There is always a gap between what I know I should be doing and what I should be in character and what I am actually doing and being in my life. It isn’t just sin that causes this gap, but a lack of accomplishment and retarded growth in me, a sense of bobbing around in the ocean in a boat with the motor off. That gap creates guilt and tension in me, especially as a pastor, a father, and a grandfather who is supposed to provide an example for others to follow. I have discovered that this tension in me can motivate me or it can bury me with a sense of hopelessness, leading to depression over my failures. I have also discovered that I am not the only one who feels this way. This sense of being overwhelmed with this gap in our lives is why many people avoid going to church; they subconsciously choose to avoid anything that would make the gap bigger.

An interesting phenomenon in life is that the more I grow, the better my eyesight becomes into who I really am in character and accomplishment. It is like climbing Mt Adams; the higher I climb, the farther I can see.

I don’t want to remove the tension this gap produces in me by false self-talk that everything is OK, that would blind me and deceive me into who I am, but I think that is what many do to cope with this guilt in themselves. I don’t want to become like those people Jesus is talking about in Revelation 3:17 Because you say, “I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing,” and you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked.

I have discovered that the number of goals I have set for myself and the length of my daily “to-do” list contribute to my sense of being overwhelmed with life and my sense of failure. Most of the time, they motivate and drive me, but occasionally, they become a big club over my head. When that happens, I rewrite my goals into a list of only four, mostly easy ones, and reduce my “to-do” list accordingly. It is like priming the pump and restarting my motor.

I also honestly examine my life, confess any sins or failures to the Lord, and ask Him for His strength and joy to fill me as I pursue Him and His will for my life. This time of confession and asking for strength is often repeated over and over until the fire in me is restarted and burning hot.

We just had a week of freezing weather, at least for our part of the world. It was so cold and icy that we canceled church this past weekend, and I canceled a steelhead fishing trip scheduled for today. Dozens of people have fallen on the ice, and I have heard of three people with broken bones because of their falls. Some have had broken water pipes, and others I know slid off the road. This is what you call a significant inconvenience.

This past summer, it got so hot that I couldn’t sleep, so I bought an air-conditioning unit to cool off our bedroom at night so I could sleep. Our lawn turned all brown, and I canceled a week of bicycle riding. Now, that was a significant inconvenience. But the weather was pretty good between the cold and the hot.

Job 37:10 From the breath of God, ice is made, and the expanse of the waters is frozen.
God made the seasons, the heat, winter, the sun and stars, the moon and night and day.

Besides the inconvenience of freezing weather and super hot days, there are tornadoes, hurricanes, severe wind storms, earthquakes, floods, and volcanic eruptions.

In all those, there is nothing we can do to change them, stop them, or postpone them. All we can do is compensate as best we can to endure them and survive them with air-conditioners and the like.

Why did God make life like this? The highs and the lows, the good and bad days, the cold days and hot days, the seasons, and the crisis events.

Did you know that the weather in the eternal Kingdom will be perfect? I am thinking about the day I will be abundantly ushered into that glorious place.

Did you know that God is in charge of our lives and the circumstances of our lives? There is a little bit we can control and influence, but not much. On the other hand, we can control 100% of our thoughts, attitudes, and how we talk to and treat others amid the freezing days.

Did you know that God is constantly training us, disciplining us, rewarding us, and shaping us into the image and character of Jesus? He controls the circumstances, but we control our thoughts, attitudes, and responses. We grow rapidly when we rejoice and cope with life positively, cooperating and loving others in the bad days. It is our choice every day. Complain or rejoice, it makes a lot of difference in the final results of who we are in our character.

Proverbs 12:4 An excellent wife is the crown of her husband.
Proverbs 18:22 He who finds a wife finds a good thing
And obtains favor from the Lord.
Proverbs 19:14 A prudent wife is from the Lord.
Proverbs 31:10 An excellent wife, who can find?
For her worth is far above jewels.

Patty and I have been married 54 years; over that time, she has been a fantastic gift from the Lord. Patty was raised as a city girl, and after we got married and moved to the farm, she jumped in and worked right alongside me, milking cows, shoveling cow manure, and feeding calves. Then, I became a Pastor of a small church meeting in a public school gym on a very small salary. Again, she adapted and did whatever was needed for us to succeed. She taught kids, helped with Youth group, cleaned the gym and bathrooms, helped me set up chairs, led worship with me, visited people in hospitals and new people to church, cooked meals and delivered them to sick people, typed bulletins and letters and ran them off on the old mimeograph machine.

