It is amazing that considering my last couple of fishing trips that nothing went wrong today, at least nothing serious or permanent. As we turned out our driveway it seemed like my bike was exceptionally hard to pedal. Cliff my brother yelled at me that something was wrong with my bike. Oh great, I thought, we haven’t gone 10 feet and it is starting already. Evidently my bicycle which has been on our front porch for the last week fell over when a bunch of the grandkids were having an air soft war at our house. The back tire, which I hadn’t tightened enough after putting new tubes in was rubbing on the frame so I pushed it back where it was supposed to be and tightened up the nuts on the side and off we went. The only problem was the usual buttock pain on the first day. I am going to put a different seat or saddle on for tomorrow to make some different spots hurt, I brought 3 and will rotate between them for a couple of days until the old rear end toughens up a bit more. I brought 2 big tubes of “Butt Butter”, and it works quite well. I am getting ready to boil some water to pour into a pouch of freeze dried dinner, pretty tasty stuff. I will take pictures most days and put on my blog but the WiFi here is pretty weak and I don’t think they would send. Almost all uphill today as we climbed about 3,000 feet but the legs are feeling good so far. It is supposed to be near record heat for the next couple of days so I anticipate drinking lots of water and lattering up with the sunscreen.

Tomorrow at 6 am I am leaving with my brother Cliff, his wife Kathy, and Tom Zilverberg on a 2000 mile bicycle trip. We are going to Glacier National Park and back again in a circular route. We will average about 68 miles each day for 32 biking days with 5 rest days, each one being on Sunday. Tomorrow we are camping in Idanah just past Detroit Lake.

This will be the 6th bicycle trip that I have taken that has been a month or more in length and I still get super nervous, hyped up, excited, and a bit apprehensive thinking about what it will feel like to get hit with a truck on a bicycle.

I enjoy these trips for 5 reasons; (1) I usually lose 20 to 30 lbs, get in really great shape, and come back with so much more energy. I maintain a pulse rate of about 120 beats a minute for about 8 hours minimum each day with about 30 minutes to an hour of over 140 beats a minute so I get a great cardiovascular workout. (2) I get a great time of personal renewal. My job as a pastor requires being around people most of the day and many are sick or have family sick, or they are in some kind of life crisis in their marriage or extended family or finances. Usually they are wanting some counsel from me that will fix it all tomorrow, but most often it is going to be a long, slow, tedious, tiring journey, and they don’t want to hear that particularly. All that to say, I get weary of ministry and run out of gas and these trips are wonderful in their ability to fill my tank to full. (3) All day long I ride along talking to no one but God and I do a lot of reflective thinking about myself, my character and my lack of character and what to do about it. (4) Because of the thinking I do all day long when I get to camp and start writing words come out of me like a water fall. I get lots of sermons written, goals written, and plans and strategies worked out and written down. (5) It isn’t the most dangerous thing in life to do but there is an element of risk involved that gives the trip a bit of an edge to it that is invigorating for me. Pastoring is a noble job, but it can get a bit boring and routine at times and it has been listed as one of the softest jobs there is, safe is not very exciting.

There are certain dates that I remember easily. October 27, 1948 is my birthday, and everybody remembers their birthday because we get asked to put it on so many different things from drivers licenses, income tax returns, and airplane tickets. August 24, 1969 is our wedding day, and I am reminded of that day every year as we celebrate our anniversary and somebody asks how long we have been married so I have to quick do the math and remember the year. This year will be 50 years married to the same beautiful lady. I remember the year our first child was born, Sarah, in 1975, I don’t remember the day, but it was such a momentous day in our lives I couldn’t forget the year. Our doctor had told us we wouldn’t be able to have any kids, but after 6 years along came Sarah and 7 more in the years to follow. But probably the date that is most indelibly impressed in my memory besides my birthday is the day I graduated from High School, 1967. Even though it is only 4 years long, High School seemed to go on for half my life, I didn’t think I was ever going to be out of High School and I had so many dreams that I wanted to get after as soon as I got out of High School. My High School years were good, but there still was this sense that I was finally free after graduating.

