About 23 years ago, my good friend and fishing partner and I went to the Portland Boat Show. While we were there, he bought a new jet sled. We decided to break it in the next week on a sturgeon fishing trip. We usually fished on the Colombia River below Bonneville Dam, but we decided to go on the Willamette River in Portland. We invited two other friends and launched from a boat ramp under the St John’s Bridge. About an hour after launching, a Coast Guard boat approached us, and I passed that information on to my friend. He said, “Oh, that is because I don’t have my hull numbers on the boat, they haven’t come in the mail yet; I have my temporary registration, though. Shortly after that, a Coast Guard guy on the boat coming toward us called to us with a bullhorn. He yelled, “Would everyone on the boat please come to the back with your hands up in the air.” I said, “Those guys take no hull numbers on a boat pretty seriously!” The Coast Guard boat came alongside ours, and four guys with guns came on board and ordered us to get on our knees, put our hands behind our heads, and cross our ankles. It isn’t easy to cross your ankles while on your knees; try it, and I couldn’t, so I asked one of the Coast Guard guys to help me. They towed us into the Coast Guard station and kept us in a room in the station while they inspected the boat on the inside and under the boat with divers.

The problem was that we were about a year removed from 9/11 and a week before the Portland Rose Festival, and they had brought in some Navy ships for the festival. We had never fished in this area and had a nice new fish finder on the boat, so we were cruising along slowly, back and forth, looking for fish. In the process, we got closer to the navy ships than we were supposed to, and they thought we were terrorists. Channel 12 news was there filming us, and we were on the news that night as a terrorist scare.

It was some time before they told us what this was all about. The guns, the hands on our heads, the solemn looks of the Coast Guard guys, the divers, and being kept in a room with a guard all made me nervous. So, I prayed and asked God for peace, joy, and strength. Shortly after that, we were released with an explanation for our arrest. I said to the main guy in charge, “Do we look like terrorists?” He said, “No, you look like four dumb fishermen, but we must be careful.” I said to one of the Coast Guard guys, I know you know where the best place to fish is, and you have used up three hours of our fishing time; how about telling us where to fish. He did, and we caught a bunch of sturgeon that day. After we got out and started fishing, talking among ourselves about what had just happened to us, we decided that they knew from the start that we were just fishing but decided to use us as a training session. Oh, well, it was an adventure, we caught fish, and I was reminded that events like this can be a fun adventure if we pray and ask God for His peace, joy, and strength.

One of my goals at 76 years of age is to live my life with purpose; my primary purpose is to serve God and influence people toward loving Him and living for Him through my actions and spoken and written words. I also want to live my life with balance. Besides my ministry, I want to spend as much time with my family as possible, enjoying their fellowship. Besides my family, I also have many terrific friends with whom I enjoy spending time with in a variety of ways. I also want to pursue activities that give me great joy, such as fishing, hunting, bicycling, traveling, building, and dozens of other minor things. And then I need to rest and relax doing nothing. Pursuing all those things with balance is not easy, but it is possible with diligent planning and record-keeping. I have found that the more balanced my life is, the happier and more energetic I am.

We had a milk/cream separator made by Delaval when I was a kid. At that time, we milked our cows by hand and separated the milk from the cream. We sold the cream to the creamery and fed the skim milk to the pigs. We would pour the milk into the top of the separator, and a bunch of blades spun inside to separate the lighter cream from the heavier milk. The milk would come out, one spout and the cream out of the other, with a bucket under each spout to catch the milk and cream. We put the cream in a big cream can and set it in the creek until we took it to the creamery. The separator had a handle on the side that someone would crank to spin the blades on the inside. The handle had to be spun at just the right speed. If it went too fast, milk would be mixed in with the cream, and if it went too slow, just the opposite. Either way was bad. The speed was one revolution per second. Our separator had a little bell that dinged every time the crank hit the bottom of the cycle. We had a big clock on the wall with a second hand, and the goal was to hear the bell ding every time the second hand jerked to the next number.

The goal with the separator was the perfect speed; that is my goal with my life. I don’t want to get milk mixed in with the cream, that would be bad.

Shortly after I started College as a Freshman, a friend loaned me the book, “ The Cost of Discipleship,” by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He said, “You have got to read this book; it is amazing!” with that kind of encouragement, I read it through in a couple of days. I can identify about a dozen events in my life that I call “defining moments,” events that changed the course and direction of my life. Reading the “Cost of Discipleship” was one of those twelve. I was a young 18-year-old boy, just off the farm, from a very small community with only 30 kids in the High School I attended. I had no clue what I was going to do with my life; I was just, sort of feeling my way along, waiting for God to direct me. After reading the book, I still didn’t know what I was going to do, but I did know one thing: I wasn’t going to settle for mediocrity; I was going to take the narrow and hard way every time there was a fork in the road of my life.

Patty and I went to the movie, “ Bonhoeffer,” tonight. It was an incredible movie about the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He, indeed, was a man who made tough choices as a Pastor in Germany during the days of Hitler. He was executed by Hitler just weeks before World War II ended. He could have easily saved his life on numerous occasions, but his courage and commitment kept him from the easy way. I was nervous about going tonight for fear that my memory of him from the book would be damaged, but it wasn’t at all.

