I found out today that my good friend Brad Ils and his wife Trina lost their youngest daughter yesterday. Aleeya was 16 years old and had a blood clot land in her lungs, and she died instantly while she and Brad were shopping together at Target. Brad pastors one of our daughter churches, Turning Point Church, that meets in Turner.

Unexpected deaths are hard, especially if it is a 16-year-old daughter. Life is often a puzzle as we try to figure out why God does certain things a certain way, and this kind of event is probably one of the most difficult to make sense of. We all would like the “why” question answered for a lot of things, but God doesn’t usually come through on that question. Job asked “why” a dozen times and he never got an answer. Someone asked me once if I thought God would give us answers once we were in heaven. I think that when we get to heaven, we will know all the answers, and they will make perfect sense and will demonstrate both God’s wisdom and His love.

Brad and Trina have a great advantage over many other people who go through this kind of trial because they have a strong faith and a close relationship with the Lord. They know that Aleeya is in heaven with Jesus experiencing incomprehensible joy because she loved the Lord and was in His family. We don’t mourn because Aleeya somehow got a bum rap and missed out on so much of life. There is nothing she would have done in this life that comes close to what she is experiencing and doing now. We mourn because of our own loss of someone we loved and will miss. But we will see her again very soon by God’s standard of time. That is why the Bible says we mourn, but not like the world does because they have no hope.

I fell Sunday morning going down the steps off of our back porch at 2:00 am headed out to rescue Patty’s chickens from a coon or whatever was making them sqwack like crazy. As a result, I bruised my tailbone and stayed in bed most of the day, missing church and three teaching responsibilities that I had. I slept an extra 10 hours yesterday recovering from my adventure. As a result of the extra rest I am feeling much better today, and Patty is bossing me around, giving me “low impact, ” as she calls them, jobs to do. I noticed several other things about the extra sleep and rest. I have about a dozen little growths on my forehead, like most older people do, and have them burned off with liquid nitrogen periodically. Well, this morning they are all gone, at least significantly reduced in size. I don’t know for sure that it was all the extra sleep that was the cause, but seems reasonable to conclude that it was. The other very noticeable thing was my mood, I was feeling good emotionally this morning and very positive and energetic. I work at staying positive in my thinking, but sometimes I just feel sort of flat.

I get in the habit of leaving my one hour of exercise, my Bible reading and memory work, my prayer time, my book reading, and my blog writing until the evening and often it is midnight or 1:00 am before I get everything done and go to bed. I get up at 5:00 am five mornings a week, and if I go fishing on one of the other two mornings I get up at 4:00 am. As an ex dairy farmer I have done that most of my life, and have functioned fine, but I think I need to change my habits some as an older man now. I was reviewing my goals yesterday and added that I will be in bed by 10:00 am at least five nights a week. I have come to this conclusion before and have made goals to improve in this area, but I am determined to make it happen now. The problem is that I have so many things on my “todo list” that I want to get one more crossed off, just one more, than it ends up being two. . . I exercise religiously an hour every day for my health, and I am always dieting working at keeping my weight in check and eliminating most sugar from my diet, again for my health. I am not trying to live forever, just to serve the Lord well with the time I have left, so it seems reasonable that I can motivate myself to get adequate sleep and rest in order to stay healthy and energetic.

Last night at about 2:00 am, I heard Patty’s chickens squawking, so I went out to chase off whatever was harassing them, and I fell going down the steps from our back deck and landed on my tailbone. It was just awkwardness on my part; the steps weren’t wet or icy; I just stepped wrong and lost my balance. This morning when I got up to go to 7:00 am prayer at JBC for our services, I was in extreme pain and couldn’t walk or stand, so I went back to bed. I called the church and told them I couldn’t teach my two leadership classes or my Prophecy Classes. Patty got up and got me five ibuprofen pills, helped me to the bathroom, and now I am on my way to full recovery. I think I bruised my tailbone pretty good, but I don’t think there is any serious damage done. I am getting waited on and pampered, and Roscoe is lying on the bed with me, commiserating with me as he licks my face.

It just goes to show you the unpredictableness of life, going out to rescue chickens and end up stuck in bed. That wasn’t my plan, but now I have a new plan. Get well rested up, do a bunch of extra memorizing of Bible verses, write a couple of different blogs on my Ipad to get ahead on that, and get my Wednesday night service sermon done. I am taking it by faith that I will be up to teaching on Wednesday night. My main concern is that I am scheduled to go steelhead fishing on Friday on the Siletz river, and I for sure don’t want to miss that.

The main thing that I try to remember now and practice is to don’t do the “shoulda, if only, why me, poor me, ” self-talk. Instead, “thank You Lord that I still get to do something that matters, even if it is from the bed, thank You for the needed rest, thank You for my caring family and dog, and thank You for my many friends who are praying for me.”

