I am sitting in LAX Los Angeles Airport with a 4 hour layover waiting to catch my flight to Tucson. I am sitting in the “Rock & Brew” eating chicken wings watching the rerun of Thursday night football, but mostly I am watching people. As I watch discreetly I wonder who they are, what their past is, what their values are, what they would be like to go fishing with, whether they love Jesus, how many hurts they are carrying around with them. I wonder if given a chance if I could be a friend and would be able to make any difference in their life. So many people like ants milling around each other, feeling, talking, strong, weak, pleasant, mean, responsible, lazy, selfish, loving. In Psalms it says, “God looks out on all the inhabitants of the earth, He who understands all their thoughts and motives, He who made them”. I wonder what God thinks and feels. One of the commands of Jesus is to “lift up our eyes and look at people”, He says, “they are like sheep without a shepherd”. I can’t do much here other than be pleasant to the waitress, but looking and wondering and praying diligently that somehow God will work, and draw, and convict, remove blinders, bind the demons, and bring a believer into their life. It is good for me and it is good for my heart to watch, wonder, and pray.

I try not to say I am tired when I feel tired, because it just amplifies the feeling, but for the sake of this blog I will violate that rule just this once. This week has been our “Five Days of Prayer”, and most mornings I have been getting up at 4 am and getting to bed about midnight. Tomorrow morning, Friday I am getting up at 3:30 am and driving to Portland to catch a plane to Sierra Vista, Arizona where I will be speaking over the weekend. I am sitting in my recliner writing this blog and it is 10:20 pm and I have a goal of getting to bed by 11 pm though I still have to do some packing. So, as I sit here, I let out a nice long sigh and say, “whoooeeee I am tired”. The best way to conquer the mental side of tiredness is to have a plan. So my plan is to ask Patty to set the coffee pot to go off at 3 am, pour it into my thermos in the morning and take it with me and drink coffee all the way to the airport, sleep on the plane, get to my motel room by 5 pm and read a bit and do my “disciplines” and be in bed by 8 pm and sleep in until 8 am. I don’t sleep for 12 hours very often, but I think I will do it this time. Nice plan. It is quite amazing how a good plan energizes my thinking and my attitude. I can sit here and say, “Whoooeeeee, I am tired”, but I say it with a smile because I know it is just temporary, because I have a plan!!

When our kids were involved in sports we would go to almost all of their games and cheer them on. I would get so involved and intense in their play, their effort and their performance that it was like I was trying to will them into a higher level of success. I would alternate between yelling encouragement, giving instruction, and then closing my eyes and praying, pleading with God to help them, then yell some more. By the end of a game I would be totally exhausted, almost like I had played it. Those were great days in our life.

Now I do that with people in our church. I get so totally and emotionally involved with each person in our church as I think about them, write about them, talk to them and pray for them. Some I cheer for and thank God profusely for their faithfulness and their growth in character as I observe their life. Others I plead with God to do SOMETHING, ANYTHING to bring them back to Him. I send notes, text messages, emails and make phone calls to those who are ignoring God and drifting away from Him, fearing that it is to late.

Sometimes I get so discouraged with my poor success at influencing people to not drift away from God that I wish I could just go ride a bicycle all by myself for the rest of my life, and not fret about anybody ever again. But I know that is not what my life is about, so let’s get after them, and I will rest in heaven.

I have been shooting my bow for the last week getting ready for a hunting trip to the Steens Mountains. It is my favorite place to hunt, and pretty much the only place I have hunted for the past 30 years. I have a big canvas bag stuffed with shrink wrap for a target. It stops an arrow cold after only a few inches of penetration. I have it hanging from the ends of rafters on my new garage that I recently built. I shoot 6 arrows at 20 yards, then 30, 40, 50, and 60 yards making a few small adjustments on my sights as needed. I take a short break and then repeat the sequence. I am starting to get most of the arrows in the center of the bag most of the time. Though I am getting pretty accurate with my bow, when I started in this year I had a bad habit of flinching as I released the arrow resulting in a really bad shot that ended up sticking in my garage wall instead of my nice arrow target. The result is there are a bunch of holes in my garage wall. When I get back from my hunting trip I am going to patch all the holes with Big Stretch caulking and paint it and it will be as good as new.