I love to read stories about heroes who lived for a cause and changed history because of it. I also enjoy going to movies about great people who did extraordinary things with their lives.

I have taught “Men’s Leadership Class” for 45 years, and several years ago, I also added a separate class for ladies. In the men’s class, one of my lessons is about how to meet the seven basic needs of your wife. I always enjoy teaching that particular class and get a good response from the guys in the class. Last week, I got a message from a guy who went through Leadership Class five years ago and moved because of a job change. He sent me a note to thank me for that class. He was 22 years old and single when he took the class, but he married about a year after moving. He said that his marriage was beautiful, and he was sure that the reason was because he went back and reread the notes from the class every month after he got married. He also said that many of his friends at his church and work associates would complain about their wives and bad marriages, and he would share the information that he had down pat because he put it into practice in his marriage. He said that God had given him a wonderful ministry of helping other married men know how to really love their wives. He related that no one where he lived knew me, so he just shared what he was doing without mentioning my name and wondered if that was right. I responded and assured him that he had way more clout with his friends than I did and that he was the one who validated the information by making it work in his marriage. I also told him that I had heard the information at a seminar shortly after I was married over 50 years ago and that I had put it into practice in my marriage, so it really wasn’t mine. I also thanked him for the note of appreciation and that he had made my day.

I got to thinking about the number of married guys who have taken the leadership class over the years, and hoped it had been as helpful to them as it had been to my friend who wrote me.

I am memorizing the book of 1st John in the New Testament. There are five chapters with 105 verses. My goal is to memorize three verses each week and to get it done in eight months. It is a difficult book to memorize. The main theme of the book is “don’t sin.” At the very beginning John says, “I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin.” But the only commandment he mentions is love one another and the only sin he mentions is hating others, and he mentions them often. John says, “if you hate your brother you are walking in the darkness and you don’t know where you are going because the darkness has blinded your eyes.” John says there are only two commandments, believe in Jesus and love one another. Pretty simple list of commandments. John says that we can love others because He first loved us. The more we think about, and meditate on how much He loved us, the easier it is to love others. Those who hate others have not really comprehended how much Jesus loves them. 

The most basic ingredient in loving others is to forgive them of anything just as God has forgiven us. To love others is to honor them, to be nice to them. To love others is to help them when they need help, to meet needs that we can meet. We know what it means to love another person, we don’’t really need to be taught, but often bitterness and resentment has blinded our eyes, and we are walking in the darkness just like John says. 

In the movie, “Chariots of Fire,” Eric Little makes the comment to his sister, “I sense His pleasure.” I remember sitting in the theater having that line grab my heart. I want to sense His pleasure in me when I do something that pleases Him, I thought. What a great way to know His will, sensing His pleasure when I did His will. That is the ambition of my life now, to do those things that please Him. I believe that as I work at sensing His pleasure I will get better and better at it, my heart will become sensitive to his pleasure in me. I also believe that when I please Him with my actions, choices and words that I will feel His joy in my heart. I will feel happy because He feels happy in me. 

1 John 3:22 and whatever we ask we receive from Him, because we keep His commandments and do the things that are pleasing in His sight.

Hebrews 11:5 By faith Enoch was taken up so that he would not see death; and he was not found because God took him up; for he obtained the witness that before his being taken up he was pleasing to God.

John 8:29 for I always do the things that are pleasing to Him.”

2 Corinthians 5:9 Therefore we also have as our ambition, whether at home or absent, to be pleasing to Him.

My son-in-law from Alaska went elk hunting yesterday and shot a 5×5 bull elk. He carried a quarter back to the pick-up in the rain and the snow and came home, an hour’s drive, to get help with the rest of the elk. My son Sam and his son went back with him, and they got it packed out and home this morning at 2:00 am. We spent all day cutting it up, grinding it, and wrapping it up and into the freezer. They are leaving for Fairbanks, Alaska, tomorrow morning, taking all they can in four coolers. It was a delightful time for me, with kids hunting, retrieving, and processing elk.

It is interesting to think about hunting for elk, deer, moose, or whatever. You have this elusive goal, but it is not a sure thing because the target has a will of its own: not to get shot. So you get up early, walk in the cold and the rain, climb over trees and rocks, hike for miles and miles, looking through your binoculars until your eyes hurt, hoping against hope that you will see a herd of elk. In Oregon, about one hunter in ten is successful. And if you don’t kill something, you try again the following year.

People who don’t hunt don’t understand those who do hunt’s obsession with killing something. But an obsession it is. Why? Is it simply the meat and food you provide for your family? Most would agree that you could buy it cheaper than the hunting trip, the guns, and the ammunition cost. So why? I think that it is simply the challenge. God created us for challenge and accomplishment, and we aren’t happy unless we are tripping over logs trying to conquer something.

I love hunting, but I also love attempting to do something significant for God in His church. To start a ministry, plan an event, and persuade people that they need Jesus. God has given every person a passion, a gift, a strength, an ability to do something with their life that matters for all eternity. If you discover that passion and use your giftedness to accomplish it, you will be the happiest person in the world, or at least feel like it.

