We were fishing last night and a moose walked out of the brush behind us and walked out into the water to get a drink. He didn’t seem bothered much by the fishermen in the river. There are a lot of moose in the area. We have to be careful driving at night that we don’t hit one. Two of the pictures are taken out the window of the lodge we are staying in. There are lots of eagles in the area and our trail cam took a picture of a grizzly bear outside our lodge. One of the cool things about fishing in Alaska is all the beautiful scenery and the wildlife. It is all a huge testament of God’s creation.

 Romans 1:20 For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.

I have been at “Funny River Fishing Lodge” for three days now, have only fished for a couple of hours so far, and have caught one limit of six sockeye salmon. The run is just starting, and I had some work to do on my boat to get it ready for fishing. I was planning on fishing for Halibut today, but we had a 7.3 earthquake and a tsunami warning for the area I fish, so I slept in this morning. About a dozen guys are showing up today and tomorrow who will fish here next week. I will take them out in my boat, halibut fishing three at a time, and also help the novices to rig up and teach them how to fish for sockeye salmon. It is a unique system of fishing that is difficult to do until you get the hang of it. We fish for salmon from the bank on the Kenai River in Soldotna. I have come up and fished in Alaska for 25 years, which is one of the year’s highlights for me. Fishing is like bicycling because there is much time for reflective thinking. I have a list of things that I consciously set my mind on to meditate on while I am fishing. God, passages in the Bible, my future, goals, dreams, desires, my weak areas, and what I need to do to grow, family members, praying for them, sermons, and heaven.

I work hard at not just daydreaming and letting my mind do what it wants. About a dozen verses in the Bible emphasize choosing what we think about. We change our behavior by changing what we think about. The devil focuses on our minds as he tempts us, and our minds left on their own gravitate to selfishness, worry, critical judgment, immorality, and covetousness. Romans 12:2 tells us to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. Scripture memory is the best discipline to train our minds to be servants instead of the boss in our lives. I spend 40 minutes daily memorizing, reviewing, and meditating on Bible verses. Make a goal to establish this habit and discipline in your life.

                  Luke 15:8-9 What woman, if she has ten silver coins and loses one coin, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? When she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin I lost!’

Today I lost one of my hearing aids. I was lying on my back under my boat wiring in tail lights and turn signals, and I was swatting mosquitoes that were annoying me, and somehow one of them fell out. My hearing aids are Bluetoothed with my phone, and I noticed I was only hearing stuff in one ear, so I reached up to check it, and it was gone. I backtracked everywhere I had been and found it under the boat. It was tough to see in the grass, but I suspected it would be a likely place, so I looked for it thoroughly. I rejoiced greatly when I found it, and I texted Patty, and she rejoiced with me.

The point of Jesus’s story was that lost people need to be sought after and brought to faith in Jesus with at least as much earnestness as a hearing aid or a lost coin. A key way to develop a passion for influencing people is to pray faithfully for a list of people you know who don’t know Jesus. Praying for them every day will cause us to be more and more attentive to opportunities to invite them to church or share our story with them. Try it.

When I first started pastoring, my biggest hurdle was coming up with a good sermon every week. I was working part-time besides pastoring, so finding the time to study for and write sermons was challenging. About six months after starting to preach, I had a counseling session with a great seminary professor who taught preaching. One of the things he recommended was to listen to good preachers a lot, at least one sermon a day. He recommended listening to various preachers, but as I did, he said certain ones would resonate with me, and then zero in on my top four to six. He emphasized listening to things that made it easy to listen to and that helped hold my attention. I religiously did that daily sermon listening discipline for years, usually listening to about ten a week. I would listen while driving, milking cows, and mowing the lawn. One of my favorites was John MacArthur. I bought hundreds of cassettes of his sermons over the years. He died a couple of days ago. He was certainly ready to step into heaven, but the news made me very sad. I never met him, but I considered him a good friend. He had a significant influence on my life and my ministry over the years. The main thing that I got from him was to teach the Bible accurately and in a way that held people’s attention and not bore people with poor preaching of the Bible.

I woke up at 5:00 am and was at our meeting place at the JBC parking lot at 6:00 am. Four of us headed to the Portland airport, boarded the plane at 10:00 am, and landed in Anchorage at 2:00 pm. We boarded a small six-passenger airplane and landed in Kenai, Alaska, at 4:00 pm. We were picked up and drove  30 minutes to the Funny River Fishing Lodge. We unloaded all the stuff we had brought, and I got my stuff together and headed to the Kenai River to fish for sockeye salmon. I fished for two hours and caught nothing, so I am in the lodge eating popcorn and typing this blog. I will be here for three weeks, fishing for salmon and halibut and helping other guys catch fish. This is probably my favorite three weeks of the year. God truly blesses me for being able to do this every year. This is my 25th year here, fishing and helping others fish. I expect to catch over a hundred sockeye salmon and dozens of halibut. Life doesn’t get much better than that. God has indeed blessed my life. I have a wonderful marriage and wife, eight exceptional children, 28 grandchildren, a ministry of over fifty years that is God blessed, and I get to come to Alaska and fish. Thank you, Lord, for blessing my life.