Our oldest, Sarah, had her oldest child, our oldest grandchild, Josiah graduate from High School tonight, our first grandchild to graduate from High School. Let’s see, it is 2019, I wonder if I will remember that date in say 5 years, probably not. Since I have graduated from High School 53 years ago my life has been full of experiences, adventures, excitement, near death experiences, accomplishments, failures, disappointments, and growth.

As I sat and watched Josiah’s graduation tonight I wondered what his future held. How many adventures he would have, how many different countries he would visit, how much he would learn and grow, what great things he would accomplish for God, who he would marry, how many great grandchildren he would have for me.

As I sat wondering, knowing that he was a good boy with so much potential, but also knowing that the world is an evil place and can totally mess up the lives of good people, I resolved again to pray for him everyday that God would guide him into His perfect will, that God would protect him from the evil one and temptation, and that He would be a mighty man of God and would accomplish amazing things with his life.

As his grandfather God has given me jurisdiction or authority in Josiah’s life so that my prayers to God for Josiah are honored and answered by God with high priority. I don’t want to be lazy or negligent to exercise the power and authority I have to bless my grandson. Dear Lord, please help me to be a faithful prayer on behalf of all my grandchildren, but especially Josiah as he is in these critical years where his choices will have significant impact on the direction his life goes.

Wisdom is knowing what to do and say in any situation that God sovereignly puts us in. It is great to have wisdom when you are raising your kids, in your marriage, at work, with your neighbors, and especially when problems and obstacles to your goals come up. Knowing what to do and what to say in every situation, that sounds so cool. There are some basic requirements needed to become wise. The first one is humility, that is you have to admit that you are very much lacking in wisdom, the one who thinks he already is wise will remain a fool. Everybody and his Uncle thinks that they are pretty smart, and they have an answer for everything.

1 Corinthians 3:18-19 Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you thinks that he is wise in this age, he must become foolish, so that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness before God. For it is written, “He is the one who catches the wise in their craftiness”.

A humble person is not a know it all, and they are humble enough to ask others for advice and counsel about anything and everything.

Proverbs 1:5 A wise man will hear and increase in learning, and a man of understanding will acquire wise counsel.

A wise person is someone who knows how important wisdom is for success in every area of life. Because they realize how little wisdom they really have they are always seeking for wisdom in every way with a sense of desperation. Fools think they are wise enough, and have an opinion about everything, and seldom ask for advice or counsel from anybody.

We seem to have moved into an age where most people do that which is right in their own eyes. An age where most are a know it all, where most think their opinion is right. As a culture moves in the direction of pride, arrogance, and foolishness more and more conflict erupts in families, in work places, in community’s and between countries.

A characteristic of truly wise people is graciousness and gentleness in relationships. Fools are relationally stupid, and in the midst of the conflicts that they provoke they are sure it is everybody else’s fault. After every tense moment with another person in my life I journal and ask myself, “what could I have said or done differently to have prevented that situation from happening?” Every morning I pray and declare to God that I am greatly lacking in wisdom and I ask God to give me more wisdom and to guide me to those who can give me good counsel in every area of life.

Every year for the last 7 years I have gone on a long bicycle trip with some other people. Last year we went from my house to the Grand Canyon, then up to Yellowstone National Park and then back home. That was about 4,000 miles and took us 65 days to ride including rest days. The year before that in 2017 we did a trip around the State of Oregon that was 2000 miles. In 2016 3 of us took our wives who road in a pickup with a camper and pulling a trailer, and we went from San Diego to St Augustine, Florida. This was probably my most enjoyable trip because of Patty being along and because of all the new country that I hadn’t seen before. In 2014 John Smith and I road all the way across the nation on what is called the “Nortern Tier” and ended in Portand, Maine, this was probably my favorite trip because of all the people we met on the trip and also because of the added challenge of carrying everything on our bikes. The very first trip was in 2013 when my brother Cliff and I road to Fairbanks, Alaska. It is about 2500 miles to Fairbanks from our house and we road about half of it. That was by far the most beautiful of all the trips and we saw 92 bears on the trip to add some excitment to the trip.

