I am at my son Seth’s place near Twin Falls, Idaho, hanging out with him and his family. My brother, Cliff, and his wife, Kathy, will get here sometime today, and we will stay here tomorrow and leave Thursday morning on our bicycles. Thursday will be easy because we will be riding only 60 miles, it is a gradual downhill all day, and the forecast is for a light tailwind. That will be a nice first day for me to get broke in on this bicycle riding stuff! I wish all the rest of the days would be like that, but they won’t. Oh well, such is life!

Today and tomorrow, I will try to get ahead on my Bible reading, memorizing, book reading, and writing goals. Once I get on the trip, I will struggle to keep up with my disciplines because of tiredness at the end of the day. It will be easy to justify doing less or nothing at all. In the next two weeks, one of my goals is not to let my old, wimpy body control my thinking. We will see how I do.

Hebrews 12:1 says that we need to run the race with endurance set before us. That is an everyday challenge for all of us. Everybody’s life is different, but we all have trials, difficulties, and struggles that wear us out and make us tired, and I, for one, tend to let that psych me out and control my determination and self-control. I will keep working on that, but I wish Jesus would return soon.

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.

This morning, I went to the Oregon Heart Center and had a heart monitor put on. I will wear it for a couple of weeks, and then I will get some report on how my heart is doing. Last week, I had a couple of other tests done. So far, everything is good. My heart is doing its job well.

The word heart is often used in the Bible, talking about our inner person. We are commanded to love God with all our hearts, to trust the Lord with all our hearts, wisdom enters our hearts, we meditate in our hearts, and the Bible says that our hearts are wicked. In Psalms 139:23, David asks,” Search me, O God, and know my heart.”

There is a lot of information on how to have a healthy heart; exercise and diet are the main things. The Bible also lists several things that will give us a healthy heart, and the main thing is to read the Bible faithfully. Psalms 119:11 Your word I have treasured in my heart that I may not sin against You.

Jesus defined success in John 4:34. Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to accomplish His work.” My Dad often gave me a list of things to do on the farm while he was gone. It was easy for me to determine my level of success; that list determined it. When Dad got back, did I get everything done on the list or not? Psalms 139:16 says that God has a list for my life, “And in Your book were all written the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there was not one of them.” God doesn’t hand us the list like my Dad did; he expects us to figure it out. That process began in earnest when I decided I was going to college instead of Vietnam, and what College that would be. After that, the choices that needed to be made came quickly, some minor and others very significant. I prayed a lot, asking for guidance and wisdom. I pondered and thought long and hard about many of my choices. I got married and had eight kids, and then my choices were not just about me; and I needed to include others in the choosing process. Now, I am 75 years old, with few choices left to make. Sometimes I sit and think about the day when I stand before Jesus at the “Judgment Seat of Christ” , and see His list for my life. I wonder how successful I will have been over the years I lived here on earth as a disciple for Jesus. Even though I probably don’t have a lot of choices left to make, I do think, pray, and get counsel for them, I want to do well, and cross off more things on Jesus’s “to do list” for me.

I have identified 26 different character traits in the Bible that I need to work on so that I can become more and more like Jesus in character. James 1:4 says, “That you may become perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” That doesn’t mean sinless but grown up in character, like Jesus. As I read down the list of character traits and think about myself, some of them I am strong in, but others need some work. Another thing about this list is that some are more emphasized in the Bible; they are important to God. The character trait mentioned most when talking about Jesus is His humility. So, obviously, if I want to become like Him, I should work hard on that. Philippians 2 is the perfect description and definition of humility in the life of Jesus in the Bible. It says in Philippians 2:5, “Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus,” speaking of His humility.

Humility is all about how we treat people. A humble person puts others ahead of themselves. The most significant place we struggle is in how we talk to other people. The most effective guide for us as we strive to be humble is to elevate others, build their self-worth, and honor them. Humble people don’t think about themselves and what they want or need; they think about those around them and what they need. Sometimes, we believe that to be humble, we need to put ourselves down; no, we need to lift others. We don’t do that by making things up that aren’t true or flattering others, but we are “good finders,” we train ourselves to see the positive, the good, and the accomplishments in others, and we affirm them with our words.

When we work hard at exalting others, God will exalt us, but if we exalt ourselves, He will humble us.

Patty and I attended the High School graduation of our granddaughter Adrie tonight. We have 28 grandkids, and she is the fourth of our grandkids to graduate from High School. None of them are married yet, so no great-grandkids. I remember the day when we had no kids, and the doctor told us we wouldn’t be able to have any children. I am so thankful that the Lord chose to bless us with eight children who are all amazing disciples of Jesus.

Another category of people that I like to count in my life are my friends. Jesus elevated the meaning of that word when He called His disciples His friends.

Proverbs 17:17: A friend loves at all times.

Proverbs 18:24 there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

When I started pastoring almost 50 years ago, a well-meaning pastor told me that pastors couldn’t have friends in their church because they have to lead without partiality, and if someone were their friend, they wouldn’t be able to do that. I am glad that I didn’t follow that advice. Over the years, I have had many excellent friends in our church.