Wow, this so much fun I think I will do it again tomorrow😀!

Dear Jesus,

I confess to You that I am a sinner, and I have broken many of Your laws.

I admit that I don’t deserve Heaven and never will.

I accept Your free gift of eternal life that You are offering to me.

I believe that You, Jesus are God, equal with the Father.

I believe that you emptied Yourself of all that You were as God, and that You left Heaven, and became just exactly like me in every way.

I believe that You never sinned, not even a little one, not even in thought or attitude.

I believe that You were nailed to a cross, and while You hung there God the Father took all of my sins, past, present and future and put them on You, and looked at You as if you actually committed the sins that I committed, and punished You, for my sins.

I believe that You physically died on that cross, that You were buried, and that three days later You rose from the dead, and that You are alive today.

I commit my life to You. You have purchased me with Your blood, I belong to You.

I declare You to be Lord of my life.

I will obey You and do whatever You ask and I will follow You and serve You all the days of my life.

I know that I will fail many times as Your disciple. Thank you for Your continual forgiveness of me. I will not take advantage of Your forgiveness, mercy, and grace, to live the way I want, but I will accept Your forgiveness and live my life free from the fear of failing.

I admit that I can’t live for You and follow You in my strength, but I do believe that the Holy Spirit now lives in me and gives me the power to grow and please You with my life.

Proverbs 24:3-4 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.

I use that phrase a lot when talking about parenting. That ought to be our goal in our parenting, to raise and train champions. A champion is someone who consistently wins at almost everything they put their hand to because they want to win. Wanting to win is not driven by a desire to beat someone else but to be the best they can be. A champion does what needs to be done when they feel like it, and when they don’t feel like it because it needs to be done. A champion knows that the key to winning is hard work, lots of it, and they have learned to enjoy the feeling of being exhausted at the end of a hard day. A champion gets bored quickly with the status quo, with things being the same, with easy, with comfortable, they are always raising the bar, adding some more weight to the bar, writing more challenging goals. A champion is humble. They know that there is no such thing as a self-made champion, we all need help, need encouragement, need counsel, need a kick in the butt, and they are always looking for it, and when they get it, they say thank you. A champion has eliminated the phrase, “it’s hard” from their vocabulary; they don’t complain, gripe, fuss, or grumble; they just don’t.

No one is born a champion, they are trained into being a champion by wise parents. I am teaching a class on how to raise champions starting April 11th, Sunday mornings, at 10:15 till 11:15 am at JBC in the Discipleship Center upstairs in room 202.

Proverbs 23:7 says, “as a man thinks in his heart, so is he, ” which means what you think about predominately is what you will become or already are. In reverse, choose to think and meditate on being the kind of person you want to become and you will meditate and envision yourself into that kind of person. 2 Corinthians 10:5 says that we are to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. The most important discipline in life is taking captive every thought and choosing to think thoughts that are positive, wholesome, holy, thoughts about activities and ways of acting and talking that are pleasing to Christ. Because our mind is such an independent thing inside us, we have to be continually listening to what our mind is thinking; this is such a fundamental part of growing mature. It is worth reminding ourselves constantly to stay on top of this discipline.

It is easy to begin thinking critical, judgmental thoughts about others, but it so important not to let your mind go there. It may be true the thoughts you are having about others, but those thoughts don’t change them, and they just make you an unhappy person.

Lots of parents quote this verse as a guarantee that their kids will eventually turn around and come back to the Lord. The problem with many is that they think “train” means “teach” or “expose.” so if they faithfully take them to church, Sunday School, Vacation Bible School and “expose” them to the Bible or they teach them the stories in the Bible at home that they have met their part of the deal. The problem is the word is train, a very proactive word that means much more than give information to. Let’s pretend that God has said that if you want your kids to be very successful in life and to go to heaven when they die that they must play Beethoven’s No. 29 B flat major without a mistake. As a parent, what would you do? You would teach and then they would practice, you would teach and they would practice, you would teach and they would practice, and when they got ahead of you, you would find someone else to teach and continue the cycle. That is called training, and that is what Proverbs 22:6 says to do “Train.” Training assumes a plan or strategy, it assumes practice and evaluation, it assumes a goal or target. Kids that hit 18 years of age who have not been we’ll trained, well parented have a significant disadvantage in life.

Most parents assume that because they are parents, they somehow have the knowledge and wisdom to be good parents. They may be good parents, loving parents, but they probably aren’t good trainers, good coaches. What parents need to do is get trained themselves on how to do Proverbs 22:6 effectively. Most parents don’t get training because of the time required, and they won’t know that they needed to get training until it is too late for their kid.