This year my brother Cliff, his wife Kathy, and a friend, Tom Zilverberg will ride to Glacier National Park and back home in a circular route. The trip is right at 2000 miles and we plan on leaving on June 10th and getting home on July 9th, exactly one month. So because we are leaving in 4 days I have been really busy getting all my stuff together.  All day long I am writing things down what I need to get before we head on the trip, I keep racking my  brain knowing that I have not remembered everything.

I love doing these bicycle trips because of the “alone time” I get every day as I ride along, talking to no one but God, enjoying the time of reflextion and meditation. I have some ideas for trips for the next 5 years. One is to hit all lower 48 States which would be a long trip and would take about  100 days to complete. Another one that I have already got all routed out is to start at the tip of Flordia and go to Fairbanks, Alaska.

I was recently talking to a guy who had just finished his first marathon. We talked about how your mind takes over around mile 18 to 22 and screams at you to stop running because you are killing yourself. This experience that almost all marathon runners have is called hitting the wall, and until you have actually experienced it, it is hard to understand. But once you have experienced it you are amazed at how much power your brain has to control your actions even contrary to what you really want to do. If a person runs multiple marathons he learns how to run through the wall by ignoring the thoughts that pour into his mind to quit and replacing those thoughts with positive, I can do it thoughts. On the second marathon that I ran which was in Vancouver, British Colombia, I got to mile 18 and there was the beginning of a one mile long hill. As I started up the hill my mind started whining and complaining, and then a spectator stood up out of his lawn chair and held up a sign he had written that said, “you can do it”. He shouted out to me, “Hey, number 440 (that was my bib number), I wrote this sign just for you”. It was amazing how powerful that sign, that shout out of encouragement to me at that perfect time changed my self talk and I kept running and improved my first marathon time by 30 minutes. Our minds are like a spoiled child and we have to train it to be strong and tough. Our mind is connected to our Old Nature that is selfish, lazy, self absorbed, and really likes comfort. The people who accomplish the most in life train their brain, and take every thought captive to the obedience to Christ.

One of the strongest messages of the Bible is do not conform to the world. That would be that part of the world we live in, the culture we live in. Cultures establish values, rules of behavior, standards of what is right and what is wrong, a list of what is true and what is false, a belief in what will bring joy and what won’t, and a philosophy of the meaning of life and the afterlife. The Bible is the very Word of God expressed and written by people who had a special relationship with God that allowed them to hear the message that God had for the world. As a person who is seeking for truth and for God, reads the Bible he will quickly discover that much of what they read doesn’t agree with the world. When choosing what to accept, what to believe, and what to use as their standard, people are powerfully pulled in the direction of conforming to those around them because of their super strong desire to be accepted by others. Most people’s self worth comes from their perception of what the opinion of their peers is of them, and because our personal self worth is so important to us we work hard to impress the world around us so that their opinion of us will be positive so that our opinion of ourselves will be positive. But the basic message of the Bible is “be different”, do not conform, don’t follow the crowd, instead follow the standard of God as given in the Bible. In order to be successful in following God’s way and not conforming to the way of the world, we have to have help from other people. A key role of our church family is to produce an environment of our own, a counter culture that gives us the security to have the strength so as not to allow the world to push us into their mold.

