I use the little phrase, “you always milk the cows”!! as an expression to illustrate the importance of faithfully practicing certain spiritual duties everyday. On the dairy growing up nobody ever, not even once in all the years that I was on the farm, ever said, “what do you think, shall we milk the cows today”, I don’t think anybody even thought it, you always milked the cows! The spiritual disciplines of reading our Bible, working on memorizing portions of the Bible, spending time with God in prayer, examining our life and confessing all know sin to God, reading some in good books, reviewing the day and thanking God for all that we were able to do, making a “todo list for the next day, and writing a little in a journal, ought to be daily duties. It is so easy to get lazy and undisciplined in the daily discipline of doing these basics every day, every day, every day, and once a single day is missed it is easier to miss another day and another, and pretty soon you have backslid way away from God and your joy is gone, your peace is gone, your strength is gone, your relationships struggle, and you just chase your tail all day with no purpose. You always milk the cows and you always do the basic disciplines. There are always those who respond to me with the word “legalism”, that making the basic disciplines a daily duty is legalistic. If a dairy farmer was haphazard in milking his cows we would label him lazy, irresponsible, stupid, and soon we would call him bankrupt. A Christian who is faithful to do the basics daily is a disciple, wise, faithful, committed, and very blessed by God. I take Parkinson’s medicine every eight hours, because my bladder no longer works I use a catheter every eight hours as well, and because it is so effective at keeping my Parkinson’s from progressing I ride a stationary bike every night for 60 to 90 minutes. Those are routines that I never miss, and no one calls me legalistic for being rigid, inflexible, and routine in these essentials in my life now, it is just being wise. So why is it that when we jump from the physical and health disciplines, to the spiritual disciplines that being faithful, regimented, dutiful, and diligent is called legalistic. Those followers of Jesus who love Him with all of their heart don’t ever want to backslide away from Him, and they know how easy it is to do just that so they are very disciplined to do the basics every day, every day, every day, they milk the cows.

I just finished teaching a seminar in California for about 7 hours a day for two days. Teaching about leadership, prayer, goal setting, motivation, etc is about as good as it gets for me. I am always fulfilled, and feel great satisfaction when I teach people that will teach others also. But in spite of the great time that the last two days have been I am sitting in my room tonight feeling very tired. One of the things that I teach is that when you get to the end of a day, and are dead dog tired, rejoice because it means you were blessed by God with something to do that mattered that took energy and effort. When I feel as tired as I do tonight it takes extra caution and self-control to keep my mind from getting negative and thinking “poor me” thoughts. Once started down that path of thinking it is hard to rein in my thoughts, so having been there and done that I am choosing to replay in my thinking the positive and affirming comments from those in attendance today about how the seminar content was going to positively impact their ministries, and thank the Lord for blessing me with this opportunity to serve Him. I am also thinking about tomorrow when I get home and how nice that will be, and going out to dinner with Patty after she picks me up from the airport, and sleeping in my own bed, and working on my boat on Friday, and playing poker Friday night. Whooooeeeeeee life is good.

I enjoy hearing of a need that someone has and being able to do something that meets it. I especially enjoy it when it is one of the kids or grandkids, but also others, and sometimes the most rewarding are total strangers. When I travel there is almost always an opportunity to do a small act of kindness if I keep my eyes open, especially in airports and while on the plane. It is sort of like a personal challenge that I make with myself to look attentively for something to do to help.

It is also very enjoyable to be on the receiving end of a kind deed, especially from strangers while on a trip. I am in Whittier, California doing a seminar, and the host for the seminar had a stationary bicycle here for me to use in the evening, because he knew how helpful riding it each night was for my Parkinson’s. Someone else asked me this morning how my bicycling went last night, and I laughed and said, “I only rode for a little bit because I forgot my tennis shoes so I rode in my cowboy boots, and those boots weren’t made for riding a stationary bicycle.” He laughed also and commented on how funny that must have looked. Today after I was finished teaching for the day and everyone was leaving, the same fellow came up and handed me a bag and a brand new pair of tennis shoes, and they were the right size. Wow, that was a kind and thoughtful thing to do! Makes a person feel good not just because of getting a brand new pair of shoes for free, but the positiveness and goodness that was expressed. There is so much negative stuff in the news and in our world today that is very uplifting to experience the opposite.

