Another good friend of mine died this week, Doug Sheets. He got an infection in a knee replacement he had, which led to other issues that his body couldn’t recover from. Doug was the worship leader at Jefferson Baptist Church for many years. I first met Doug at one of our early “Pastor’s Prayer Summits” at Cannon Beach Conference Center in the mid-nineties. He was one of the worship leaders there, and I remember being very blessed by the worship times we had there when he was leading. He was unemployed at the time and volunteered to come lead worship for JBC. After a short time, he became our full-time worship leader. It was in 1990 that prayer became a significant focus of our church, and with Doug’s leadership, it was very easy to add worship to prayer as our primary focus. God used Doug in those years to help shape us into the church we are today.

Because of my age, I think about death a fair amount, and then when someone I know well, who was younger than me, dies, it prompts even more contemplation about this step into eternity. As I think about heaven, what it will be like, what it will feel like to make that transition, I usually start thinking about the “Judgment Seat of Christ,” and how I will do there. Standing before Jesus, the King of the Universe, the Son of God, the creator of everything, I wonder how that will feel. The Apostle John, in the 1st Epistle of John, suggests that some will shrink back in shame at their first view of Jesus. I do not want to do that, but I want to stand before Him with confidence and hear Him say, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

When I was a kid, I asked my Pastor if there were only ten things that were wrong to do, because it seemed like my Mom and my Dad had a lot more than ten things that were wrong on their list. He said, yes, that there were more than ten wrong things, but that God had put the most serious sins in the Ten Commandments. I didn’t really understand the concept of coveting, and I told my pastor that I could think of many things worse than coveting, so why was that one on the worst-sins list? Coveting has several corollaries: discontentment and impulsive, undisciplined buying. I have discovered over the years that I am way less disciplined at night than during the day. I start the day with a good amount of self-discipline, but by the time I go to bed, it is mostly gone. The worst thing for me to do is shop online after 9:00 pm; I don’t know what I will buy. Many mornings, I go back over what I bought the night before, cancel them all, and think to myself, “What were you thinking?” It usually isn’t costly, just dumb. A few nights ago, I was watching a YouTube video on how to stay healthy and energetic after 80, and the speaker made a big deal about the health benefits of cayenne pepper. I went on Amazon and found a 5-ounce jar on sale for $2.00 an ounce, and a five-pound jug for 20 cents an ounce, so I bought the five-pound jug. That is what you call dumb. How long will it take us to eat five pounds of cayenne pepper, even if it were a bargain? Have you ever noticed when you are most apt to sin?

Reading good books is a discipline that many have lost or never acquired. Many tell me that they do not read well. We were all there at one point, but we learned to read; that is a basic purpose of school. Reading is a skill that all but an exceedingly small minority can do well with practice. God, in His wisdom and sovereignty, had the Bible, the Word of God, preserved in writing. He is the one who created us in His image; He made our minds. The best and fastest way to grow in wisdom is by reading. I became a reader at a very young age. My Mom and my Dad would read to us kids when we were small and instilled in us a love of books and a desire to read. I still remember some of my favorite stories. We drove up and down the West Coast following my Dad as he was stationed at various Naval bases. When we were about to drive to another location, Mom would check out a cardboard box full of books for me to read while she drove, and we would turn them back in at the library in the next town we moved to. When Dad retired and we moved to our first farm, thirteen miles outside of town, a bookmobile would drive out near our place once a week, and I would check out books there. My sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Wilson, had a thirty-volume set of paperback books that were a series of stories about a young Christian man and his adventures. She offered anyone who would agree to read them all an A in reading. I decided to take the challenge and read every one of them, and the spiritual lessons in each tremendously impacted me. The key to faithful reading is to set a goal and stick to it so a good habit forms. My goal now is to read 20 pages a day, 5 days a week. That is about 5,000 pages a year, or about 20 books, depending on their size. I have friends who read 100 books a year, which is two books every week. The more you read, the better you read, that is, the faster you read and the more you retain, and the more you read, the more you enjoy reading. The main thing is that the more you read, the wiser and smarter you will become. Don’t let the business of life and the things in the world keep you from growing your brain.

