i am self aware. I carry on a conversation with myself all day long. I have thoughts that I know and nobody else does. I think about my future, my past, my likes, and my dislikes. Self awareness is not something I think about often, but occasionally the awareness of it and the truth of it just sort of washes over me. Some think that our existence has no meaning, no purpose, no plan, but as I think about my existence my aliveness, my iniqueness, and the very strong sense of “future”  I believe without a doubt that I am eternal, that is I will never cease to be self-aware, to be alive, to talk with myself, and to anticipate and plan the future. God created me as an act of His will with a plan for my life. His  premeditated planning, and giving me existence so that I can know Him and live with Him is a great act of love. I exist, I exist, I exist, I exist, so amazing, so mind boggling, such a mystery. I will live my future with Him, in His presence with incomprehensible joy or I will live my future away from Him, separated, with no joy, zero.  If I really want to live with God forever I choose to believe in Him, to seek Him, to need Him, to draw near to Him.

A characteristic of us people is that we are finite as opposed to infinite. We can only do so much, and we can only be in one place at a time. That means that if we want to maximize our life we must choose wisely how we use our time, our energy, and our resources.  It really does boil down to choices that we make. At every intersection in our life and there are dozens every day there are multiple options to choose from, just like a menu in a Resturant. Wisdom is what we need to make choices that are absolutely the best. The book of Provers in the Bible says that if we have wisdom we will do well.  Part of our problem is that the wrong choices available to us have a lot of things about them that make them appealing to us and fool us into picking them. The best choices result in happiness, unity, peace, success, character growth. The less than best choices result in conflict, frustration, unhappiness, anxiety, failure. A major part of being wise is recognizing that every word we speak is a choice and that we choose  all day long and that every one of them brings consequence or blessing even the seemingly little and unimportant ones. Every day we are sowing and reaping. Sowing seeds of the choices we make that day, and reaping the consequences or rewards of the sowing we have done in days past. Life is not random, or an accident, it is precise, governed, and designed to make us wiser and more mature if we pay attention and learn.

we all seek happiness. In fact  we are driven by that universal quest for happiness. It is what everybody wants but very few know how to get. Most think it comes from the events and circumstances in our life being good instead of bad which makes them a victim, meaning they can’t control whether they are happy or not because most of the events in our life are outside the realm of our control. We got back from our two week trip to Sierra Leone, West Africa last night at 7 pm and I have been feeling extraordinarily happy all day today. I was curious why so I started writing my thoughts down, and it turned into “The Ten Commandments to having Great Joy”. As I finished writing and retread several times what I had put together I thought to myself, “that is pretty good”.  The reason I thought it was good is because it was simple, and easy to understand and it was guaranteed to work. It seems a bit prideful to declare a personal work”Good”, but we all do it whether it is a wood working project, a painting, or an apple pie. I am very seldom totally pleased with things I write, most of the time I am very discontent with it and struggle to make it better.  I am going to preach it this weekend at JBC so if you want to know the “Ten Commandments to having joy” our services are 7 pm on Saturday night and 9 and 11:30 am on Sunday morning. You can also go to our web sight and listen to the recording of it. Www.jeffersonbaptistchurch.org

My goal is to read 100 pages each week in good books. We didn’t do a whole lot today and the next two days we will be traveling home, doing a lot of sitting so I will get in a lot of reading time, and get ahead a bit on my goal that is 5,000 pages a year. Today I downloaded some books from Amazon on my IPad to read, one of them is called, “Grit, The Power of Passion and Perseverence” which the author says is the true secret to success in any area of life. I finished about half of it today and it is a good read. One of the good quotes is, “people like to believe in the gifted, natural, talented, intelligent person being great because it lets them off the hook for being mediocre, but the statistical facts overwhelmingly prove that the greatest, most successful people were and are the ordinary in the world but they have grit”. Grit is defined as the combination of hard work, a never give up attitude, and a huge level of discontentment with present accomplishments. Almost any person can be a champion if they have grit and almost any person can acquire grit, but a catch is, most will need to be coached and mentored by a person who already has grit in order to acquire it for themselves, and most won’t be teachable and humble enough to be mentored and coached by someone else. So it looks like the main difference between high achievers, average, and low achievers is pride and humility. 

I skipped day 9 but we have been on a driving trip around the country the last couple of days visiting churches and schools that JBC has had a part in starting, and there was no internet service last night where we stayed. We also visited 2 new churches that have just started up and that was very fun. They both gathered all their people together though it was on Saturday and they sang and we did some praying with them. The church that we visited this afternoon that is new had a children’s program for us where they sang and danced. I wish the Internet was good enough to be able to send the video I took so you could see these little kids dancing African style. They had a little boy, probably about 7 or 8 that was amazing playing a drum. Their church facility was bamboo rods that formed the walls and ceilings like studs and rafters covered with plastic with dirt floor and wood benches. It was a cool little church. I was incredibly blessed being there with them. Tomorrow Brad and I are going to visit some shops in Freetown to do the tourist thing and then come back here to the compound for a 4th of July celebration with the missionaries that are here, and then Tuesday we head back home. It will be good to get home. The heat and humidity and general conditions really tucker me out, but it will be sad leaving because it is so rewarding working and serving here helping the pastors and churches. If I were 10 years younger I would spend 2 months a year here instead of bicycling around the country. Oh well, I will do what I can and pray a lot.

