Our son in law, Philip killed a moose in Alaska this last week. The best part of the picture for me are the cute grandkids. Philip and Shelly, and their 5 kids were all camping together in the wilds of Alaska. A great tool for raising tough kids with grit is camping in difficult settings. They are coming to visit us for Christmas and bringing some moose meat for my Christmas present, I hope!

Patty and I along with our daughter Sandee flew to Santa Rosa this morning for the funeral for Patty’s brother in law. The fellow sitting next to me on the plane didn’t know English very well which resulted in some funny conversations. He was playing a game on his phone and the stewardess came by and asked him to be sure it was in airplane mode, she could see that it wasn’t. He thought she had asked him to put it away, so he turned it off and put it in a briefcase. I said to him what she said but he didn’t seem to get it. I was on my iPad and he was quite adamant that I was going to get into trouble if I didn’t turn it off, but I just smiled and kept doing on it what I had been doing. When the stewardess walked by and didn’t say anything to me , he went ahead and took out his phone again, but he still didn’t have it in airplane mode. When the stewardess walked by she could see that it wasn’t and asked him to switch it off or put it to airplane mode. He got pretty upset by what he thought was preferential treatment for me. Between the stewardess and me we finally convinced him and showed him what he needed to do. When he didn’t understand he was upset, when he did understand he was happy. Life is like that. When we don’t understand why things are happening the way they are we are not happy. What fixes that is when we decide to trust the Lord with our life and the details of it even though we don’t understand. It is a decision that we need to make new every morning, otherwise we will go back to being unhappy and grumpy because life doesn’t make sense.

I hit the publish button by accident and left out my verses

Proverbs 1:22. How long, O naive ones, will you love being simple-minded? And scoffers delight themselves in scoffing. And fools hate knowledge?

Proverbs 1:7. Fools despise wisdom and instruction.

Proverbs 1:32. the complacency of fools will destroy them.

Proverbs 3:35. But fools display dishonor.

Proverbs 10:8. But a babbling fool will be ruined.

Proverbs 12:15. The way of a fool is right in his own eyes,

I am in the book of Proverbs for my personal Bible reading for several days and I can’t help thinking about lots of current events as I read the book. Yesterday I shared some thoughts on wisdom, and I thought I might share a few verses and thoughts on being a fool. A fool doesn’t seem to realize that a good reputation takes years of faithful, consistent living to build, but only a few minutes to destroy. A fool greatly overestimates the value or influence of his words and actions when there is no character or honorable reputation to back them up. A fool has no depth of character to control his words and actions so he merely reacts to events. A fool forms opinions and values quickly and with little thought, but is convinced that they are always right.

Wisdom is learning to think like God. Wisdom is mentally processing information and events, and arriving at a conclusion that is accurate and true, the same conclusion that God arrives at. Those who are truly wise change things, and make them better, those who are truly wise change people and make them better.

The greatest barrier to growing in wisdom is pride, thinking we already know it all. In a world where information about anything is available in a few seconds from a “smart phone” it is so easy to think we are wise, but instead be fools who make poor choice after poor choice and mess up their own lives and the lives of those around them.

A collection of Proverbs from the Bible on Wisdom:

A wise man will hear and increase in learning, And a man of understanding will acquire wise counsel. The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, But a wise man is he who listens to counsel. Make your ear attentive to wisdom, Incline your heart to understanding; For if you cry for discernment, Lift your voice for understanding; If you seek her as silver And search for her as for hidden treasures; then wisdom will enter your heart. Acquire wisdom! Acquire understanding! Do not forget nor turn away from the words of my mouth. Do not forsake her, and she will guard you; Love her, and she will watch over you. The beginning of wisdom is: Acquire wisdom; And with all your acquiring, get understanding. Prize her, and she will exalt you; She will honor you if you embrace her. Then you will discern righteousness and justice And equity and every good course. For wisdom will enter your heart And knowledge will be pleasant to your soul; Discretion will guard you, Understanding will watch over you, To deliver you from the way of evil. How blessed is the man who finds wisdom And the man who gains understanding. For her profit is better than the profit of silver And her gain better than fine gold. She is more precious than jewels; And nothing you desire compares with her.

It is fun to go on trips, but it is always so good to be back home again. I am back with Patty and family, I am back to my own bed, my recliner that is so comfortable to sit and read in, my hot tub, but a major thing for me is my routine. At home I have a routine for most everything I do, and that routine is a major factor in keeping me faithful to do what I need to do every day. Whether it is my Bible reading, my prayer time with God, my exercise, or my work, I do so much better when I am in my routine. When I am being a faithful man, keeping my commitments, doing what blesses others, being responsible, pleasing the Lord, I feel so much better about myself, I feel successful. A personal routine is not a rut, a rut is what you get into because of bad habits, pressure from others, and laziness and apathy. People in ruts are bored and unmotivated. A personal routine is like a train on tracks, it can go fast because of the tracks, it goes straight because of the tracks, and those who ride are safe because of the tracks.