I walked exactly five miles today in one hour and 20 minutes, 16-minute miles. My goal is to walk my half-marathon on November 29th, which starts at our house in 3 hours and thirty minutes, which is also 16-minute miles. 13.1 miles is more than double what I walked today, but I think I can keep up that pace for eight more miles. I am going to try to walk 8 miles next week. My left hip, which I had replaced with an artificial hip six months ago, did well. My right hip, which I plan to replace in a couple of months, also did well. I may decide to push my right hip surgery out a couple of years. My goal is not to qualify for the Olympics but to be able to preach and teach with energy for ten more years. Preaching and teaching the Bible have been the focus of my life for the last 50 years. It takes a lot of emotional energy to preach and teach God’s Word with the desire to see people transformed in their spiritual walk with God. Over the years, I have discovered that my emotional energy is greatly influenced by my physical energy. If I become a physical wimp, my preaching becomes dull. The content may be right on, but people don’t learn and grow because they mentally checked out while I was teaching. God’s anointing through the Holy Spirit is critically important as I prepare and speak, but it works with me and is not intended to be a crutch for poor preparation. It isn’t easy buffeting this old, lazy body, but God never intended life to be easy.

Well, I signed up today for another ten-day fishing trip out of San Diego. It is for 2029, and I will turn 81 on the trip. Four years is enough time for me to save up for the journey for myself and possibly a son, son-in-law, or grandson. I was seriously considering going in two years, but decided that it cost too much to go again that soon. I enjoyed the trip so much that I have hardly thought about anything else since I have been home.

Tonight, when I started reading the Bible, I prayed and asked God to use His Word in me so that I could think of nothing else but the truth I was learning. I had a great time fishing, but I don’t want that to infect me as much as serving God and the truth in His Word.

(I have published before)

 This is a picture of the aircraft carrier Wasp before it sank during the Battle of Guadalcanal in World War II. This battle lasted over six months and was fought on land by Marines, supported by numerous ships. My dad was on this ship when it sank. The Yorktown was sunk at the Battle of Midway, and my dad was on it too. The Hornet participated in many battles and launched the “Doolittle Raid,’ when Tokyo was bombed for the first time in the war. It was sunk in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, and my dad was on board when it went down. He had four ships sunk under him during the war. When my dad died in 1991, a friend who served with him sent us this letter and story about him.

“We were sitting in a gun turret mounted on the side of the ship under the flight deck. We were letting our gun cool off after rapid firing; if the gun is loaded while hot, the powder can ignite before the projectile is loaded. We had successfully loaded it before deciding to let it cool. While waiting, a Japanese kamikaze plane flew low around the ship, heading straight toward us. Duke stomped on the foot firing mechanism and blew that plane into little pieces 200 feet away. It was funny when it was over, but I can tell you both Duke and I thought we had bought it that day. We served together on the Hornet, Wasp, Yorktown, Enterprise, Saratoga, North Carolina, O’Brien, and others. We spent many hours together—sometimes two or three days straight—in battle at our stations. Please allow me to say that Delbert Duke was a good man.”

Of all my disciplines, the hardest for me to be faithful in is my exercise. I have a goal to walk, to ride my stationary bike and my real bike, and to lift weights. I want to do at least one of them every day.  I know how important this area of my life is to my energy level, weight management, and overall good health, but I continue to struggle to maintain my commitment to it. The reason is the same for me as for most people my age: it hurts. Even with the exercise, my joints hurt from arthritis, and my muscles ache whenever I strain them —I guess because they are old. Ibuprofen is my main cure. So I have to overcome those deterrents every day mentally. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. The key to getting over the hump in any discipline is to write down the goal I want to accomplish clearly and read it every day. Many people ignore all reminders of failure in any discipline in which they are not doing well. That may take away the sting of failing, but it certainly won’t motivate us to grow or change. Reading a goal every day that you are failing miserably at will, for sure, make you feel like dirt, but it is that feeling that keeps pushing me until I do it. I usually miss a couple of days after the initial success, but I keep reading the goal every day and do the exercise again and again, and before long, it becomes a habit.

Sometimes I fall away from the habit when I am on a fishing or other kind of trip and have to redo the faithfulness process, but I do, and I get back to the discipline. On the exercise goal, I have set some public benchmarks. I am committed to running a half-marathon on November 29th, and I don’t want to embarrass myself by not finishing or by taking 20 hours. I have set a goal to go on a 30-day bicycle trip in June. I have also set a public goal to climb Mt Adams on July 11th with several other climbers. The key to success in those three events is training and preparation without waiting until the last minute. The older I get, the more difficult it is to maintain my exercise goals, but I will work hard at it because I don’t want to become a vegetable.

