Pastoring a church is a great privilege given to me by God. One of my goals is to pastor and lead with a healthy soul. Many do not and the consequences in the church of America is significant, which results in significant consequences in our country as well.

“1,500 pastors leave the ministry permanently each month in America. 80% of pastors and 85% of their spouses feel discouraged in their roles. 70% of pastors do not have a close friend, confidant, or mentor. Over 50% of pastors are so discouraged they would leave the ministry if they could but have no other way of making a living. Over 50% of pastors’ wives feel that their husband entering ministry was the most destructive thing to ever happen to their families. 30% of pastors said they had either been in an ongoing affair or had a one-time sexual encounter with a parishioner. 71% of pastors stated they were burned out, and they battle depression beyond fatigue on a weekly and even a daily basis. Only one out of every ten ministers will actually retire as a minister.” (Information from The Barna Group).

I want to get to the finish line still in love with Jesus, still in love with the church, still in love with being a pastor. With my head held high, with my dignity and honor still intact, I want to look back over my shoulder and say it was worth it. A healthy soul is not easy to achieve and it is even harder to maintain over the long haul.

The foundation of a healthy soul is right and pure motive. Why do we do what we do, what drives us, what gives us our fire and passion. Our motive is tricky, it slips sideways so easily and imperceptibly from the influence of the world, the pull of our flesh, and the temptation of the devil. It takes constant self-monitoring, but only those who are humble enough to receive input, instruction, and criticism from others close to them who see little warning signs of drift into the dark side will be able to maintain purity of motive that God will bless.

For me pure motive is doing everything I do to please the Lord. 2 Corinthians 5:9 Therefore we also have as our ambition (motive), whether at home or absent, to be pleasing to Him.

It is so easy to slip a bit and begin to please people. We serve people, teach people, pray for people, counsel people and if we do a good job they will appreciate us and verbalize that appreciation, and it is so addicting.

It is so easy to be motivated by the pride of accomplishment, a sense of worth that come from influencing people towards faith in God. It seems strange that such a noble accomplishment could be driven by pride.

There are many other “false gods” lurking to seduce us away from the purity of devotion to Christ and the super strong desire to please Him in all that we do, such as power, money, and even comfort.

The strongest check in my spirit to scrutinize my motive is feelings of discouragement, hurt feelings, self-pity, feeling unappreciated, and finding myself getting irritated at people.

Dear Lord, my desire, my motive, my ambition is to please You with my life, work, and accomplishment. Test my heart, O Lord, and see if there is any wrong motive in me, show me what I need to change.

I remember the months I agonized over whether to stay on the farm or pastor. My prayer was a constant, “What do I do?” Since those days there have been many more sleepless nights as I pondered a decision that had to be made, and I had no clue what was right, what was best, or what was God’s will. Almost all of those really big ones had to do with JBC as I pastored over the years. The good and right decisions usually resulted in growth and unity, the not so good ones usually ended up in disunity that often lingered for years, and made life generally miserable. Over the last 42years JBC has been my life, almost every waking moment I was thinking about the church, the health of the church, the growth, the programs, what I could do better, different, what was good, what was bad. In my mind and heart, the church was the Body and Bride of Christ, He gave His life for the church, and I was determined to give mine as well, my love for Jesus was manifested in my love for His Bride, in my life that meant JBC. My total devotion to my church didn’t detract from my marriage, in fact I think it made it better, I don’t think it negatively affected my parenting, I think it made it better. Now at 70 years of age I often sit and reminisce about the good old days, or the not so good days, and my part in them.