And even more importantly, she was my biggest fan and encourager as I started preaching, teaching, and leading the church as a total novice. There were days when I would have quit and gone back to farming if she hadn’t encouraged me to keep running the race. She was always the perfect balance between encouraging and admonishing, giving me the carrot or the whip! As I worked very long hours studying, leading, teaching, and building buildings to try and get the church over the hump so we could survive, she never complained once about me being gone too much or me neglecting the family; she just picked up the slack.

She never complained about our small salary or felt sorry for herself for not having many things she would have liked; she managed our money well, and we got by fine.

And most importantly, she was a wonderful mother to eight kids as they came along every two years with a set of twins thrown in. We raised most of our babies before the invention of disposable diapers. Patty kept them well-fed, did homework with them, hauled them to piano lessons, and taught them well about Jesus and how to live righteously.

She is a bit slower now, more aches and pains, but she is still an amazing gift from the Lord, and I am a blessed man because of her.

Wow! I haven’t had a day like this for a while. I slept until 9:00 am this morning and then got into my sweats to help keep me warm. We had a church service in our house with some kids and grandkids, and then they all played games. I watched NFL playoff football on my iPad, sitting in my recliner with my electric blanket over me. I have been switching back and forth from football to reading, memorizing Bible verses, and writing. I also made a massive bowl of popcorn to eat while watching football. I have butter smudges all over the screen on my iPad.

This reminds me of when I was a kid on the farm. During October and November, my Dad was a maniac trying to get everything done that needed done before winter came. When the first snow came, usually around Thanksgiving, he would go into the house, take off his work boots, sit in his recliner, and watch the latest rerun of Bonanza; winter was here, time to relax.

Patty was like that when she was pregnant with all eight kids; she was very sick for the first six months, and then she was like Superwoman for the last three months. She worked non-stop all day long, trying to get everything done that needed to be done for the new baby’s arrival.

I am like that a bit now. I figure that Jesus is coming soon, or I am going to die relatively soon, and then I am going to stand before Him and give an account of my life to Him and be rewarded for what I have done with my life. I would like to have a lot more to show for my time here than I presently have, so I am trying to catch up. It is harder to do the catch-up thing when you are 75; I wish I had started my comeback sooner. I remind myself of the Dallas Cowboys today, who made a major comeback effort but still lost to the Green Bay Packers, even though they have a rookie quarterback and are the youngest team in the NFL.

If you haven’t started it yet, it is time to start your sprint to the finish line.

I remember stories my Dad used to tell about living during the Depression. There weren’t many of the conveniences that we have now. They had kerosene lanterns for light, outhouses, a hand pump outside, wood stoves for heat and cooking, and thundermugs. Dad said they had an old model A pickup, but when it got cold in the winter, they had to build a fire under it to warm the engine up enough to get it to start. He said they were super cautious not to catch the pickup on fire. The wheels had spokes so they would wrap rope around the tires for traction devices when there was snow. One of my favorite stories was when they would tie fish hooks on the end of a couple of feet of heavy string, tie the line to a stake in their field, and put a kernel of corn on the hook. Ducks would fly in at night to feed in the field, swallow the corn, and get hooked. Dad and his brother would go out in the morning, thump the ducks on the head with a stick, clean them, and have ducks for dinner.
From 1960 to 1962, the first two years on the farm after Dad retired from the Navy, our family didn’t have electricity or running water. We took baths in a galvanized tub that Dad would set up next to the wood stove on bath day, and we would heat water on the wood stove. When we finally got a TV, it was black and white, and you had to be constantly fiddling with the nobs on the front so it didn’t look fuzzy and the picture wouldn’t constantly flip. We got three stations, but someone had to climb the fir tree next to our house and turn the antennae when you changed stations. Someone would lean out the window and yell at the person in the tree when they were in the right spot.
The electricity was off for a couple of hours during this ice storm today. I was instantly reminded of how many conveniences we have and how addicted and dependent we have become to them. I have a recliner that is operated by an electric motor. I was in it fully reclined with my feet up when the electricity went off; I couldn’t get out of my chair; I was stuck, and Patty had to pull me out.
Two things we did while raising our kids to keep them from becoming overly addicted to modern conveniences; the first was we went camping a lot and roughed it, and the second is we took them all on mission trips to third-world countries to see how they lived so they would be appreciative of what we have and not take it for granted.
I often daydream about heaven, and I have wondered whether we will have heated seats in our cars.