I am headed to Los Angelos area to speak for two days at a seminar for Pastors. I have a 3 hour layover in San Francisco, and I am sitting here in a Sports Bar watching pre-season baseball and sportscasters talk about the upcoming NCAA basketball tournament dubbed “March Madness”. While sitting here I have gotten into numerous conversations with people about basketball, but the conversations inevitably shift to politics, guns, North Korea, Trump, etc. and not to far into the conversation they come to the conclusion that I am one of those radical right wing Christians who loves guns and thinks Trump is alright. So far after 6 conversations with 6 different people, I have had gracious, thoughtful, pleasant conversations with people who were very different than me in their opinions and views. It is so nice to talk with someone without being labeled as stupid or having my character attacked even though we have different world views and political views. I enjoy chatting with people about things we view differently until it becomes emotional, mean spirited, and argumentative, and then I graciously bail, at least I try to. One of my guiding principles is to honor all people because they are people created in the image of God. To honor a person means that I have good manners, don’t purposely say things to them that would be insulting or hurtful, to listen attentively to their words, not interrupting, correcting or arguing. I know what I believe to be true, and I am in the business of “converting” people to my view, but I want my life to be marked by integrity, graciousness, rejoicing always- complaining about nothing, and being a person who is nice. It takes great self-control at times, but I believe people are drawn to being accepted and loved, not to persuasive words, arguments or insults.

All people believe some things to be true that are not. All of us are deceived to some extent, though we would probably all deny it. It is not a pleasant thought to think that we are living our life, making decisions, establishing values on the basis of information that we think is right on, when in fact it is totally false. If what I just said is true, how does that happen, how is it that we would sincerely believe something to be true that is not. How does someone or a group of people fool us to believing a lie.

A naive person goes on in his deceived state not really caring, and certainly not concerned about finding out what is really true, but a wise person understands how easy it is to be influenced by the world and it’s values and philosophy, and is ruthless and obsessed with discovering real truth.

The process of sorting through the values, opinions, philosophies, and beliefs of the world must begin with ourselves, in the sense of our off base values, character flaws, blind spots, and faulty paradigms. Proverbs 14:8 says, “The wisdom of the sensible is to understand his ways.” Why do I do some of the things I do? What motivates me, really? Spending time thinking reflectively and practicing self-evaluation in an honest and non-defensive way is part of what a wise person seeking truth does. They do this routinely as a disciplined part of their pursuing maturity.

I woke up about 3 am this morning and decided to go out the back door of our bedroom which goes out on a little covered deck to see what the weather might be today. When I stepped out, being quite so as not to wake Patty, I saw a person standing on our deck, and they were very big and tall, and facing me. I crotched down a bit getting ready for a fight, trying to look as menacing as I could, thinking to myself, you are an old man who can barely walk, this probably isn’t going to turn out very good, Lord, could You help me here, please. I said in my toughest, fiercest voice, “what are you doing here?”. They didn’t say a word, and didn’t move, so I repeated myself adding that I had a gun, still no response. As I stood there waiting for the worst, planning my attack, thinking if I could get in a few quick hits I could probably take this guy, whoever he was. Then as I took a step towards him I realized that what I was looking at was my chest waders hanging up from the rafters of the deck. I had gone surf fishing at the ocean on Monday, and I had hung them there to dry out. They sure looked like a person there in the dark. I took them down, rolled them up and stuffed them into the duffel bag I keep them in, and said, “Thank You Lord! We took care of him”, as I smiled to myself, trying to imagine how that would have turned out had it really been a big, mean person. I told Patty the story this morning, and she said that she was confident that had it been a person, that I would have whipped him, tied him up, and called the police, and then I would have told her everything was under control in case the ruckus had woken her up.

Patty has been gone for over a week up to Fairbanks, Alaska helping our daughter Shelly with her new baby girl, their 6th child, and our 23rd grandchild. She is coming home tomorrow. When I think about Patty a number of Bible verses come to mind and Proverbs 12:4 is one of them which says, “An excellent wife is the crown of her husband, But she who shames him is like rottenness in his bones.” Another way of saying that verse is, “An excellent wife makes her husband feel like a king, but if she shames him he will feel rotten to the core of his being.” Patty makes me feel like John Wayne, Samson, Tim Tebow, Billy Graham, and Bill Hybels all rolled into one. She appreciates me, serves me, and lets me go bicycle across the nation for two months with words of encouragement and affirmation. She prays with me, sleeps with me, camps with me, drives to Alaska with me, never gets angry at me, and only occasionally scolds me. This coming August we will have been married 49 years. Patty is what Proverbs calls an Excellent wife.

