if there was no electricity for days or weeks, months or even years. How would I get home? How would Patty do? I was really getting into this movie in my head when the lights came back on. The lady at the desk said, “no big deal, someone was just working on something for a few minutes”. Oh well, it was an adventure while it lasted. This kind of thinking happens fairly often with me, and I know lots of other people who do the same, but one thing that is different in my overly imaginative scenarios from many others that I know is that I never get nervous or anxious about the future if it really is true. I have a very strong trust in God’s plan for my life, and a belief that the ride may get rough but God is driving and He knows what He is doing and has a plan.

I am sitting in LAX Los Angeles Airport with a 4 hour layover waiting to catch my flight to Tucson. I am sitting in the “Rock & Brew” eating chicken wings watching the rerun of Thursday night football, but mostly I am watching people. As I watch discreetly I wonder who they are, what their past is, what their values are, what they would be like to go fishing with, whether they love Jesus, how many hurts they are carrying around with them. I wonder if given a chance if I could be a friend and would be able to make any difference in their life. So many people like ants milling around each other, feeling, talking, strong, weak, pleasant, mean, responsible, lazy, selfish, loving. In Psalms it says, “God looks out on all the inhabitants of the earth, He who understands all their thoughts and motives, He who made them”. I wonder what God thinks and feels. One of the commands of Jesus is to “lift up our eyes and look at people”, He says, “they are like sheep without a shepherd”. I can’t do much here other than be pleasant to the waitress, but looking and wondering and praying diligently that somehow God will work, and draw, and convict, remove blinders, bind the demons, and bring a believer into their life. It is good for me and it is good for my heart to watch, wonder, and pray.

I try not to say I am tired when I feel tired, because it just amplifies the feeling, but for the sake of this blog I will violate that rule just this once. This week has been our “Five Days of Prayer”, and most mornings I have been getting up at 4 am and getting to bed about midnight. Tomorrow morning, Friday I am getting up at 3:30 am and driving to Portland to catch a plane to Sierra Vista, Arizona where I will be speaking over the weekend. I am sitting in my recliner writing this blog and it is 10:20 pm and I have a goal of getting to bed by 11 pm though I still have to do some packing. So, as I sit here, I let out a nice long sigh and say, “whoooeeee I am tired”. The best way to conquer the mental side of tiredness is to have a plan. So my plan is to ask Patty to set the coffee pot to go off at 3 am, pour it into my thermos in the morning and take it with me and drink coffee all the way to the airport, sleep on the plane, get to my motel room by 5 pm and read a bit and do my “disciplines” and be in bed by 8 pm and sleep in until 8 am. I don’t sleep for 12 hours very often, but I think I will do it this time. Nice plan. It is quite amazing how a good plan energizes my thinking and my attitude. I can sit here and say, “Whoooeeeee, I am tired”, but I say it with a smile because I know it is just temporary, because I have a plan!!

When our kids were involved in sports we would go to almost all of their games and cheer them on. I would get so involved and intense in their play, their effort and their performance that it was like I was trying to will them into a higher level of success. I would alternate between yelling encouragement, giving instruction, and then closing my eyes and praying, pleading with God to help them, then yell some more. By the end of a game I would be totally exhausted, almost like I had played it. Those were great days in our life.

Now I do that with people in our church. I get so totally and emotionally involved with each person in our church as I think about them, write about them, talk to them and pray for them. Some I cheer for and thank God profusely for their faithfulness and their growth in character as I observe their life. Others I plead with God to do SOMETHING, ANYTHING to bring them back to Him. I send notes, text messages, emails and make phone calls to those who are ignoring God and drifting away from Him, fearing that it is to late.

Sometimes I get so discouraged with my poor success at influencing people to not drift away from God that I wish I could just go ride a bicycle all by myself for the rest of my life, and not fret about anybody ever again. But I know that is not what my life is about, so let’s get after them, and I will rest in heaven.

