I am getting all jazzed about my tuna fishing trip out of San Diego. My friend and I are leaving this Friday at 5:30 a.m. We are taking two days to drive to where we will launch out on a 120-foot boat, live on the ship for ten days, and fish. I first wrote this down as a goal in 2019 while I was up at the Portland Sportsman’s Show. The Sportsman’s Show features approximately 800 booths that sell every type of sporting goods imaginable, as well as hundreds of fishing and hunting guides and lodges. I stood and watched videos at a booth advertising fishing trips out of San Diego for over an hour. I was totally mesmerized by the number and the size of the fish being caught in the video. There was a drawing for a free trip, which I filled out. Although I didn’t win the free trip, I did receive advertisements from them every month after that.

I have a place on my cell phone where I write down ideas for future goals, and I typed in that I was going to go on a ten-day trip out of San Diego before the end of 2025, and here we are, October 2025. The trip costs $5,200, excluding gas for driving down and back, three nights in a motel, fish processing, fishing gear, and tips for the deckhands. I have been saving for the trip ever since I wrote it down as a goal way back in 2019. I even have a little extra money left over that I may use to do a fish mount of a 100-pound bluefin tuna. If Patty reads this, she will want the extra for grandkid gifts for birthdays and this upcoming Christmas. I wrote this in my official goals that I sent out to all my friends and posted on my blog for the first time in 2020. A Pastor friend who reads my blog and saw my goals told me that there was a fellow in his church who did a trip like I wanted to do every couple of years. He gave me his number, and I called.

We had coffee together and talked about his past experiences. This was almost two years ago, and he said he was signed up to go in October 2025. So, I decided right then that I would go with him. Here we are, only five days until we leave. Many people don’t set ambitious goals for five or even ten years in the future. As a result, they don’t do any huge things with their lives. Big goals, whether they are ministry, occupational, or fishing goals, take time to accomplish. If you don’t have the confidence to dream up big goals that take time to accomplish, you won’t achieve many, if any, big things with your life. Over the years, Jefferson Baptist Church has planted and adopted ten different churches; seven of them are still going strong today. Very few churches have done that. We set a goal in 1990 to plant our first church by 2000 and another church every two years thereafter. Ten years later, we started Agape Family Fellowship in Albany. Big goals require time to pray about for God’s guidance and blessing, time to plan well, and time to save up the necessary funds to accomplish them. All of the buildings at JBC are paid for, as that was the goal. Several of our buildings took ten years to finish, but that was the goal. Dream some crazy dreams. Dreaming is free. Be open to promptings, ideas, and experiences. Anything is accomplishable if you have enough time.