While I was over on the Deschutes River rafting I camped with a group from our church who were doing the guiding for those who were coming over each day to raft. There were about 15 or so who were there for the full three days of rafting, many of them young people. On Wednesday morning I got up at 5:30 am to read my Bible and pray a bit for the day. When I got up Pastor Mike was already up reading his Bible and while I sat in my lawn chair reading next to the Deschutes River in the next 30 minutes I think every person got up and sat and read and prayed for a bit before they started the day. As I sat listening to the roar of the river and watched the sun come up, I thought, what a wonderful culture we have as a church where we highly value the Word of God and have established the discipline of reading every day, even on a camping trip. I am so thankful to be part of it. I am so thankful that I am an integral part of it, like my hand is part of my body. I draw grace from my relationship with my church family, I give grace, I pray for every person in our church family each week and God does life changing things in the life of every person because of my prayers. Many people pray for me, and God does great and amazing things in my life because of the prayers of many in our body for me. In my physical body, my heart, lungs, liver, brain and all the various parts work together for my health. That is the way it is supposed to be in a church. I am so thankful for JBC, we are not a perfect church, but we are moving in that direction every day.

These last two days I have been over at the Deschutes River white water rafting with Pastor Mike and others from our church. It was a lot of fun rafting, and it was even more fun camping on the river with great people. Today on one of the trips when we went over the rapids called Oak Springs, I got thrown out of the raft and while under the water one of the oars swung up and whacked me right under the chin. It made a gash that went to the bone, and now it is swole up pretty good. It whacked me so hard that it loosened a couple of my teeth, and gave me a bit of whip lash in my neck. When it hit me I had this immediate sensation that I was going to pass out, and I knew that wouldn’t be good so I immediately opened my eyes to help keep myself conscious. I saw the raft above me so I backstroked away from it, talking to myself saying, “hold your breath”, “keep your back down”, “keep your feet downriver”, “backstroke to the shore”. It wasn’t to long before one of the other rafts paddled to where I was and rescued me. It always adds to the adventure and excitement of an event like this to have an unexpected crisis of sorts, and to conquer it. I am home now getting sympathy from Patty, she is such a good wife, and I have taken a bunch of ibuprofen, sitting in my recliner feeling pretty good. I am part of the team that is going to raft the Colorado River this time next year, and it is a much bigger River than the Deschutes with some really big rapids, and for a few minutes I started thinking, Dee, you are to old for this kind of stuff, let some young guy take your place. Then I remembered one of my favorite passages in the Bible in Joshua where Caleb who says on his 85th birthday, “I am as strong as I was when I was 40 years old, give me that mountain to conquer and I will drive those giants out of the land”, and he did.

Today was a very good day, I had a very long todo list and I got just about everything checked off that was on my list. Shot my bow a bunch, finished my sermon for this weekend, wrote some birthday notes, did some clean up in my shop, and bought my deer and elk tags. I won’t be writing a blog for several days in that I am leaving in the morning to go with a group from our church who will be rafting the Deschutes River tomorrow and Wednesday. I also went golfing this morning and got my best score ever using my sister in Laws clubs. I still don’t know what happened to my clubs, but if I have to replace them I will get what Annie Duke says is good. Life is busy, but that is good.

I am supposed to go golfing tomorrow morning with my brother and some other friends. It has been about 3 months since the last time I went golfing, and I went out to get my clubs and I can’t find them. I looked in every square inch in every building, corner, closet, attic, car trunk, under the beds, in the boats, every conceivable place I can think of at least 3 times each, and they have disappeared. The problem with going golfing once each 3 or 4 months is I can’t remember where I put them after the last time I went. I guess I will have to borrow some from the other guys I am golfing with. You know how it is when you lose something and you can’t find it, you get more and more frustrated, and then the frustration turns to irritation, and then someone says something about if I were more organized this wouldn’t happen, and then I get angry. 😤 Now I am sitting down writing this blog, and talking myself back into being cool and calm. It kind of reminds me of the story Jesus tells about a lady who loses a coin and sweeps the whole house and finally finds it, and then He declares that He has come into the world to seek And save the lost, those who are spiritually lost. To be spiritually lost means you don’t have a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. You don’t know Him, love Him, serve Him, follow Him, you aren’t guided by Him, and you won’t live with Him forever after you die. Jesus left heaven, stripped Himself of all that He was as God, and died on a cross so lost people could be found. Many refuse to come to Jesus, they hide, as it were, from being found. I wonder how frustrating that is for Jesus?