I was recently asked what the secret to lasting in ministry was, and I responded that there are five keys to running the race with endurance, and one of them was having good friends who knew how to encourage you.

I am a blessed man with a wonderful wife, eight children, six sons-in-law, two daughters-in-law, 28 grandchildren, and many good friends who would do anything for me and who I would do anything for.

I read a book several years ago titled, “The Lonely Male.” I thought when I finished it, that isn’t me. It is too bad that so many guys don’t have close friends. Many have buddies that they do things with, but most don’t have close friends.

Several years ago, a man in our church was lamenting that he had no friends. I suggested that he change that, and he said that guys just didn’t like him. I said that he could choose to be a friend to someone else instead of waiting for someone to decide to be his friend.

In the last three days, I have built a deck around half of our 20-foot diameter above-ground swimming pool. My grandson Will helped me. I enjoy projects like this, building and doing things with my grandkids, so it was a fun three days. There were a lot of 16-foot decking boards, pressure-treated 4×4 posts, 20 12-foot 2×6 joists, and an assortment of other heavy boards and stuff. At the end of today, we are just about finished with our project, and I am totally run out of gas tonight. I take a water break about every hour and a 10-minute sit-down break every two hours, and then at lunchtime, I take a twenty-minute nap. You would think I would still be relatively fresh after all those breaks. I, for sure, don’t work as hard and fast as I used to on projects like this, but I still enjoy them, maybe even more. As I sit in my recliner, exhausted, writing this, I remember my Dad saying, “Being tired at the end of a day of hard work is the best feeling in the world; it means you did something.” Doing something that matters is my goal every day. It might be a day with a grandkid, building a deck for my wife, teaching a Bible lesson, preaching a sermon, or counseling a couple with marriage problems. Jesus said that we glorify God the Father by bearing much fruit. Doing something with our life that matters is a result of choosing and planning; it seldom just happens by chance. Our jobs, our families and home life, our church involvement, and our social life can all be areas of significant accomplishment if we plan for it. Living life on purpose is the key to bearing much fruit.

My forty-day bicycle trip down through Oregon, into Northern California, Nevada, East into Utah, north into Idaho, and finally West back home didn’t turn out how I planned. I quit after four days because of fatigue, but my brother Cliff and his wife have continued. They are about halfway done, and today was their first day in Utah. I have a friend who will drive my bicycle and me to Idaho, and I will rejoin them on day 27, with 13 days left to ride. Sometime this year, I will drive the route with Patty so she can see the beauty of the mountains and rock formations in Utah. Cliff and Kathy have been having a good time and have had very little traffic through Nevada.

Part of my Bible reading schedule is reading five chapters of Psalms daily. There are 150 chapters in Psalms, so by reading five chapters daily, I read the book of Psalms every month. The book of Psalms is a collection of songs, poems, and prayers written by David, Moses, Ezra, and others. In Luke, Jesus said that much of what was written in Psalms was about Himself. I believe that much of Psalms is a prophecy of the very words, thoughts, emotions, and prayers of Jesus as He lived life.

Luke 22:44, Now He said to them, “These are My words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things which are written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.”

I have memorized about 20 chapters in Psalms and another 50 verses as well. I have picked out, memorized, and meditated on those Psalms that give me confidence in living life, verses that help me to understand the Lord more, verses that guide me in my decisions, and verses that guide my praying.

Psalms 1:2-3
But his delight is in the law of the Lord,
And in His law he meditates day and night.
He will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water,
Which yields its fruit in its season
And its leaf does not wither;
And in whatever he does, he prospers.

Psalms 3:3-6
But You, O Lord, are a shield about me,
My glory, and the One who lifts my head.
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 of people
Who have set themselves against me round about.

Psalms 4:7-8
You have put gladness in my heart,
More than when their grain and new wine abound.
In peace I will both lie down and sleep,
For You alone, O Lord, make me to dwell in safety.

Psalms 5:1-3
Give ear to my words, O Lord,
Consider my groaning.
Heed the sound of my cry for help, my King and my God,
For to You I pray.
In the morning, O Lord, You will hear my voice;
In the morning I will order my prayer to You and eagerly watch.

Psalms 8:3-5
When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which You have ordained;
What is man that You take thought of him,
And the son of man that You care for him?
Yet You have made him a little lower than God,
And You crown him with glory and majesty!

A discipline I started several years ago was writing my prayers to God. I got frustrated with myself because I struggled so much during my prayer times with my mind wandering. I went to a seminar where the speaker started by saying, “I struggled so much for years with my mind wandering when I prayed, and then I discovered the cure.” He had my instant attention. He said he wrote out his prayers, and his mind didn’t wander. I have been writing mine ever since that seminar. I have a prayer journal, and I write for about 30 minutes. Then, I randomly read past prayers for 30 minutes. It is a beautiful time with the Lord. I highly recommend this, not only for praying but also for personal interaction, self-examination, and confession of sin. I consider this hour of my day the most important for connecting with God and hearing His voice and promptings in my life.