I have been shooting my bow for the last week getting ready for a hunting trip to the Steens Mountains. It is my favorite place to hunt, and pretty much the only place I have hunted for the past 30 years. I have a big canvas bag stuffed with shrink wrap for a target. It stops an arrow cold after only a few inches of penetration. I have it hanging from the ends of rafters on my new garage that I recently built. I shoot 6 arrows at 20 yards, then 30, 40, 50, and 60 yards making a few small adjustments on my sights as needed. I take a short break and then repeat the sequence. I am starting to get most of the arrows in the center of the bag most of the time. Though I am getting pretty accurate with my bow, when I started in this year I had a bad habit of flinching as I released the arrow resulting in a really bad shot that ended up sticking in my garage wall instead of my nice arrow target. The result is there are a bunch of holes in my garage wall. When I get back from my hunting trip I am going to patch all the holes with Big Stretch caulking and paint it and it will be as good as new.

That garage wall is a picture of my life. When I do something wrong, hurt someone with my words, mess up with my money, fail to love Patty the way I should, or make a decision that results in a huge loss of time, it is like an arrow shot into my garage wall. 1 John 1:9 says that if I confess my sins that God will forgive me my sins, that is like pulling the arrows out of the wall. The problem is that there is still a hole that looks ugly, that is the consequences that I experience for the dumb things I have done. Though I am forgiven there is usually still a consequence for the sin committed. If I work at it, I can usually fix the consequence of my blunder by reconciling with the people I offended, or doing something to make up for my sin. It is my relational “big stretch caulking” liberally applied and then painted.

Many people just live with the holes in the wall because it seems easier just to ignore the consequences than fix them. It often is very humbling the fixing process and many instead of experiencing the humiliation of telling someone that we blew it will just pretend that it didn’t happen. Time does not take the hole in the wall away. It stays and gets uglier by the day.

To be relationally stupid means that that we often tend to do and say things that creates conflict and disunity with others and not be aware of it. It is often sad to see the blindness of many to the damage they cause with their attitude and words. It is often sort of a head shaker for me in dealing with people and helping them to grow in maturity so that they have healthy relationships. For many years I was very relationally stupid and the worst part was that much of the time was in the early years of ministry as a pastor. It took awhile , but I finally started figuring out what I was doing wrong from much advice and counsel from others who helped point out character flaws, blind spots, and what to do that is relationally intelligent. My main tool in growing in this area was a journal. Every time there was any kind of conflict, disunity, or a bit of a rub with another person I would describe the whole event in as much detail as I could remember in my journal, and then I would write, “I am 100% the problem, ‘Dear Lord, show me what I need to work on, show me my blind spots, Your commandment to me is to love others the way You do, but I can’t unless You help me”. I would then read what I wrote trying to see myself accurately. I would write down something I could see that needed changing, even if just a little bit, and then I would read it again, and find another blind spot. As I reread my little “short story” of the event I would often find 6 to 12 things I could have done or said differently. It didn’t take to many “short stories” about conflicts I was in to see some repeated offenses which increased my self-control to not do them. I began to read books on “relational intelligence” and “people skills” that taught me some basic pro-active ways to be likable, lovable, and relationally attractive. They were mostly simple little skills like asking good questions, listening attentively, making eye contact, not interrupting their story, not being argumentative, and smiling. I still have an occasional difficult time with another person and I still journal about it, and I am still learning and growing into a the kind of lover of people that Jesus was.

God admonishes and commands us to be devoted to prayer. Why? He desires our fellowship, conversation, intimacy, because He loves us. He is willing to bless us if we give Him time in prayer. In the gospel of John Jesus expresses His strongest of desires to God the father when He prays and says, “I desire that they be with me”, speaking of us. It is a mystery, but God enjoys our company. God invented prayer not as a powerful way to get things done, He is God, all powerful, and all wise, and He doesn’t need us to accomplish His will, He doesn’t need our permission to do anything. He invented prayer as a way of getting us to spend some time with Him. It is sad that we are to busy with life to spend a little time with the one who gave us life.

This next week is our “Five Days of Prayer”, and I plan on being there for at least 30. This is not because it is a religious duty, but because I am choosing to honor my God and my Savior by giving Him time. At the end of the week I will have experienced amazing peace, joy, and the level of inner strength will have grown significantly because I chose to hang out with God. This is not a super saint thing, it is just a loving God thing.