Today was the last day of class and we ended it at noon. Each of the pastors took an exam for the class that I had prepared which took almost all of them about 2 hours to complete. The answers required quite a bit of thinking and writing, and I worded them in such a way that they couldn’t just repeat back information  they had memorized, but they really had to understand the principles that I had been teaching them for 4 days, and how they applied to their church. Most of them did very well, and the couple of guys who didn’t missed quite a bit of class. It was very rewarding to read the answers and see not only understanding but desire and anxiousness to begin putting into practice what they had learned. I am excited to read the papers they will write that are due in one month on their strategy and plans to lead their churches to being healthy and growing. We left shortly after noon to drive around Sierra Leone to visit a number of our churches. It is very enjoyable because the country is so beautiful and the African culture and lifestyle is so interesting. Tomorrow should be a lot of fun as we will be visiting churches who are expecting us and they usually have a nice reception with a bit of “show and tell” to show us how they are doing. I am so thankful to God that He opened up doors of opportunity over the years to serve Him like this. It is incredibly rewarding.

I had a very vivid real dream last night. I can’t remember the last time I have had any kind of dream, especially one like this that seemed so real. I woke up with a start thinking that I was getting bit hard by some kind of bug. I looked down next to me where I thought I was getting the bite and I saw a big spider the size of my hand that was bright yellow with big fang like teeth. When I went to kill him he ran off into the sheets. I reached over and grabbed my phone to use as a light and began frantically tearing my bed apart looking for this vicious bug. It was about then that I realized that this wasn’t real and sheepishly looked over at Brad’s bed to see if he was watching the show I was putting on. He was sound asleep and in the morning said he didn’t hear anything. I have heard that the medicine I am taking to prevent Malaria can cause dreams, and boy, did it. I am kind of looking forward to tonight to see what kind of adventure I have while sleeping. We had another great day at Grace Bible Institute teaching the Pastors. Today we talked about barriers to church growth. Things about our churches that discourage unbelievers and unchurched people from coming and attending our churches.  We talked about legalism and how churches often make a long list of rules that define holiness. The pastors said that it was especially  bad in Africa.  After we kicked it around for awhile with a number of them getting very heated and emotional, I shared that we needed to keep the rules to a minimum and only what was very clearly spelled out in the Bible with no stretching to include our favorite prohibition. And even with the short list we needed to remember that people become part of God’s family by faith, not good works or the absence of bad things, and that the pursuit of a godly lifestyle happens after we are born again, not before. They are an incredibly teachable group of guys who love Jesus and want to be good Pastors.

As I taught the pastors today they would periodically interject a condition in Africa that they thought  prevented them from doing as pastors what I was teaching them to do. When they threw it out as a real problem they assumed that it wasn’t that way in America, therefore I had it easier than they did and they were justified in not growing as a church.  In every instance Brad and I would say, yep, I know what you are saying, it is the exact same way in America, and then we would tell a similar story. One was, “here in Sierra Leone, if you say something they don’t like or if you don’t meet their needs like they think you should they leave!”, another one was, “people find so many things to do on Sunday and they don’t come to church much!”, and this one was a little unique for them, “I discipled and trained this guy to be a leader in our church and an Elder and then he announced to me that he was going to get a second wife” , in the U.S. they try and keep it a secret when they get another woman in their life. So we agreed together that people are the same all over the world, and getting people to love Jesus and follow him with all their heart was very hard work, but not impossible. It is rare to find people who have faith in Jesus and also a strong commitment to obey and follow Him, but that is the goal of our ministries. It has been a lot of fun teaching and interacting with them. They are very teachable and truly want to serve the Lord as they lead their churches.

Today was the day that I taught on goal setting to the pastors at our Bible Institute. It was incredibly rewarding to hear them share some of the goals they were making for their lives, ministries and churches. Conditions are so bad here it is very easy for the Pastors to become “small thinkers” in regards to the possibilities that they have in their churches. My personal goal in teaching them is that they would dream some big dreams and not be afraid or intimidated  to go for their dreams. I was pretty sure a couple of them would come up with some reasonably aggressive growth goals, but I didn’t think they would be willing to share them for fear that the others would think they were crazy. But they all were amazingly bold and excited about doing something big for God. They just shared a little bit today, tomorrow the assignment of writing 12 goals is due and they are to read them in class. I can hardly wait to hear what they are going to share. Today they read their personal prayers of commitment that they are committed to praying every morning for the rest of their lives. It was so cool to hear them read commitments like, “I will love my wife like Jesus loves me”, “I will read my Bible everyday, everyday, everyday”, “I will pray for every person in my church every week”, “I will not get angry at anybody no matter what they do”, and on the list went. It was enough to get a non-emotional guy like me all choked up, and a bit misty eyed.

Monday through Friday is the day’s Grace Bible Institute has class for the pastors of the churches we have started. Today was the first day of class and it went very well. There is very little electricity in the country so we had a generator and ran wires and extension cords to laptops, projectors, fans and lights. It all worked super. We had class from 9 to noon and from 1 to 4 pm. Today I taught about leadership, how to earn the right to lead, and the goal of leadership in a local church. I also got started on goal setting and how goals give us the tools for becoming a visionary leader that people follow. It is fun to teach them because they are so hungry to learn, to grow personally, and have their churches grow. Pastor Brad Ils who pastors Turning Point in Turner, Oregon, one of our daughter churches, came on this trip with me and he is team teaching with me and it is making it so much easier on my voice, and he does a super good job teaching as well.  I gave all the pastors some homework tonight to write a personal prayer of commitment to the Lord that they can pray each morning. They will read them in class tomorrow so that should be very moving for me. It is humbling to think about how things have worked out over the years, doors God has opened up, and here I am in Africa teaching Pastors how to successfully reach the lost, lead their churches and grow. It is a great blessing to be used by God.