We had a church work day today to take off the old and put on the new. That is we were taking off the old siding on our gym and what we call the “Old Sanctuary”, and putting on new Hardi-plank siding along with new vinyl windows. One of the guys working spotted a nail in the parking lot, held it up and said that’s not good. He then called his wife and asked if she would bring down their 2 young boys, I guess 6 or 7 years old, to the church. When they got there he or their Mom told them that they would pay them 10 cents for every nail they picked up. They looked for about an hour and found over a hundred nails. I wonder how many flat tires would have resulted from those nails if they hadn’t been picked up. I was very impressed with the boys in that I didn’t hear any complaining from them that they had gotten pulled away from a computer game or a television program. They went right to work looking and did so very diligently until they were sure they had found all of the nails. I thought to myself, “those boys are being well parented and trained so that they grow in the character trait of diligence”.

August is a good month, in fact it is my favorite month. August 24th is when I married my wonderful wife, and this August 24th is our 50th wedding Anniversary. August 24th is also the opening of Archery Season in Oregon for both deer and elk. We are going to celebrate our 50th by leaving Monday, August 26th, for the Steen’s Mountains and camp for two weeks, and I will hunt for deer and elk with my bow. Patty really enjoys camping, and she is as excited about this celebration event as I am in spite of the fact that some skeptics think that this celebration is mostly for me. Part of what makes Patty such a wonderful wife is that if I get excited about something she automatically gets excited about it with me. Back when I bought a Yamaha 1100 V Star motorcycle in order to take a 9000 mile trip, hitting all lower 48 States, all by myself with all my camping stuff on the back of the bike, having only ridden a motorcycle for a couple of months, most thought I was crazy. Patty got as excited as I did, not because of the trip itself, I am sure she was very nervous about my safety, but simply because I was excited about it. When I abruptly quit college in order to go back to the family dairy with my Dad, and live in the basement of my folks house, Patty was excited about the new adventure along with me. When I left the security of farming with my Dad to start a dairy of my own, she was right there with me and spent as much time milking cows as I did. When I went broke on that adventure, and decided God was calling me to be a pastor, and accepted a call to a little church of about 20 people meeting in a grade school gym in Jefferson, Oregon, Patty jumped right into the challenge of being a pastors wife, and handled very positively the pressures of living in a fishbowl as it were, as the Pastor’s family. Yep, it has been a good 50 years with a wonderful wife, and that is why August is my favorite month.

By the way, we are going to have a celebration Party August 24th at Lake Charles, at 2:00 pm. It is going to be a dessert Potluck and everyone is welcome to come celebrate with us. We would feel very honored if you came.

My cell phone died about a week ago. Not everything quit, just the part that sent the other person’s voice to the speaker, I couldn’t hear the person who called me and they couldn’t hear me. I tried to fix it, but had no success. I googled it and got 10 suggestions on how to fix it, but none of them worked. I took it to the Apple store in Corvallis and they put it on a tester and announced that my phone was dead and unfixable, and that the warranty was past the cutoff date. Oh well, I would have probably spent the money on something like a fishing rod anyway.

So I finally gave in and got a new one today, and it works great. For the last week I was constantly fiddling with that phone trying to get it to work. The phone would ring, I would answer and nothing. That kept happening over and over again, and every time it did I got a little more agitated. I am not addicted to alcohol, I am not addicted to drugs, I am not addicted to porn, but I do appear to be addicted to my cell phone. Strange how we are as people, addicted to a cell phone, yes, we are really strange.

I pushed my lawn lower around in my yard this afternoon until I was pretty sure I was about to die from the heat. I went in and got a quart jar of water and ice, and here I sit getting rested up for another bout with the grass in my yard. The expression, “Hotter than hell” has been around for awhile, but nobody really knows how hot hell is. Jesus tells a story about 2 men who die, one of them ends up in hell, and in the story “he cried out and said, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus so that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool off my tongue, for I am in agony in this flame.” The devil is often portrayed as the captain of hell, but he is just one of the residents,

Revelation 20:10 And the devil who deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are also; and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.

But the Bible also says that people who are not followers of Jesus Christ will end up in this “hot place” as well.

Revelation 20:15 And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.

I was in a store this morning waiting for my cell phone to get fixed, and there was a “Harry Potter” movie playing on a big screen, and I listened in as a customer and a salesman were discussing the merits of the movie. Another customer, chimed in, “I don’t watch movies that are fantasy“. The salesman asked, “why?”, and the response was, “because they mess with your brain so that you don’t know what is real in life from what is fantasy“. That pretty much ended the discussion about Harry Potter.

Most people think that hell as a place of eternal punishment and torment in intense heat is fantasy, and as a result do very little serious thinking about their eternal destiny, and how to control the location of that destiny.

Many of those who would acknowledge the reality of heaven and hell think that they just have to wait and see if they were good enough to make it out of hell. The Bible teaches clearly that no one is good enough and no one can earn their way into God’s presence. Heaven is a free gift given to those who believe in, love, and follow Jesus as their Lord and Savior.

Well, here I go, back to the “hot place” my yard pushing a lawn mower. I am looking forward to going to the “cool place”, heaven, one of these days soon, no lawn mowing there.