Of all the decisions that I have ever made as the Pastor of JBC, the hardest, by far, was stepping back and giving the bulk of the weekend preaching to my associate pastor, Mike Dedera. I had been the “Preaching Pastor” for 40 years. It was my spiritual gift, it was who I was, it was the primary source of joy and fulfillment in my life, I never felt more alive than when I was preaching, I never sensed the pleasure of God in my life as strongly as when I was preaching, the most spiritual experiences of my life happened while I was preaching. But I am not going to live forever, somebody else is going to have to take that role sooner or later, either by my choice or by the fact that I have died or gotten so senile I don’t know Genesis from Revelation. On the bicycle trip that we took from San Diego to St Augustine, Florida, I had a very close call with a pickup nicking the side mirror on my bicycle. It was a bit nerve wracking thinking about what I would look and feel like if he had been half an inch closer. Because I do think about the church most of the time I began thinking what would happen to JBC if I had gotten killed. I know Jesus can build his church, but I also know what has happened to many churches at the end of a long pastorate, the next guy gets crucified, he can do nothing right no matter how hard he tries. Part of me thought, what happens after I am gone isn’t my problem, just enjoy life until that day, but another part of me thought, you have given to much not to care about what happens in the next 30 years. The first 10 years of pastoring I was a mediocre preacher at best, but I worked constantly on my gift and my passion, always being my own worst critic. It just took lots of pulpit time for me to grow and learn how to speak so that people learned, grew, and experienced God by hearing His word taught well. I knew it was going to take the same for Mike, time, practice, experience, agony over bombs, and hopefully being coached well. I went back and forth on it a thousand times, constantly asking God, “What do I do?” By the time we were home I had made up my mind, and later that week had the discussion with Mike before I changed my mind. I have seconded guessed that decision hundreds of times over the last 2 years, but tonight as I sat listening to Mike preach from the book of Proverbs on Wisdom I had a wonderful gift from God as He filled me with a great sense of peace and joy and anticipation for the days and years ahead. Many of my decisions and choices over the last 42 years were bad, but this one was a good one.

I picked a bad profession to get rich in. There are a few pastors with big churches and lots of books to their credit who have lots of money but most Pastors that I know are average if not below average in income. In the early years of pastoring JBC when it was small and struggling and we had eight kids who ate a lot we had to manage every penny, but it was a great life and our kids all learned the secret of being content with what we had, which is invaluable. Paul the Apostle talked about that secret that he found in Philippians 4:12-13,

I know how to get along with humble means, and I also know how to live in prosperity; in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need. I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.

Hebrews 13:5-6 Make sure that your character is free from the love of money, being content with what you have; for He Himself has said, “I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you,” so that we confidently say, “The Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid.”

The secret is that our abundance almost guarantees that we will have a low trust in God, but when we have little we grow in our daily dependence on Him and our love grows toward Him and not toward the world. contentment doesn’t mean laziness, it doesn’t mean resignation, but it does mean that we recognize that God is the one who keeps an eye on the sparrow and I am worth much more to Him than a bird is. Life is unpredictable but I trust God with my life, and He will take care of me, He always has and he always will.

Those who have taught me and influenced me most in my life have said to me over and over, steward your money well and give away as much as you can to God’s work. The act of giving inoculates our heart against the love or dependence on money, and God is free to give generously to the person who is content either way, with or with out. Learning the secret of contentment is a special kind of freedom of the soul. That is why I say that living life in such a way that our kids grew up with the “Secret” of being content no matter what is invaluable.

Since January 1st I have not eaten any sugar that I am aware of, and also no wheat flour. So far with only that diet restriction I have lost 13 lbs, and I am feeling really good with lots more energy. It hasn’t been very hard to maintain the discipline because the results have been so quick and significant that I stay motivated not to cheat. The Bible has a lot to say about living healthy, but not much of what it says has anything to do with food. An example is in Proverbs 17:22 “A joyful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit dries up the bones.” Most people with Parkinson’s are mildly to severally depressed, because the chemical that their body has stopped making is dopamine which besides being the chemical the brain uses to communicate to the muscles is also the “feel good” chemical. “A joyful heart is good medicine”. So is a joyful heart entirely an issue of good things happening in and around us. It is obvious that it is also the result of our body not producing certain chemicals. So, the burning question is, can I choose to be joyful as an act of my will or am I entirely at the mercy of unpredictable and uncontrollable events in my life? So I can choose to act happy even if I don’t feel happy. If I am only acting happy am I really happy? Not yet, but if I continue to act happy in spite of how I feel, my behavior will work on me in the inside, and soon I will feel happy. “Don’t act the way you feel, act the way you want to feel, and you soon will.” So, choosing to rejoice always, and to think of positive things most of the time will result in a mostly positive and happy person, which results in good health.

