Friday through Sunday, I was on a drift trip on the John Day River, fishing for Small Mouth bass. There were four of us on the trip: my son-in-law Mike Hatfield, good fishing buddy Larry King, and my grandson Will. Will and I were in my pontoon rubber raft, and Mike and Larry were fishing in a drift boat. We fished for three days, camped on the river for two nights, and had a great time. The scenery on the John Day is fantastic, and the fishing is even better. We got off the river by 5:00 pm each evening, and after setting up camp and cooking and eating dinner, there were several hours to sit and read or look out on the river and think and pray. We didn’t have cell reception, so I didn’t write a blog while fishing. We got home from the fishing trip last night at 8:00 pm, and I hurried around and got everything ready and then left this morning for our son Seth’s place near Twin Falls, Idaho, where I will join Cliff and Kathy on our bicycle trip that they have been on for the last 25 days. Thursday morning, we will leave and have 12 days of riding back home. Last week, I went to the Oregon Heart Center and got a heart monitor I will wear on the bicycle trip. The monitor sends information back to the clinic, and if anything fishy shows up from the monitor while I am riding, they will call me and let me know. I am sure that after the trip, I will be declared healthy as a horse.

The Bible says that we have a built-in monitor for our spiritual heart, which is our mouth; what we speak out of our mouth clearly indicates what is in our heart. Warning signs of a faulty heart are complaining, slandering and gossiping about others, bitter speech, and angry and critical speech to others. It is an excellent spiritual exercise to think about how we talk and use that to evaluate the health of our inner person, the real us.