On our drive home from San Diego from our fishing trip, we drove through central California on Highway 395 to Reno, Nevada, back into California, into Oregon on Highway 97, West on Highway 58 to I-5, and home. When we were driving through NE California, we saw miles of fence running parallel to the road, only about 18 inches tall. I googled it and found out that it was built to keep tortoises from going out onto the road and getting run over. As I continued to read, I read that the fence project was declared a failure because the tortoises, when they got to the fence, would walk back and forth trying to get through, and would continue this pursuit until they died from anxiety. The entire thing seemed so strange to me that money would be spent on fencing to keep tortoises from getting run over, but they died anyway from tortoise anxiety. I saw hundreds of armadillos killed on the road when we bicycled through the Southern States several years ago, but there was no fence to save them, and there wasn’t one around here when possums were dead on the road everywhere. There are several places in Alaska where fences are built to keep moose off the roads, and they even have big culverts under the road so they can get through without dying from anxiety trying to get to the other side. I think the moose fence was built to protect motorists, but I am not sure. The tortoise fence reminds me of Proverbs 14:12: “There is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death.” I make a lot of choices in life that seem right at the time, but later on, I would call them a tortoise fence. The big question for me is how to reduce the number of foolish choices I make. The answer from Proverbs is to be a wisdom seeker. If we seek wisdom like silver and gold, we will find it, and when we get wisdom, Proverbs says we will know every right and wise choice in life.

I got home from my 14-day fishing trip yesterday. We drove two days down and two days back to San Diego, where we went out on a ten-day fishing trip on a 100-foot boat. I caught about 20 fish total, including yellow fin tuna, Dorado, yellow tail, wahoo, ling cod, and rock fish. It was a very enjoyable trip with lots of new experiences. I fish a lot and usually do well, but this was a new fishing experience for me, and I think I caught the fewest number of fish of anybody of the 25 other people on the boat, including two ladies, so I went from the world’s best fisherman to the worst!

With the boat constantly rocking back and forth from the waves, you adapt by walking with your feet spread apart and swaying in time with the boat. The most challenging place to manage the rocking was in the shower, with my eyes closed. I managed to keep from falling while showering, but came close several times. Now that I am home, I am still walking like I am on the boat, and last night in the shower, I found myself swaying back and forth.

One characteristic of those with wisdom and character is their ability to adjust quickly to different situations and environments. It isn’t that we compromise or become phonies; instead, we recognize which behaviors foster unity and strengthen our witness among diverse groups and kinds of people.

It didn’t take long on the boat to discover that most of those on board were very wealthy and made this fishing trip at least once a year, and many several times each year. I think my friend Scott and I were the only first-timers on the boat, and I found myself constantly being scolded and coached by the others around me on how to fish. With 25 people all fishing at once around the boat as it drifted and turned in the current, you had to adjust to the others around you; it was almost like dancing. I regularly got tangled up with others because I was out of step, and I got scolded for it. At first, I was very intimidated by this, but I soon learned that they enjoyed coaching and teaching me if I responded in humility as a learner. I asked one of the guys if I could buy a 12-ounce weight from him, and he gave me three and said his payment was watching me work hard at learning to fish.

There are approximately 30 people on the Excel, including eight crew members and 22 fishermen. The boat is about 2,500 square feet, about the same as our house. We have 11 living in our house, and we often think it is crowded. The crowded condition in our home is not a problem because we are a family and get along well. There are small groups of friends on the boat, but most of the people on the ship don’t know each other very well. There are some very nice individuals and some not-so-nice ones, so at times it can be a bit stressful for me. I have never done this kind of fishing before, and several people on the boat have done it frequently. Some of the experienced guys are very gracious in their teaching and explaining to me how to fish for various species of fish, but some are arrogant know-it-alls who make my temperature rise. I have developed six guidelines for these ten days of fishing on this boat, to be a positive influence on the others and to make the trip personally enjoyable for me.

1.      Smile a lot. Several people in the past have said that I have a nice smile, so I am going to use God’s gift to me of nice teeth to connect positively with people.

2.      Honor each person by paying sincere attention to their words as they talk, maintaining eye contact, even if they cuss a lot.

3.      Ask questions about fishing and their personal lives.

4.      Pray for people silently as I listen to them, that God would bless them and bring them to Himself, and help me to love them.

5.      I haven’t caught nearly as many fish as I thought I would on this trip, and I have had numerous seals steal my fish, and I have caught a bunch of junk fish that we throw back. But I am committed to rejoicing always, grumbling about nothing, and rejoicing with those who catch more fish than I do, though that is hard.

6.      Make the trip about growing closer to God rather than about catching fish. Sitting out in the ocean, taking in the beautiful sunsets, has been a great reminder of God’s power, His attributes, and His love for me. The time I have been able to spend praying has been great.