A personal routine is an established habit of doing certain things everyday, at particular times normally, and usually in the same place. I established my personal, daily routine by writing down what I wanted to do everyday and then I read it at the end of every day. As I continued to faithfully read the list at the end of every day I thought about how to be successful in accomplishing each thing on the list and when and where would work best. It probably took close to a year and then I was in a groove and I rarely didn’t get everything done, except when I was on a trip. But now I am home and I am writing this, and then …

I haven’t written a blog for several days because I am up in the Steens Mountains archery hunting for deer and elk with my son Seth, and there is little to no cell service. I did discover though that up at the outhouse in this campground that I get good service, so I am typing this on my phone in the outhouse. The weather has been a major challenge. The wind has been blowing so hard that I thought it was going to blow our tent over, and it has been freezing cold with snow every day. It is nice that we have a little propane heater that keeps our tent toasty. Yesterday I made a decision that was hard for me though I have been thinking about it for awhile. I am going to make hunting a done chapter in my life.  I can bicycle great, and walk on flat ground ground with no problem,  but I really struggle walking on uneven ground, and I seem to have lost the joy that I once received walking through the woods, out in the sage brush, and rimrock, simply because of the struggle to keep from falling. I enjoy the camping  a lot and intend on going on hunting trips, but I will fish, read, write  and enjoy the fellowship. Life has chapters and you go with them. 

My brother-in-law, Mike Bowers, went to heaven yesterday. His life here on this earth as we know it, ended because of cancer. It is getting to the point in my life where those I was close to, friends with, and/or family that are in heaven are more than those alive here on earth. When someone I know passes it always prompts some contemplative thinking on my part. The most significant person in my life that is in heaven is my Dad. That has been over 25 years ago but the memories of his cancer and struggle at the end is still very clear in my mind.

I have often thought that a cool way to have people die is like Jesus, not his form of death on a cross, but the fact that he rose from the dead and then over 500 people saw him and conversed with Him before He was resurrected to heaven. If I could have spent a couple of weeks with Dad after he died and had his new body before he took off for heaven, wow, that would have taken a lot of the pain away. But God doesn’t do it that way. I wonder why? I am pretty sure that the strength of my faith that Dad is in heaven, and that I am going to see him one of these days, and it is getting closer, is just as strong as if I had spent two weeks with him after he died, and before he left earth.

I know many who don’t have any faith. Death in their mind is a period at the end of a sentence. That is all there is, there ain’t no more.

Romans 1:18-20 says that God put an awareness of Him in our hearts, and people have to mentally push Him out of their hearts to not believe that He exists. The Bible also says we have eternity in our hearts, we are born with it, but that gets pushed out of many people’s hearts as well. Seems so sad to have no hope. The Bible also says that if we seek Him, we will find Him, and if we draw near to Him He will draw near to us. If I were a person with no faith in God or heaven, if I were a person with no hope I would choose to seek Him, and see what happened, yep that is what I would do.

The pastor of the church I was speaking at IN Sierra Vista, Arizona, was driving me to Tucson where I was going to catch my plane home. I am staying at a motel near the airport and will take off tomorrow morning at 8 am. There was a check point coming up, and he remembered that he had given his credit card to his secretary, and had no way to pay for my motel, so he pulled into the left lane and made a U-turn back the way we had come. About a minute later there was a border patrol car behind us, and in another minute there were two border patrol cars behind us and then they turned their lights on. We pulled over and they came up to the car on my side with big flashlights shining into the back of the car checking everything thoroughly. My pastor friend apologized for the turn, and explained what we were doing, and they said “no problem”, and off we went. It was kind of fun and added a little excitement to the day. I was impressed with how gracious the border patrol guys were considering how much flak they must get in a day, doing what they are doing. I am sure if we had been rude and belligerent we wouldn’t have gotten the same kind of treatment. It reminds me of one of my memory verses in Matthew 7:12, “However you want people to treat you, so treat them, for this is the law of the prophets”. That last phrase “this is the law of the prophets” basically means, this is a big deal to God, so pay attention. Treating people with honor and dignity as people created by God in His image is a very important discipline. Those who are rude and obnoxious will be treated accordingly, it is a law of GOD, SET IN CONCRETE.

I flew into Arizona yesterday and the pastor of the church I am speaking at today and tomorrow picked me up and was going to drop me off at the motel I was staying at after we had dinner. As we were driving into the parking lot of the motel all of the lights went out and the place went completely dark. Whow, what just happened?! I don’t know how your brain works, but mine starts going through all the possible reasons on why this just happened, and it often gets stuck on a reason that is sensational and off of the wall. I can’t help it, I just have this wild imagination that just goes off in these wild possibilities and exciting adventures. So I really couldn’t see the rest of the city, but I imagined that the lights were off everywhere, not just this motel, and a possibility that popped into my mind was North Korea shot a nuclear missile at the United States and it had knocked out all of the electricity in the entire country. I began to wonder if Jesus was coming soon, and what that was going to feel and look like. Then I began making plans on how to survive if there was no electricity for days or weeks, months or even years. How would I get home? How would Patty do? I was really getting into this movie in my head when the lights came back on. The lady at the desk said, “no big deal, someone was just working on something for a few minutes”. Oh well, it was an adventure while it lasted. This kind of thinking happens fairly often with me, and I know lots of other people who do the same, but one thing that is different in my overly imaginative scenarios from many others that I know is that I never get nervous or anxious about the future if it really is true. I have a very strong trust in God’s plan for my life, and a belief that the ride may get rough but God is driving and He knows what He is doing and has a plan.