When our first child was born Patty, and I went to several seminars a year on parenting. We bought dozens of books on parenting and read and discussed them. We drove hundreds of miles to get personal counseling on parenting from a Dad of 12 of the best behaved, most disciplined, and amazingly talented family of kids I had ever seen. He gave us 15 minutes a week for three months, and we drove into Portland, a 90-minute drive each week to get it.

I am going to teach a class at JBC on “training our kids” on Sunday mornings at 10:15 am until 11:15 am starting April 11th until June 6th.

Whenever I write about a mess up that I have done or even a sin I have committed, I get more than expected responses, positive responses; it is almost like people enjoy my mistakes😁. It leads me to conclude that the cool dude, I’ve got my act together, perfect leader type is highly overrated, which is a good thing for me. So why do people seem to enjoy a leader’s mistakes? I don’t think it is merely the fallibility of a leader that warms people’s hearts, but it is how he responds to them to maintain his dignity without being a “holier than thou” person. Everybody messes up, sins, and does foolish things regularly. Because our self-worth and dignity are so important to us, we do everything we can to protect them. Most naturally assume that the way to do that is to cover up, excuse, blame others, ignore, lie, or exaggerate our strengths. We tend to do all of the above subconsciously. As can be seen in the political world, leaders who do that are not respected have few admirers, and they aren’t really leaders at all. One of the lessons I have learned is that my mess-ups are usually funny if I don’t take myself too seriously and don’t go through the list of methods to protect myself and my supposed reputation. I don’t enjoy seeing someone blow it or fail at something, but I do enjoy seeing someone blow it big time when he comes out the other side unscathed, with maybe even a more positive image than before. The key for me is to find every sin, even the little itty bitty ones, and character flaws that are in me, hand them all over to God and thank Him for dying for me and paying the penalty for those sins.

Tonight I thought and I wrote, I thought and I wrote, as I wrote the blog for tonight. It was slow going, my brain wasn’t cooperating and I couldn’t seem to get into the mood. After about two hours I was finally close to being done and I was thinking that it was going to be pretty good. I was thinking about how to bring it to a close and while thinking I fell asleep. I only slept for about 5 minutes, but during that five minutes my hand fell on the screen of my Ipad and it erased everything I had just written. Usually, my Ipad saves everything I write, but somehow during this eraser event, I convinced my Ipad not to keep anything. I tried to rewrite it from memory, but it seemed like it had gotten erased from my memory like my Ipad. I finally gave up, and now you are stuck reading this account of why you are stuck with such a pathetic effort at writing.

Have you ever had an event or something that you did, and at the conclusion, the best description you can come up with is, “now that was a complete waste of time!” I call them “Efforts in futility!” Because I have already spent two hours working on this blog, I am not inclined to spend too much more time on it so, sorry this is what you get.

I have a goal of consistently increasing the number of people who subscribe to my blog, and that will happen if the quality is good enough that those who are subscribed read the blog through to the end each day and that many pass it on to others who choose to subscribe to my blog after reading it.

I don’t think I will get very many people who “share” this blog with others. Oh well, tomorrow will be better, I hope so anyway.

My driving desire is to win. It consumes me, and I think about it all the time. God created me to be a winner, and the Bible commands me to be a winner, you too.

1 Corinthians 9:24 Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win.

Winning means I beat someone at something. My adversary is the devil, my own sinful nature, and the world around me. Seven times in the book of Revelation, it mentions the person who “overcomes, ” which means to be a conqueror, a winner, and after every reference to overcoming a reward is cited. One of those references is in Revelation 3:5;

He who overcomes will thus be clothed in white garments; and I will not erase his name from the book of life, and I will confess his name before My Father and before His angels.

1 Peter 5:8 Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.

God created the devil to do precisely what he is doing. He knew we wouldn’t grow much in this life without an adversary so He created one for us. As we strive to win, to conquer, to overcome, as we go to war every day we get stronger, wiser, and we grow in character or we lose. Losing can be fatal and most of often is eternal in consequence.

Satan, the devil, our adversary, makes life hard, like he did with Job. Every day we get out of bed there is an additional roadblock, a problem, a crisis, a trial, and we can let it beat us, or we can conquer it, and stomp the devil under our feet.

COVID, I am sure, is a satan-caused and controlled phenomenon that he uses to defeat people, cause fear, cause strife and disunity, and turn people into losers. There will be something else as difficult if not more so coming up one of these days, and probably sooner than later.

A winner, an overcomer, doesn’t ask God to make life easier; he asks Him for strength and wisdom. Warfare is fun as long as you are winning.

The first sign that you are losing is when you complain and grumble and feel sorry for yourself.