That garage wall is a picture of my life. When I do something wrong, hurt someone with my words, mess up with my money, fail to love Patty the way I should, or make a decision that results in a huge loss of time, it is like an arrow shot into my garage wall. 1 John 1:9 says that if I confess my sins that God will forgive me my sins, that is like pulling the arrows out of the wall. The problem is that there is still a hole that looks ugly, that is the consequences that I experience for the dumb things I have done. Though I am forgiven there is usually still a consequence for the sin committed. If I work at it, I can usually fix the consequence of my blunder by reconciling with the people I offended, or doing something to make up for my sin. It is my relational “big stretch caulking” liberally applied and then painted.

Many people just live with the holes in the wall because it seems easier just to ignore the consequences than fix them. It often is very humbling the fixing process and many instead of experiencing the humiliation of telling someone that we blew it will just pretend that it didn’t happen. Time does not take the hole in the wall away. It stays and gets uglier by the day.

To be relationally stupid means that that we often tend to do and say things that creates conflict and disunity with others and not be aware of it. It is often sad to see the blindness of many to the damage they cause with their attitude and words. It is often sort of a head shaker for me in dealing with people and helping them to grow in maturity so that they have healthy relationships. For many years I was very relationally stupid and the worst part was that much of the time was in the early years of ministry as a pastor. It took awhile , but I finally started figuring out what I was doing wrong from much advice and counsel from others who helped point out character flaws, blind spots, and what to do that is relationally intelligent. My main tool in growing in this area was a journal. Every time there was any kind of conflict, disunity, or a bit of a rub with another person I would describe the whole event in as much detail as I could remember in my journal, and then I would write, “I am 100% the problem, ‘Dear Lord, show me what I need to work on, show me my blind spots, Your commandment to me is to love others the way You do, but I can’t unless You help me”. I would then read what I wrote trying to see myself accurately. I would write down something I could see that needed changing, even if just a little bit, and then I would read it again, and find another blind spot. As I reread my little “short story” of the event I would often find 6 to 12 things I could have done or said differently. It didn’t take to many “short stories” about conflicts I was in to see some repeated offenses which increased my self-control to not do them. I began to read books on “relational intelligence” and “people skills” that taught me some basic pro-active ways to be likable, lovable, and relationally attractive. They were mostly simple little skills like asking good questions, listening attentively, making eye contact, not interrupting their story, not being argumentative, and smiling. I still have an occasional difficult time with another person and I still journal about it, and I am still learning and growing into a the kind of lover of people that Jesus was.

God admonishes and commands us to be devoted to prayer. Why? He desires our fellowship, conversation, intimacy, because He loves us. He is willing to bless us if we give Him time in prayer. In the gospel of John Jesus expresses His strongest of desires to God the father when He prays and says, “I desire that they be with me”, speaking of us. It is a mystery, but God enjoys our company. God invented prayer not as a powerful way to get things done, He is God, all powerful, and all wise, and He doesn’t need us to accomplish His will, He doesn’t need our permission to do anything. He invented prayer as a way of getting us to spend some time with Him. It is sad that we are to busy with life to spend a little time with the one who gave us life.

This next week is our “Five Days of Prayer”, and I plan on being there for at least 30. This is not because it is a religious duty, but because I am choosing to honor my God and my Savior by giving Him time. At the end of the week I will have experienced amazing peace, joy, and the level of inner strength will have grown significantly because I chose to hang out with God. This is not a super saint thing, it is just a loving God thing.

