I like to tell stories; most people do. I like to tell stories when I teach and preach. One of the observations that we have all made is that some people are good storytellers, and others are not. Because I want to be a good storyteller, I have bought and read many books on the art and skill of telling stories. One of the books recommended buying books of short stories that were well written and read a lot of them. I have purchased every book Patrick McManus wrote and read each one several times. They are the best, and I never tire of reading them.

In one of my “public speaking” books, the author recounted that at a clinic put on to train people to tell stories well, the audience of twelve was wired up to measure their brain impulses as one of them told a story. It was observed that with a few of the storytellers, the brains of the audience synchronized with the storytellers’ brains until they were all simultaneously experiencing the same feelings of stress, joy, and humor as if they were all telling the story simultaneously.

As I read the book mentioned above, I thought of all the many skills there are in life to learn. Some are mechanical and have to do with making or fixing things. But many are relational and have to do with growing relationships with other people and being able to help them through teaching, counseling, and regular conversations.

Learning new skills in life has been one of my goals over the years in my life, and I have majored in mechanical skills because up until a few years ago, I didn’t realize that connecting with people was even a skill to be learned; I thought it was just a gift or part of your temperament that you were born with.

What drives people to learn and grow in any skill is the desire to succeed in life and the realization that our skill set is essential in our life’s accomplishments. Most people have learned new skills passively; that is, they have learned them because of the demands life has put on them, such as pressures, problems, pain, and failures.

Relational skills are part of what Proverbs is talking about when it says to seek wisdom diligently. Those who seek it like gold, silver, or precious jewels will find it.

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Proverbs 10:24 the desire of the righteous will be granted.
Psalms 145:19 He will fulfill the desire of those who fear Him;
Psalms 37:4 Delight yourself in the Lord, And He will give you the desires of your heart.
The main motto of my life over the last 50 years in knowing what God’s will is for my life is to get close to Him and follow my dreams. It has worked pretty well as I look backward in my life. The basic premise is that God will put His will for my life in my heart when I seek Him, and I will sense His will in the form of desires and dreams. I believe that as long as I am in the center of His will, I can’t fail. Accomplishing those desires and dreams won’t be easy; they will require diligence, wisdom, and endurance. However, perseverance comes from the confidence that what I am striving for is God’s will; therefore, success is guaranteed sooner or later.

I have been feeling a bit wimpy and lazy lately because I don’t have the usual number of ideas, dreams, and goals swirling around in my mind. But I am getting more comfortable with the idea that just as I believed that the constant push towards bigger and more was from God, I can now feel confident that the desire for fewer accomplishments and more leisure is also from Him.

Today, I finished my bicycle remodeling project of putting a Rohloff hub on my bike. It is a transmission, like a car transmission, with gears of various sizes inside the bike’s rear hub. It has 14 gears that are shifted by a shifter on the handlebars. It replaces the nine sprockets on the back wheel of the bike and three sprockets on the bike’s crank that I had previously, which almost all bicycles have. It was a highly complex process of replacing the old hub with the new one, replacing all the spokes, and getting them laced correctly and tuned so the wheel went around in a true circle. I made many mistakes and had to redo what I had done dozens of times until I finally got everything right. I celebrated my accomplishment by going on a twenty-mile ride. The weather was gorgeous, and the bike worked flawlessly. It shifted from the lowest gear to the highest and back as smooth as silk; riding such a fine-shifting bicycle was a joy.

Even though the bicycle worked flawlessly, I had not ridden 20 miles on a bike for over eight months, and when I got back to the house, I was near death, or at least felt like it. On May 20th, I am leaving on a 2,500-mile bicycle trip, averaging over 60 miles daily for 40 days.

We all face situations in which we fear failing when the reality is stacked against the challenge or goal we are facing. What do we do then? Many people quit rather than risk the possibility of not succeeding. I wasn’t thinking so much at the end of the ride today about the possibility of being unable to do it, but more about the pain I will feel at the end of each day on the trip. When I ride into our designated camping spot, I have to set up my tent, blow up my pad, roll out my sleeping bag, cook dinner on a little propane stove, and sleep on the ground. The next morning, I will need to do it all in reverse and do it for 40 days.