Today, Patty and I drove up to Trout Lake, Washington, where I lived with my family on our dairy from 1965 until 1976. I graduated from High School there in 1967 and would still be there if God had not called me to be a Pastor instead of a dairy farmer. We drove up to see my sister Laura and her husband Monte because today was her birthday. While there, we also stopped and visited with my youngest brother, Jeff, and his wife, Beki, who runs a Christian Camp in Trout Lake. We had a wonderful time visiting with everyone. One of the bonuses was that they had about a foot of snow, and it was snowing very hard when we left. It was beautiful.

As we drove through the Trout Lake area both up and back, I got to reminiscing about my high school years and early married years on the dairy. It is funny how physical visuals will push buttons in our memory and cause all kinds of memories to come rushing back into our minds. My years there in Trout Lake were terrific, with a great family life, a very small school (5 in my graduating class) but super experiences and an excellent education, a great church with lots of spiritual growth, and wonderful experiences and memories of life on the farm.

I was again reminded of what a blessed life I have had. All of the wonderful experiences I had in those formative years of my life were not chosen or arranged by me; they were just part of God’s plan. I didn’t earn or deserve them; God just decided that would be my life. I don’t know why, but that was my life. So much of what and who I am today in character resulted from those years in my life 50 years ago.

It would be incredibly arrogant to say or think, “Wow, look what I have done!” I should always say and think nothing but “Thank You, Lord, I love You!”

Way back when I was 20 years old, just married for one month, a student at Seattle Pacific College, now University, I had a part-time job with a freight company. My job was to find records of items shipped that didn’t arrive at the point of destination, at least claimed by those who were supposed to have received the item. The claims were primarily bogus, so they could get a refund for what they had received but claimed that they hadn’t. This was before the days of computers, so all records were on paper in cardboard file boxes stacked in piles in the basement of the freight office. There were no stairs to this basement, just a freight elevator, raised and lowered by an electric winch on the top of the wooden box that one rode from the main floor to the basement. My job was to go through the boxes and find the records proving that the item shipped had reached its destination. I got paid $2.00 an hour, but I received a bonus for every claim that I proved was not true or at least not our company’s fault. There was one light bulb in the basement over a table, so I would carry a box that I thought had the information that I needed to the table and go through it, and if I didn’t find the evidence I needed, I would carry it back and do the same thing with another box. This era was before headlamps and LED lights, so I had a big, clunky flashlight with 5 D batteries. Did you know that D batteries have been around since 1895? I used that flashlight to read the labels on the front of the boxes and to find my way around the basement that was my office.

I would get to the freight office at 2:00 pm and work until 5:00 pm each weekday when they closed. One day, I got so intent on my detective work that I lost track of the time and went well past the 5:00 pm closing time. The workers on the main floor thought I had already left, so they all left and turned off the electricity in the building. The light in the basement went out, and the elevator no longer worked, so I was stuck in the basement of this office building on Queen Anne Hill in downtown Seattle. I hunted around the basement with my flashlight, looking for some outside entrance or way up to the main floor. I found a metal chute where mailboxes were sent down to the basement from an outside hole. The chute was held up tight to the ceiling by springs, but when it was loaded up with mail, the weight would cause it to sag to the floor, and when the mail had slid down, it would pull back to the ceiling. I stacked cardboard boxes to stand on to reach the chute, but the boxes kept collapsing under my weight. Finally, I found some heavier boxes to hold my weight, and I reached the chute and pulled it down. I had to climb up this steep, slick metal chute to the small hole to the outside and freedom. I was trying to grip the outside edges of the chute and kept badly cutting my hands on the sharp metal edges. By the time I finally managed to climb the chute and squeeze my way through the hole, I had blood all over me from my cut hands. When I climbed out, many people were walking along the sidewalk, and they looked at me, screamed, and ran away. There were a couple of guys who offered to help me; I looked like I was the victim of an axe murderer who must have chopped me a bunch of times. Patty always picked me up from work in our 1952 Volkswagen Bug, and she had been driving around and around the block because there was no parking, wondering where I was. She came around the corner and saw me shortly after these two guys started trying to help me. She saw me covered with blood, her eyes got huge, and it looked like she was trying to scream but nothing was coming out of her mouth. I jumped up, ran around, and got into the car before anybody could call an ambulance. I yelled at her, “Go, go, go!”

