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.