One my favorite fishing stories is when we got boarded and arrested by the coast guard. I think it was around 2003, and one of my fishing buddies bought a brand new jet sled. We did quite a lot of sturgeon fishing in the Colombia River in those days, and decided to try fishing the Willamette River in Portland with his new fishing boat. We launched under the St John’s Bridge, and because we had never fished there we decided to cruise around real slow watching our fish finder for deep places and good places to fish. The Portland Rose Festival was close and they had a number of Navy ships docked there in that area. As we wandered around the river looking for fishing spots we evidently got to close to one of the ships. So we didn’t have hull numbers on the new boat yet, our zig zagging around looked suspicious, we got to close to a Navy Ship, and it was just a couple of years since 9/11. I saw a Coast Guard boat heading our way so I said to my friend, “It looks like that Coast Guard boat is headed towards us“, and he said, “It is because I don’t have my hull numbers on, but I have my temporary registration, so we will be fine”. About then they shouted at us through a bull horn, ” Would everyone on the boat come to the back of the boat with your hands up”! I said, ” Sounds more serious than no hull numbers to me”! 4 Coast Guard guys boarded our boat and told us to get on our knees, cross our ankles and put our hands on our heads. I couldn’t lift my foot high enough while on my knees to get it crossed over my other leg, so I asked one of the Coast Guard guys if he would help me out and pick up my foot and put it over my other leg. I think he thought I was being a smart aleck, and he just ignored me and wouldn’t help me. As I continued to try cross them he said in a disgusted tone, “never mind”. I responded with a sigh of relief, a smile, and said, “Thank you, very much”! They towed us into the Coast Guard station and searched the boat complete with divers checking the under side of the boat. News people with cameras came from channel 12 news and we were on the news that night as a potential terrorist scare. I am glad they didn’t use our names or show our faces. I asked the guy who appeared to be in charge, “Do we look like terrorists to you?” And he responded by saying, “No, you like 4 dumb fishermen🥺!” Shortly after they boarded the boat they took our Drivers Licenses, and evidently ran our names through their computers, and as they handed them back one of the guys said, “Who is the preacher?” I said, “I am, and I am going to use you in my sermon tomorrow as an illustration, could you give me your name please”. None of them had much of a sense of humor. As they were getting ready to let us go I said, “You know, you have pretty well messed up our fishing day, how about telling us where a good spot to catch keeper sized sturgeon is.” He did, and we caught some.

One of our parenting tools was camping. We camped with our kids a lot as they grew up. The reason was because, whatever can go wrong camping, almost always does go wrong, and then we could teach our kids how to deal with unexpected problems and road blocks without freaking out over it. We wanted to raise tough minded, strong kids, not wimps. So this weekend I took off with 3 friends from the church to go fishing at Brownlee Reservoir on the Snake River. We pulled my 20 ft pontoon boat along with our camping gear for a three day fishing trip for Crappie and Cat Fish. We went down the Reservoir about 6 miles the first evening, and my prop fell off of my outboard motor. I guess the cotter key broke off and the nut holding the prop on worked itself off. We then had to make it back to camp on my little 6 hp trolling motor which pushes the pontoon boat at 3 mph wide open. I brought my big 10×20 Cabella’s tent so we could all fit in one tent. We got it all set up and decided to leave off the rain fly because it was so hot and there wasn’t a cloud in sight. Our plan was to go out last night at 6 pm and put out underwater lights, propane lanterns and spot lights, and then haul in the fish as they came to the light. We didn’t go very far from camp with the 6 hp motor, but about 10 pm it started pouring rain, we didn’t see the clouds coming in because it was dark. By the time we got the anchors in, the lights in, the fishing rods in, the motor started and then put putted to camp everything in the tent was wet. One of the guys slept in the car his sleeping bag was so wet. Through it all we rejoiced and had an adventure, a good time, and good fellowship. It isn’t just about catching fish. James 1:2-4 is our guiding verses, “Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance, and let endurance have its perfect result that you may be perfect and complete lacking in nothing.”

I taught at a parenting dessert tonight, and my main emphasis was parent on purpose. That means that as parents we are training our kids with the goal of adding specific character traits to their life. Most parents are in neutral on effort until their kid does something wrong, then they shift it into high gear for a little while, then back to neutral when everything is cool. Parents ought to train their kids in high gear all the time, but especially when their kids are in high gear, when they are motivated, learning, and growing. Aggressively teach and encourage then, and it is so rewarding. As we parented on purpose we targeted character traits and the one on the top of our list was diligence. As a pastor I have observed that a key reason many people don’t do the basic disciplines of the Christian life is because they are lazy, it is to hard, meaning they might have to watch 30 minutes less television if they read their Bibles every day. People who manage time well get more done than most because they work faster than most. Men who love their wives well do so because they do the things that lazy men don’t do. Kids that get good grades aren’t usually smarter than other kids, but they almost always are much harder workers. All kids are born lazy, and many stay lazy their entire life.