On the drive to our apartment, I explained what happened to Patty but never said anything to my bosses. I always kept an eye on the time after that.

Psalms 92:14- 15 They will still yield fruit in old age; They shall be full of sap and very green, to declare that the Lord is upright.

I want to keep running the race, doing ministry, and doing something with my life that matters to God, but things are changing a bit as I get older. I don’t have as much energy and drive as I once had. So, I need to make some adjustments in my major ministries. Praying is easy in a recliner and hot tub, so I am increasing my prayer time. The cool thing about praying is that I probably accomplish more per hour of activity than anything else, though I won’t know what it is until I get to heaven. Another activity I can do in my recliner is write, so I am devoting more and more time to writing. The cool thing about writing is that if it is any good, it will stick around for years after I die, and people can still read it and be blessed.

One of my goals is to have my blog readership, those who are subscribed to it, so it is automatically emailed to them each time I write it, grow to 900 people at the end of 2024. It is 815, so I need 85 more, and I will reach my goal. You can help me with this goal if when you read one of my blogs on Facebook and like it, you share it with your friends. That will help me a lot reach my goal.

I still love to teach, but it is a very draining activity if I pour myself into it the way I like. One of the things I do now with my teaching ministry is cram most of it into one day and then rest most of the next day. That has been working well for me. I teach for eight hours on Sundays and sleep until noon on Monday.

My exercise routine is still the key to my endurance and energy, so I try not to compromise. The other thing I do is keep my thoughts positive about life and my aches and pains. Negative thinking and self-pity thinking are a considerable energy and motivation drain. The Apostle John wrote the Gospel of John, the book of Revelation, 1st John, 2nd John, and 3rd John in his 90s, so if he can do it, so can I.

If you want to accomplish more with your life, you can, but you have to want to.

Two undefeated college football teams, Michigan and Washington, faced off tonight for the national championships. Michigan won the game and is the National Champ, 34 to 13. I was rooting for Washington, but it is my first time on their side this entire season. They were the Pac-12 champs, so I was hoping they would win.

Winning or losing a game of such magnitude and with such a large audience has got to be a significant emotional high or low, depending on which team a person was on. I expect that the players on the Washington team will replay at least a dozen plays over and over in their minds for the next several weeks, plays that were so close but didn’t quite have enough of something to make a difference. It will be the ultimate in “if only” thoughts.

Imagine standing before Jesus at the end of your life at the “Judgment Seat of Christ,” and He does a replay of your life. Not your entire life, just those moments where you had an opportunity to do something with your life that mattered, but you missed them or you chose not to do them because it was hard.

2 Corinthians 5:10 For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may be recompensed for his deeds in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad.

1 Corinthians 3:13-15 Each man’s work will become evident; for the day will show it because it is to be revealed with fire, and the fire itself will test the quality of each man’s work. If any man’s work which he has built on it remains, he will receive a reward. If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire.

Matthew 25:24-28 And the one also who had received the one talent came up and said, ‘Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow and gathering where you scattered no seed. And I was afraid, and went away and hid your talent in the ground. See, you have what is yours.’ But his Master answered and said to him, ‘You wicked, lazy slave.

Heaven is heaven, but I think there will be a lot of regret on the part of many people. I wonder how long it will last, that “if only” thinking.

Today was the last day of the regular season for the National Football League. There are 32 teams in the league, and at the beginning of the season, they all were aiming to be the Super Bowl Champions at the end of the season. Now, there are 14 teams remaining in the hunt to be world champions. After this next weekend there will be eight teams left, then four, then two and then the Super Bowl. All the experts are making their guesses, and millions of dollars are being bet on the outcome, but nobody knows for sure. All the players are practicing hard and giving it their best shot to be the winner, but only one team will be left when it is all over. It reminds me of my favorite Bible passage.

1 Corinthians 9:24-27 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. Everyone who competes in the games exercises self-control in all things. They then do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. Therefore I run in such a way, as not without aim; I box in such a way, as not beating the air; but I discipline my body and make it my slave, so that, after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified.

The effort those football players are giving to win a perishable prize we ought to be giving to win a prize that will last forever at the Judgment Seat of Christ, are you?