One of the disciplines that I picked up years ago is journaling. I write a bit about the events that occurred that day in a mater of fact way, and then I write about my dealing with the events that I just wrote about, problems I solved or didn’t solve, lessons learned, wisdom gained, and then I usually write out a prayer, praying for the people that were in my day, and for myself to be used by God to bear fruit for Him.

In my journaling I try to write reflectively, looking at my day and behavior as a third person attempting to be honest and transparent about who I am, why I do what I do, and how to grow.

Writing is a great way to pull stuff out of our sub-conscious mind that we didn’t know was there, and then writing it down with thoughtfulness and clarity is a way of owning who we are, and also gives us the insight to figure out how to change.

Writing is a discipline that few develop as a skill, but it is well worth the effort and time it takes to get good at it. God wrote the Ten Commandments on a stone with His finger the Bible teaches. If God wrote it must be important. We are created in His image and likeness and the more we do what God does the better we will do in life in general.

Another reason I journal is because I forget what has happened and the emotions that I experienced as a result of an experience. So many of the events that I have lived through are so rich, but I forget them and they get lost in the sea of experiences over the years.

Once a month I take an hour and read past journal entries. It is amazing how the combination of writing and then reading what I wrote preserves the memory of my life in my head and the lessons learned and the character gained in my heart.

I went fishing today with some friends. We drove to Newport and went surf fishing for red tailed perch. I had a wonderful day. The weather was so nice and sunny, and there is something hypnotic about standing in the ocean with chest waders and hearing the roar of the waves and seeing them constantly rising up with all this white foam. We would follow the waves out and cast out as far as we could aided by our 3 oz lead sinker, and on the 2 hooks that we had we would put plastic little worms. We got there at low tide and fished up to high tide. The fish follow the tide in because sand worms come out of the sand as the surf comes in and the fish gobble them up.The fishing was ok for the first couple of hours but about an hour before hi tide they went on a feeding frenzy, and we were catching fish just about every cast, and then as the tide started out the fishing just stopped cold, no more fish. We loaded up and went to a public fish cleaning spot and filleted fish for an hour then went to a restaurant and had clam chowder and fish and chips. What a wonderful day!

Pastor Mike is on a series in his preaching, “the top 10 fears of our life”, and how to manage them. Tonight he talked about our fear of death, and he will preach the same sermon tomorrow at both services. As he was preaching tonight I was thinking of people who I knew who had come close to dying either by sickness or accident and the wide range of reactions to that near death experience that they had. Some became almost hysterical as they faced death obviously in great fear, and then I thought of my daughter Sally and her husband Aaron who live in Hawaii who recently got a phone message from the state government that they were about to be hit with a nuclear missile and that this wasn’t a drill. It turned out to be a false alarm, but when Sally and Aaron read the warning on their cell phones they said that they felt a great peace as they faced their immanent death. I think a lot now about my death because I am getting closer to it at almost 70 years of age. I imagine what I will feel as I leave my fleshly body and head to heaven. I wonder what the first thing I will see will be. I wonder what the first words will be that Jesus speaks to me. I wonder what my first words will be and who I will say them to. I wonder how long I will be there before I see my Dad. I don’t fear death and I am looking forward to the new body and adventures, but there is the nervousness of the unknown, sort of like the first time I went sky diving. I know people who believe that when we die it is over, we cease to exist, we just turn to dirt and that is all there is. That seems so sad to me, I can’t imagine that I would be motivated to do much that required sacrifice or effort, I think I would just turn into a melancholy introvert. But an even worse scenario would be the person who acknowledges that, yes, there is life after death, but I have no clue what it will be like, where I am going, or if there is such a thing as hell will I be in it? Now, that would result in great fear if that were me. But the cool thing is that it is not me, I have an absolute assurance in my salvation and my eternal home.