Philippians 4:4-8 Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice! Let your gentle spirit be known to all men. The Lord is near. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

After half our cows had died, and our offer to FHA was accepted we still had a debt of about $20,000 which we owed to feed companies, veterinarians, milking equipment companies, and a variety of other costs for starting up the dairy. I did some investigating and found that the best paying job around was a construction company with headquarters only about 10 miles from where we lived. I went down and filled out an application and they said to call and check periodically if they needed anybody. I called them everyday for 6 weeks asking if there was an opening. I think they got tired of me calling and finally gave me a job. My job was to work with another older guy on a track drill, drilling 100 foot deep holes in rock quarries. The holes were 2 inches in diameter, and after drilling about 100 of them about 3 feet apart we would load them full of dynamite and blow up the rock. The once solid rock which we had shot was now a big pile of rock about the size of softballs. After we left another crew would come in and run it through a crusher to be used to make asphalt. It was a noisy, dusty job, but it paid really well, and that was all I cared about. The fellow I worked with was the meanest, grouchiest, most obnoxious person I had ever been around. He would give me the worst jobs to do, and when I had done them he would tell me to do it again because it wasn’t right. He would yell at me, cuss at me, make fun of me all day long. The harder I worked the worse he got, and I was getting very discouraged and weary of my job. I asked my Dad what I should do and he had a pretty simple and straightforward answer, “The boss is the boss, and you do what he tells you with no insubordination”. The owner of the company stopped by about a week after I started and said to me “you know, nobody has lasted longer than 6 weeks with Doc, (that was his name), if you can tough it out that long I will give you a raise”. I asked him why he kept him if he was that hard to work for, and he said, “because he is the best driller and shooter in the business, he makes me a lot of money.” Several weeks after that we traveled to Eastern Oregon for a two week job. Doc took all of our drill bits to a machine shop to get sharpened which he did between every job, and when we got to our new job he discovered that he had forgotten to pick up the bits. Just then the owner drove up and asked why we weren’t started yet, and Doc said, “Because Dee forgot to pick up the drill bits”! I could hardly believe what I was hearing. Lester, the owner handed me the keys to his pickup and told me to go get them, to drive as fast as I could without getting a ticket. It was most of a days drive to the job, and it was about 6:00 pm when I left, and it took me 6 hours to drive to the machine shop and most of the way I was mentally fussing and fuming about the unfairness of this whole deal. When I got there at midnight it was closed so I went to sleep on the seat of the pickup. About an hour later the owner of the machine shop was knocking on my window, Lester had called him, gave me the bits and off I went for another 6 hours of driving. I got to the job sight at day light and Doc and Lester were waiting. I suggested that I get a little sleep, after all I had been awake for over 24 hours, but Doc said we have to get started and I can’t do this without your help “so get to work, now!” I was so tired I wasn’t much help, which set Doc off on numerous tirades on my uselessness. Through the entire ordeal I was pleasant, gracious, and said a lot of “yes sirs”. I kept repeating to myself, ” The boss is the boss, so don’t lip off, if you want that raise for being the only one to make it 6 weeks”. A couple of days later the owner, Lester, walked up to me and said, ” I checked with the machine shop owner, and he said it was Doc who brought the bits in, and who said he would pick them up. That took a lot of toughness to do what you did, I am going to give you that raise earlier than I said, and I am going to double it, good boy.” I remembered a quote that I had written down that I heard from a missionary who spoke at our church a couple,of years earlier, ” Take care of yourself and God will let you do it, all by yourself, but if you trust the Lord and do things the way He would do them, He will take care of you, and He will do a much better job than you will”.

Today was Patty’s birthday. A number of the kids and grandkids came over and we had a party, it was a lot of fun. Birthdays are a nice time to reminisce about people in our lives, and I did that a bit tonight while we were sitting around chatting. Patty is and has been an unbelievably good wife, and especially a pastors wife. In the early days of pastoring being a pastors wife was a significant pressure in her life as she worried that she would not measure up, and not act the way she was supposed to act and My ministry would suffer because of her. It didn’t take her long to adjust, and establish her priorities in life, and in the church. She would regularly say to me, “you are my first and most important ministry, to make sure that you are the happiest man on the earth, and my children are next, and then the church. That didn’t mean she wasn’t involved much in the ministry at JBC, she was very committed and involved especially in the children’s ministry. She has loved JBC as the “Body of Christ” just as much as I have, so it has been a great partnership in ministry. It is said that woman are emotional so they are up and down depending on the circumstances of life, but it was Patty who kept me thinking right when everything was going unbelievably well so that I didn’t get a big head, and she is the one who kept me from quitting when everything was falling apart around me. A key ingredient in my managing the pressure of ministry so well over the last 42 years is that Patty made it easy to leave everything at the office so when I got home it was rejuvenation time and renewal time. She didn’t quiz me about my day, but was very open to listening if I needed to talk. I have pastored for 42 years at Jbc, and been married for almost 50 years, and one thing I know for sure is that if the Lord hadn’t given me Patty I would be shoveling cow poop today.