In the last couple of days I got to telling stories about different hunting trips we have been on with our kids over the years, the number of times and hours they tromped around in the woods with me even when they were really young. Tonight we got to talking sports and our kids and I began to recall the number of games we went to all the way until they were finished with college. Add to that homework, work days, other family trips, school activities, and just living together, there was a huge number of hours invested in the lives of these 8 kids until they got married, and a huge amount of money. But even with the cost in time and money the years of our life when they were home and part of our life was easily the most enjoyable years of my life. I am sure that God wired us up in such a way that our kids are a major fulfillment of our personal sense of mission, and thus fill us with a great sense of personal satisfaction of having done something that matters. One of the things that I am looking forward to in heaven is being able to remember all the events, and stories, and details,of all those years and trips and games that I have forgotten now. We sit around and reminisce now about the years gone by, and none of us, kids included can remember even a fraction of all that did happen, I am thinking that the reminiscing that we do in heaven is going to be really specIal with total recall and a divine perspective.

That is the world’s opinion, in fact that is probably way to nice of a word, those in the world would for sure use a much ruder word than foolish. But God in His Word says that He has chosen the foolishness of preaching as His method of communicating His truth. I get to preach at JBC this weekend. It has been about 2 months since I have preached, and even though I have preached for 40 years I still get really nervous when I preach after that long of a layoff. I have studied a bunch, written, thought, rehearsed, prayed, and now wring my hands.

My main goal is that I would teach accurately what the Bible teaches, and not add to or take away anything because of personal opinion or bias, and especially because of popular opinion or tradition. We live in a day and age when it seems everyone has very strong opinions on almost everything , and their personal opinion has become their God. Someone asked me recently what it means to “Fear God”. I said it means that you acknowledge that God is God, almighty, all powerful, all knowing, omnipresent, infinite, all wise, it is He who has made us, not we ourselves, He makes the rules, and He is in charge, not me.

The nervousness that I feel isn’t because people are listening, it is because God is listening, and I want so very much for Him to like what He hears.

Leadership is influence. To be a leader doesn’t mean you are the boss, it means that you influence people. You influence the decisions they make, you influence the way they talk and the things they buy, you influence how they treat other people. Some people have zero influence on those around them, that is being a non-leader. Others have huge influence on people, not just those they know well but also complete strangers. Some of our influence is simply a personality thing, but most of our influence is because of specific things we say and do because we have learned the skill and the art of leading people. I teach leadership every year at JBC. This year I am going to be teaching 5 different classes each week on how to be a leader. It is probably the most enjoyable and rewarding thing I do, and I can’t hardly wait for the first week in October when the classes begin. Over the last 40 years I have made the pursuit of Leadership excellence my main goal and passion. I have read literally hundreds of books on the topic, I have gone to many seminars taught by gifted leaders, and listened to hours of lectures and sermons on-line.

I am not a gifted or natural leader who can influence by the strength of his personality or charisma, but often those who are tend to rely on that giftedness and never really become a student of the skill or art of leading people. One of the most important principles to understand is that “authority” that is not power, position, or title but is a very special magnetism that attracts people to you and prompts them to listen and follow comes from God as a reward for certain kinds behavior. When Jesus spoke and taught the crowds it says that they marveled because he taught with authority.

The main requirement for God to give me His authority is to be faithful. Jesus said, “you were faithful with a few things, I will put you in charge of many things”. To be faithful is to keep your commitments and promises no matter how small or insignificant those commitments might be. Do what you said you would do, be where you said you would be, be a person others trust and can count on. Faithfulness is a character trait, it is a way of thinking, it is a learned discipline, and it is very pleasing to God and one that He rewards greatly.

When our kids were growing up at home we on most Mondays would keep the kids out of school, and we would have a family work day. We would do firewood, clean the house, fix the house, paint the house, go to the dump, but I think the favorite project was to butcher, cut up, grind and package a beef, sometimes an elk or deer. We did a beef today, We shot the critter, skinned and gutted her this morning, hauled her home and then started the process of getting all these nice packages of beef in the freezer. We put a piece of plywood on the dining room table and bring in one quarter at a time with a bunch of adults, kids, grandkids all around the the table hacking, cutting, grinding, and wrapping, but the best part is the eating!