One of the things I do periodically is go someplace by myself for a few hours up to a couple of days to study, renew myself by being away from people, and spend time with the Lord. It is hard for me to think or focus when I am around people a lot. So I am over at Neskowin at a beach house which belongs to a friend. My son Sam, son-in-law Philip, and grandson James are here with me hunting elk. My original plan was to hike with them as they hunted, but I took a fall the first evening we were here and sprained my thumb, twisted my hip and back, and I am now walking like an old man. I am sure everything will be fine in a few days, but I can’t walk around in the woods with my boys just yet. So I am sitting in the house by myself as they hunt, having a very relaxing time. They are out in the wind and the rain, cold and wet, climbing up hills and over logs. I am contributing to their hunting success by praying they have a great time and will kill a couple of elk.

That is an interesting theological discussion. Is it okay to pray that my boys are successful in elk hunting? Jesus blessed the disciples while they were fishing, but I am sure the reason was more than just having a lot of fish; He was proving to them who He was. James 4:3 talks about wrong motives when we pray. “You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.” Does an elk fall under the category of pleasures?

I don’t know the answer to that one so I am going to go ahead and ask for two elk, big elk, two 6×6’s. I will let you know if my praying was successful or not.

As I wrote yesterday, I fell on Friday while out in the woods scouting for elk with my son Sam, his son James, and my son-in-law, who flew down from Fairbanks, Alaska, for this elk hunt. I didn’t go out with them this morning because I was so stiff and sore from my fall. As I sit here reading, writing, thinking, eating junk food, and drinking coffee, while they are out hunting, I have been replaying my embarrassing fall in my mind. The worst part was lying there on the ground, struggling to get up, feeling like a beached whale, with my kids helping me as I finally got back to my feet. 

While I was helping my Mom with my Dad the last couple months of his life, as he was dying of liver cancer, I did a lot of journaling about our conversations. One day, I wrote, “I think the last thing that will die in my Dad is his sense of dignity, or rather his desire for dignity.” Dying from liver cancer was such an undignifying experience for him. I wrote, “Dad is experiencing a lot of physical pain, but that is nothing compared to the amount of shame he is feeling because of being so helpless.” My Dad was very tough all through his life, growing up during the Great Depression, going through World War II, working hard to become a successful dairy farmer, and raising a good family. Now, he can’t take care of himself, let alone take care of others. 

I wrote in my journal, “I understand now why God instructed us to honor the aged; it is their greatest need at this point in their life.” I was very sad to think back and remember the many times I had dishonored my Dad with my words to him. The Bible says we are to honor our wives, parents, bosses, leaders, and each other. 

Psalms 71:1 The Prayer of an Old Man. “In You, O Lord, I have taken refuge; Let me never be ashamed.”

We live in an age where everyone seems to be trying to outdo those around them in shaming each other. Everyone is competing to see who can say the most humiliating thing about someone else. I guess they think they are the smartest, the toughest, and the most powerful if they do. I don’t want to be conformed to this world, but to be transformed by living for the Lord, and doing things His way. It is embarrassing to me to think of all the times I have done things the way the world does. 

I will be careful to always give worth and dignity to all that I talk to, and to never embarrass or humiliate anyone. Please help me lord to remember and keep this commitment I am making to You. 

I am over at the coast hunting elk with my son Sam, his son, my grandson, James, and son-in-law Philip who flew down from Alaska for the hunt. I fell down yesterday when we were out scouting for elk in preparation for this morning’s opening. I killed an elk in September so I am here for the fellowship and fun. When I fell, I sprained my left thumb, I thought at first that I had broken it. I also twisted my left hip and back, and I am now walking like an old man. I decided not to tag along with the boys this morning when they left so I wouldn’t slow them up, and have them worrying that I was going to fall again, so I am sitting in the house that we are staying at in Neskowin eating Ibuprofen. Every time my phone beeps indicating that I have a text message I think it might be them telling me that they got an elk. I am not sure why I am thinking that because they don’t have cell service where they are hunting. I am sitting here drinking coffee, eating chips, reading, writing this blog, and memorizing Bible verses. 

I fell as I was stepping over a down tree. There was a limb leaning against the tree and I thought it was a branch fastened to the tree so I grabbed it and put my weight on it to help me as I stepped over the tree. Because it wasn’t solid, over it went and over I went with it. The worst part of falling down is having Sam, Philip, and James, see me and gathering around worried that I was seriously hurt. I may not be a macho hunter any more, but I like to pretend I am, and have my sons and grandsons think I am as well. My cover was blown. 

A lot of people today are falling, not physically as I did, but spiritually and morally. I fell because I put my weight on something I thought was solid, but wasn’t. People today are putting their confidence in government, leaders, jobs, money, and a host of other things they think will give them security, but won’t. 

Our only real security in life is in Jesus Christ and His Word, the Bible. So trust in Jesus, read His Word everyday, and live it. The result in our life will be security, confidence, high self-worth, peace, joy, and strength.