In yesterday’s blog I mentioned that Patty and I had made a deal with the Farm Home Administration concerning the $40,000 debt that we had with them after borrowing the money to buy 40 Registered Guernsey cows. After half of them died, we sold the 20 we had left to my Dad for $16,000 which left us with approximately $24,000 left to pay off. We talked to the main person in charge in the Farm Home Administration office in our area, a very nice guy named Mr Blackburn about setting up some kind of reduced payment plan. While we were talking to him about this, he mentioned that FHA had a program set up to help farmers that went through some kind of crisis that impeded their ability to pay back their loan. He said that we could fill out the paper work explaining what had happened and make a counter offer to what we owed, FHA would either except the counter offer or reject it, they wouldn’t come back with another counter to our counter. If they did reject the offer that we made they wouldn’t accept another one for five years. We thought about it, did a lot of calculations, prayed for wisdom, and made the ridiculously low counter offer of $1,000. The offer had to include a check for the full amount of the offer, and we didn’t have any money, so $1000 was about all we could figure out that we could come up with. We waited for the longest two months of my life for a response. I remember the day the official looking envelope came from them, and we sat down in the kitchen with Mom and Dad and opened it up. They had accepted our $1,000 counter offer, and the initial contract that we had signed was also in the envelope with a big “Paid in Full” stamped on it in blue ink. My, oh my, that felt so good.

Five years later when we decided to come to Jefferson and Pastor Jefferson Baptist Church we bought a brand new house just built right in Jefferson for $25,000. We applied for a loan with FHA because the interest was 1.8 percent interest. When we went into their office in Salem to apply for the loan the lady that we were meeting with asked if we had ever had a Farm Home loan before. I thought, well this will certainly blow our chances of getting a loan from them, and I responded, yes, we had borrowed $40,000 about 5 or 6 years ago. She made a phone call, (this was before the days of computers and the internet), and after talking for a minute, she hung up the phone, and said to us, “Yes, you did take out a loan, and our records show that it is paid in full, so yes, we will loan you the money for your house.

So many times I have replayed in my mind, all those events of this story in our life, and I have thought, it is a lot like my salvation, when I had a long list of sins that I could never pay for, and Jesus came to this earth, lived, and died on a cross and paid the penalty of all of my sins, and when I die and enter heaven I will have “paid in Full” stamped on my forehead in blue ink.

I remember well my attempt to have my own dairy instead of working for my Dad. I was 22 years old, and was pretty sure I knew more about how to succeed as a dairy farmer than any living person. I borrowed $40,000 from Farm Home Administration, and bought 40 registered Guernseys from Idaho. I leased a farm that was set up for dairying, but I needed to do a ton of work to get the place fixed up, cleaned up, and ready for a grade A dairy operation. I hired a cattle trucker to transport the cows from Idaho to my new dairy in Trout Lake, Washington. Evidently the load of cows that the trucker had hauled before mine were infected with a virus, and my cows picked it up during the 18 hour ride to my dairy. Two weeks after they were unloaded at my place the first cow died, and another one died about every other day after that first one. Finally when half of my cows had died the Vet figured out what the problem was, and we inoculated the remaining cows and stopped the steady decline of my dairy herd. By this time I had spent several thousand dollars on veterinarian services along with the $40,000 I had borrowed, and with only 20 cows left I couldn’t produce enough milk to make the payment on the loan and I went deeper in debt every day I continued to operate in an attempt to succeed as a dairy farmer. Finally I gave up and sold the remaining cows to my Dad, and went back to milking for him. I got another job along with milking, and by working that job for two years along with a deal that I was able to make with the Farm Home Administration I was able to get totally out of debt.

When the cows started dying I pleaded with God to help me, and keep the cows healthy. I prayed over and over again for hours and hours begging God to please help me. For the two years that I worked like a dog on the dairy and also on the construction job drilling and blowing up rock at quarries for asphalt plants, I asked over and over again, Why? why had this happened to me? What had I done to deserve this?