When I got home today, the question that came to mind was, “Do I really want to do this?” When I thought, “Yeah, I think I do,” the next question was even more perplexing, “Why?” It wasn’t that many years ago that the question, “Do I really want to do this?” It wouldn’t have entered my mind. The excitement of the challenge would have totally erased all such questions from my thinking. Not so much now.

I have two different apps on my iPad and my computer that are supposed to catch all my spelling and grammatical mistakes and make suggestions on clarity. It will underline all the things that need changing in red. Usually, when I finish a 400-word blog, the entire thing is underlined, and some of it is underlined twice.

Last night, for some reason, neither one of the apps was working, so I decided to go ahead and write my blog without it. I made it extra short and read over it ten times to find any mistakes or corrections I needed to make. Today, I got emails and text messages from five different people pointing out mistakes I had made in my blog. Man, I knew I should have skipped writing my blog last night until my apps were working again.

The problem with the suggestions is that I couldn’t go back and fix the mistakes; the blog was already out. I know those who sent the suggestions were thinking that now I wouldn’t make the same mistake again, but I have made the same error dozens of times, being corrected after each one. It is funny how my brain works or doesn’t work. I read an average of 100 pages in good books weekly, listen to hours of podcasts and sermons by excellent speakers, and receive more coaching on spelling and grammar than any ten people combined. However, I still border on being illiterate regarding spelling and grammar. I am going to claim it as a learning disability! I have memorized almost 1000 Bible verses well, but it takes me ten times longer to memorize the words to a song than to memorize the same number of words in a Bible passage.

If I didn’t have my Apps, I would recruit some people who are good at what I am bad at to proofread everything I wrote before I published or sent it out via email.

The Bible talks about the church being made up of people who are different in giftedness, temperament, passion, maturity, and mental ability. That difference was caused by God by design so that we would be interdependent, which means we need one another to succeed. The problem is that it takes humility to admit that we need other people to be complete and succeed. Many people never accomplish, grow, or experience much joy because of their pride. That is too bad; getting notes from people is fun because I know they want me to succeed.

I got a phone call today that an old Pastor friend died. I think that is five Pastor friends who have died since January 1st. It makes a person think about the shortness of life. I am feeling good, sleeping good, I road my stationary bike for an hour tonight maintaining a heart beat of 130 beats a minute, with no shortness of breath. Right now I feel like I could live to be 100, that is 25 more years, yikes’ I better write some more goals. I know that things change quickly when you get to be 75, so I will enjoy this present relatively good health while it lasts.

Up until recently I have been absessed with accomplishing a lot with my life that matters, that made a difference, that would show up at the Judgment Seat of Christ when I got there. Now, I have become much more focused on growing my character to be as much like Jesus as I possibly can before I step into eternity. I think about my day carefully each night confessing all known sins and making strong commitments to conquer them. I know I have many blind spots, character flaws that I can’t see, and I want to fix them.

psalms 90:12 says, “Teach us to number our days, Lord, so that we might present to You with a heart of wisdom.”

I was seventeen when I went to a Thanksgiving vacation Youth retreat That our Youth group went on. It was on the Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving in 1965. We drove from Trout Lake, Washington, to Yakima, Washington, and listened to a retired missionary speak to us five times in two days. All five sermons were about the importance of reading the Bible. One of his sermons was on the importance of volume in reading. He said when you read a lot of the Bible from all over the Bible that, you become Bible-minded; that is, you understand the doctrines in the Bible, the history of God’s working in the world, the trends and shifts in God’s working with people, how things fit together in God’s plan for the ages, and the overriding goals of God for His people. ‘He said you can read the Bible through in a year by reading ten minutes a day, and he said that reading thirty minutes a day will increase the benefit of reading God’s Word ten times. I don’t know where he got his information, but I believed his statement was true. He gave a suggested Bible reading plan of reading two chapters in the Old Testament, five chapters in Psalms, one chapter in Proverbs, two chapters in the Gospels, Acts, and Revelation, and two chapters in the Epistles for a total of twelve chapters each day. I started that Bible reading plan in 1965, 58 years ago, and have continued it ever since. If you do the math, that is about 250,000 chapters of Bible reading over the last 58 years. I have read the Old Testament 58 times, the book of Psalms 720 times, Proverbs 720 times, the Gospels, Acts, and Revelations 240 times, and the Epistles, Romans through Jude 500 times each.