Anticipation is what makes life so exciting. I am headed for Alaska at 6:00 am. We will get to the lodge at about 4:00 pm and be on the river fishing at about 7:00 pm. I can think of little else. I doubt that I will sleep very much tonight. I will wake up every 15 minutes and look at the clock, willing it to turn faster. The sad thing is that it will be over in three weeks, and I will be back home. Oh well, I have several other major fishing trips planned and a couple of hunting trips for this fall. I am anxiously awaiting each of those events. The most exciting thing I anticipate is Jesus coming and taking me to heaven. I think about that every morning when I wake up, every evening when I go to bed, read the news, and read my Bible. I am eagerly awaiting the coming of the Lord.

My favorite service of the year is this Sunday. It is the annual “Baptism at the Lake.” Regular services are cancelled, and we have a service outside at Lake Charles in Talbot. It begins with a fabulous potluck at noon, and then we have a worship time with testimonies mixed in by those getting baptized. The testimonies are people sharing their experience with Jesus and how they got to where they are spiritually on that day. The testimonies are amazing and are an incredible display of God’s work in people’s lives. After the testimonies and singing, we all go down to the Lake, just a few hundred feet away, and watch as people publicly declare that Jesus is Lord of their life. Baptism is a picture of dying to self, being buried, and then being resurrected to newness of life, where Jesus is running our lives now. I am pastoring at the Jefferson Evangelical Church, and we are joining Jefferson Baptist Church for this great event and Agape Family Fellowship in Albany. I don’t do much of the actual dunking anymore, just one person this time, but one of the highlights of my parenting and pastoring is that I got to baptize all eight of our kids. It is so rewarding to see all of them walking with Jesus and serving Him with their lives.

I am 76 years old, so I am officially a senior. I get price breaks in several places, and I no longer have to take my shoes off at the airport. Patty and I enjoy this chapter in our lives, especially with our family. The best part about getting older is that every day I am one day closer to heaven; it won’t be long now. I am part of a men’s group that meets on Tuesday morning, and everyone in the group is an old guy, so we start our meeting at 9:00 am instead of 6:00 am like those young guys do. I greatly enjoy my fellowship with these guys as we tell fishing stories and pray for each other’s ailments. I also periodically attend “Senior Friends” on Wednesday afternoons from 2:00 to 4:00 pm. This Friday, a “Seniors Concert” will be at the park in front of the Middle School and swimming pool at 6:00 pm. They will be playing and singing some “oldies.” I have attended the ones they have had in the past, and they are very good; everyone is welcome regardless of age. I believe God often gives older Christians who have lived a faithful life for Him an extra measure of grace as they finish their lives. That grace gives them a heightened sense of His presence, an increased thinking about spiritual truths, an increase in peace and joy, and an increase in spiritual growth. Maybe even with those who are struggling with senility and Alzheimer’s, they may have more going on in their soul than we are aware of. I end every day by saying, “Thank you, Lord, for my life, it has been a good one, and there is still more to come.”

Today, I went to my orthopedic surgeon for a final checkup and an X-ray of my new hip. Everything looks good. I have very little pain, and I am walking normally. I am ready for some serious fishing. I leave for Alaska on Monday and will be gone for three weeks. I am very thankful for my new hip; my old one hurt so bad that I don’t think I would have been able to fish much. The X-ray on my right hip looks as bad as my left one did, but it doesn’t hurt right now, so I will leave it alone. My surgeon said that, as bad as the X-rays look, he doesn’t think it will be long before it starts to give me fits. We will see. I am hoping Jesus comes back before I need the surgery. It has been just five weeks since my surgery, and the entire experience has been relatively easy, so if I need to get my right hip replaced, it wouldn’t be much of a trial. If anybody is considering joint replacement, I highly recommend my surgeon and his outfit. They were very professional and gracious. I know that as I get older, the probability of various body parts wearing out is high, and that surgeries of different levels of seriousness are probably in my future. I worked hard this last couple of months to always rejoice, pray for strength and peace, and not be a grumpy old man. It is easy to let life get us down, but God will give us all we need to manage the trials, pressure, and pain if we ask Him. That doesn’t mean He will take it away; it’s just that we can endure it, grow, and be a blessing to those in our lives, instead of a pain. 

I have five gopher traps that I have set in my backyard, trying to catch what I believe is one gopher making a mess. I usually have success catching gophers, but this one is wily. He has tripped my traps 4 or 5 times without getting caught. I am using all my years of gopher-trapping experience, so it will only be a matter of time before I catch him. We caught the one making a mess in the front yard, and when I catch this Wily one, it looks like we have another out in the orchard. My Dad hated gophers in the hay fields. The mounds of dirt they made were very hard on the cycle blades on the swather. He would pay us .25 cents for each gopher we could trap. I used to tie a string from the trap to an empty white plastic chlorine jug so I could find them, and then, when the hay got taller, I had wooden stakes with red surveyors’ tape on them. Whenever I see a field full of gopher mounds, I think of what my Dad would say. There are people around who make an income from trapping gophers. Several years ago, a guy pulled into the church parking lot to ask a question, and while we were talking, I looked in the back of his pickup, and it was half full of dead gophers. That was his business. Once, while I was on a bicycle trip, Patty hired a guy to catch a gopher that was making a mess in our yard, and he charged $25. That is a lot more than the .25 cents I used to make as a kid. Gophers are a nuisance, and I have jokingly said that God sends them as discipline for sin in our lives. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that they are demons, messengers of satan, meant to keep us humble. Whatever, I am going to kill as many as I can.