During this time right after the 10th cow had died I went into a rage, and started picking up bales of hay and throwing them as far as I could, I kept this up until I collapsed in total exhaustion, and then I started crying. After a bit of time laying there in the hay I asked myself, “So, what are you going to do now? Get angry, get frustrated, lash out at people, go down the self-pity trail, are you going to let this horrible situation dictate to you how you feel and how you act, are you going to fall apart? After some time of reflecting on this conversation with myself, I responded with, “No, I am going to face this challenge with courage and resolution. I don’t know why You are doing this to me Lord, but I trust You totally, and I love You even if You decide to kill them all.” That conversation with myself, and God was a significant defining moment in my life.

Pastor Mike at JBC started a 10 week series on Wisdom. It is going to be an awesome series if they are all are as good as tonight’s introductory sermon to the series. Wisdom is probably my favorite topic to study in the Bible because there are so many blessings attached to having wisdom. The Bible also talks about the fool, the person who is short on wisdom, and the consequences that the fool experiences in his life. Wisdom is like gold, it doesn’t jump up and bite you when you walk by, if you want it you have to seek it diligently. When my Dad was alive he had a gold claim in Southern Oregon, and he and I would work it about 10 days a year in order to keep it, and of course to find gold. This was back in the day when gold was $35 an ounce. We would run a little portable dredge for hours in the creek where our claim was, sucking up dirt, gravel and sand off of the bottom of the creek into our sluice box. Then we would empty the contents that were in the sluice box into a five gallon bucket and sit in the creek on a rock and pan the sand and gravel in the bucket for hours looking for little bitty flakes of gold. With each pan of gravel out of the bucket, after carefully swirling it around in the pan we would get a couple of flakes of gold, and then we would pick it out with tweezers and put it into a pill bottle. We usually got a couple of ounces in our 10 days of back breaking labor. It was a lot of work for $70, I did it mostly to be with my Dad, but I also enjoyed the challenge of finding something so allusive.

Proverbs 3:13-15 How blessed is the man who finds wisdom and the man who gains understanding. For her profit is better than the profit of silver and her gain better than fine gold. She is more precious than jewels; and nothing you desire compares with her.

My Dad used to say, “just because you get old doesn’t mean you get wise, there are a lot of old fools running around.” Wisdom is everywhere to be found, but only those who seek it diligently will find it.

With wisdom we will make right choices in life, with wisdom we will say just the right words at the right time, with wisdom we can solve problems that come into our life, with wisdom we can make good use of our time, with wisdom we manage our money perfectly, with wisdom we will raise good kids, with wisdom we will have a good marriage, and with wisdom we will influence people positively. Do a little self-examination, and ask yourself how much wisdom you really have. Another quote from my Dad, “The worst kind of fool is one who is one and doesn’t know it.”

A good way to start your diligent search for wisdom would be to attend services at JBC this next 10 weeks, listen to Pastor Mike, and learn how to seek it. You can also listen to the series on our pod cast or go to our web site, jbc.church and under sermons you will find it.

Relationships grow close and intimate with good communication. Talking to another person or to a group of people in such a way that they are truly taught, motivated, blessed with joy, and feel loved is a skill that we can develop, or not.

Proverbs 16:23-24 The heart of the wise instructs his mouth and adds persuasiveness to his lips. Pleasant words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.

Most learn their communication skills from the people they grow up with, their peers, and television. Some have been blessed with good models who have gracious speech and good communication skills, but most have not. Speech in a culture without purposeful and strategic work to improve will gradually deteriorate in clarity, that is it won’t communicate clearly so others can understand the message, it will lose it’s power to influence, and the quality of relationships will suffer.

Nothing has the power to knit people together in real unity that results in joy as much good communication does. When we can clearly share our needs, our struggles, our pain and disappointments others are moved to support and encourage us. When we paint pictures with our words of our dreams, our desires, and our goals others are inspired to help us. When we speak words that give grace to those who are hurting they are drawn to us. When we stir and inspire others to growth and greater accomplishment with our timely encouragement they will value us.

Many relationships, marriages, families, and friends struggle, and are filled with conflict, hurt feelings, lack of joy, feelings of being misunderstood, unappreciated, and unloved because of poor communication skills.

Wisdom in communication comes to the person who seeks it diligently. It comes to those who seek it humbly from those around them who obviously have this skill. To those who read good books on how to “win friends and influence people”. It especially comes to those who, when they have relational struggles assume the blame for having communicated poorly, selfishly, rudely, or hurtfully, and diligently work at improving by learning the skills of good communication.