I don’t know if any other high school kids at that retreat were as impacted by the speaker as I was, but he certainly made a difference in my life. I don’t know the exact difference the Bible reading habit I picked up from him made in my life, ministry, or preaching and teaching ministry over the last 60 years, but I would guess that it is substantial. I think that many of the rewards from Jesus at the “Judgment Seat of Christ” that would come to me will go to this retired missionary. I don’t remember his name, but he was a great tool for God in my life.

I have said it many times before, but who I am today and what I have accomplished with my life is primarily the result of a lot of faithful people who spoke into my life, who motivated me, shaped me, and taught me. I hope that I am passing that on to others in my life.

The hardest thing I do is memorize Bible verses. I work on my memory verses for 45 minutes every night before bed. In the morning, my mind is much stronger, and I memorize faster, but if I do my memorizing at night, I think about the verses all night long, and they seem to be much more permanently impressed on my mind. I can talk myself out of memorizing easily because it takes so much mental energy and effort. Sometimes, my head will ache after 45 minutes of intense memorizing, not in a “headache” sort of way, but in a fatigued kind of way.

I persevere in memorizing Bible verses because I believe that the Bible is the Word of God, the Mind of Christ and that the Bible is living and supernatural. I believe that memorizing God’s Word changes me from the inside out. I know that it helps me a great deal to control my thinking.

Memorizing Scripture takes great self-control, and I grow in self-control as I continue to make memorizing the Bible a high priority in my life.

When they get to be my age, 75, many people will struggle with memory or thinking issues. Spending 45 minutes every day memorizing Bible verses is the best exercise we can do for our brain to keep it strong.

Pride is subtle; it is hard to see it in our own life. Those close to us often see it as a growing problem before we do, but one problem with those with pride is that they resist any correction in their life. It doesn’t take much pride in us before we become totally unusable by God. Pride damages all of our relationships. Certain sins and character flaws become an open door for demons to become attached to us, and then the pride problem accelerates with their temptations to become even more prideful.

God will attempt to correct us and show us our pride problem by bringing us into humbling circumstances as He did with Nebachanesser. Sometimes we get it, but sometimes we don’t.

I fear becoming prideful and messing up the ministry God has given me, so I pray daily for God to do whatever He needs to do to keep me humble. I think about my reactions to people and situations, looking seriously for pride in my life. I pray daily, asking God to “not let pride step on my neck.”

Demons are very real; we just can’t see them, so we forget about them. They are constantly working at making our lives miserable, trying to get us to sin, working at making us proud, self-centered, and unloving. They talk to us, and we hear them in our thoughts. As we work at controlling our bitter, angry, jealous, immoral, covetous, and selfish thoughts, we need to remember what the source of most of those thoughts is and ask God for help. There are many prayers in the Psalms asking for protection against our enemies; those are spiritual warfare Psalms; they are also prayers Jesus prayed in His battle against satan and his demons. It would be a good idea to memorize a number of them. Here is one of the passages that I have memorized and meditate on often.

Psalms 3:1-7 O Lord, how my adversaries have increased! But You, O Lord, are a shield about me. I was crying to the Lord with my voice, and He answered me from His holy mountain. I lay down and slept; I awoke, for the Lord sustains me. I will not be afraid of ten thousands who have set themselves against me round about. Arise, O Lord; save me, O my God! For You have smitten all my enemies on the cheek; You have shattered the teeth of the wicked.

Church is a team sport. I love you; you love me. I pray for you; you pray for me. I serve you; you serve me. I encourage you; you encourage me. I forgive you; you forgive me. And on the list goes. There is an amazing joy in being part of a loving community that looks out for each other. I have observed that those who are critical of the church are selfish, self-centered people who want their needs met but don’t think much about others around them.” It is all about me” is their motto.
Work hard to become part of a group that follows this principle.
Philippians 2:3-4 “Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others.”
It may be a church or a small group in a church, a prayer group, a men’s group, or whatever, but find such a community and don’t mess it up by being self-centered. Life is so good when it is part of a loving family of believers. Don’t rest until you find one. For me, Jefferson Baptist Church is the “I love you” church, that brings great joy into my life.