I heard so many people tonight at JBC’s Saturday Easter service say that it was our best Easter service ever! I am not sure what all the criteria in their minds were for declaring it the best, but I declared it amazing, wonderful, inspiring, God-anointed, and a couple of other adjectives, I stopped short of saying it was the best because I can’t remember last year’s Easter service. 🤪

We had a JBC record number of hours of prayer at our five days of prayer this past week so I knew that our Easter services were going to be very God anointed, and Saturday night was that for sure and tomorrow’s will be even more blessed, I am confident of that!

I have been at this prayer thing for so many years now that it is as sure as gravity in my mind and heart, when there is no prayer there is no blessing, when there is a little prayer there is a little blessing, when there is a lot of prayer there is a lot of blessing. It is a law of God. For as much as I push and nag about prayer there are still so many people in our church whose participation in JBC’s prayer ministry is very small to none.

It is because their faith in what God will do if they do pray together with their church family is very small. They don’t believe that God hears their prayers, they don’t believe that anything beyond a single prayer request matters to God. They believe God is going to do what he is going to do and our prayers will make zero difference.

Those who are non-prayers in our church reduce the amount of blessing that we all receive from God I am sure. We are a local church with a name and we meet together, we worship together, we take communion together and God’s will is that we pray together. The non- prayers make me sad because of their lack of involvement in the most important ministry in our church. I still am nice to them, I even fish with some of them, but they do make me sad.

I only slept about two hours last night because my Parkinson’s was acting up so much. When I came to prayer this morning at 5:00 am I was in a bad mood and feeling sorry for myself. About the 7:00 am prayer time I had a thought that I could ask everybody to pray for me that God would heal me of this Parkinson’s. I have never done that in the ten years that I have had this disease, but it has never been as bad as it has been in the last month. A number of people gathered around me, laid hands on me and prayed for me. While the different people were praying I wondered what would happen. God didn’t cure the disease but He did cure my bad attitude, and my resolve to exercise diligently went up substantially and I went home from prayer this morning and rode my stationary bike for an hour and then ran on my treadmill for 30 minutes and then lifted weights for 30 minutes. Tonight I am feeling much better and when I go home at 10:00 pm I plan on riding some more. Basically what I experienced this morning was encouragement from the Body of Christ. It made a huge difference in my heart and in my thinking.

I got to thinking today that probably the worst thing for me would be to get healed because then I would quit exercising and that has been such a key thing for my positive energy level. Oh well, Jesus is coming soon and then I will get my new glorified body.

Bats are ugly, only a very weird person would call them cute. They often represent evil in movies and TV programs. If you tried to draw a picture of a demon you would probably end up with a bat picture. They are known to be rabies infected and will give you rabies with a bite. And I have never seen a menu from a restaurant that offered bat as one of their foods of choice. As a result I have never gotten negative feedback on any of my bat-killing stories. So here goes another one.

Bats don’t have much in the way of eyesight. They fly around using sonar to see and navigate with. They make these “ping” sounds and they hear them as they rebound off of objects and things in their path. They eat bugs and their sonar is so good that they can spot a bug and catch and eat it in mid-flight. So if you try and hit a bat with a baseball bat you will miss badly because their sonar easily picks it out and dodges your swing.

My brothers and I used to kill bats using a tennis racquet. The holes in the racquet made it harder for their sonar to connect on. The bats would fly a circular route through the barn where the light attracted bugs then out the door and back around and through the barn again entering in through a window. One of us would have the tennis racquet ready for a mighty swing standing right in front of the window that they entered the barn through. Another one of us would be looking out the door and watching and the moment we would see a bat entering the window we would yell “Now!” and the tennis racquet-wielding brother would swing and often smack a bat head-on, and knock it across the room into the wall dead as a piece of wood. The key to the kill was the timing between the “spotter” and the “swinger.” It took a little practice but it wasn’t long before we would kill half a dozen bats.

We have had three hours of prayer each night for three days for our Easter service at Agape Family Fellowship, the church that I am pastoring. We hand-addressed 2,500 envelopes to the residents within a three-mile radius of Agape with an invitation to our Easter service. We have been encouraging all regular attendees to invite, Invite, invite.

So the question that was asked tonight at prayer was, “How many people are going to come on Easter?” the answer, “no clue!”

How long am I going to live? No clue.

Am I going to get cancer? No clue.

There are literally hundreds of questions about the details of my life that I have no answer for, I simply have no way of knowing what the answer is without being able to prophesy the future. I can guess but they are not intelligent guesses, just guesses.

The unknown causes a lot of people to worry and fret resulting in all kinds of negative consequences in their life, relationships, and health, both mental and physical.

The Bible is full of admonitions and promises in regard to our unknown future, and all of them can be summed up and stated in two words, “trust God.”

The promise of trusting God is peace, security, and joy. That sounds good to me, I think I will do that. I will occasionally start to fret and then I simply say out loud, “I trust You, Lord.” It works well for me, give it a try, unless you enjoy worrying.

Have you ever thought about the disciples of Jesus much. They were dumber than a fence post. They watched Jesus make water into wine, how did he do that?! They gathered up all the left overs when Jesus took a little kids lunch and multiplied it enough so that 5,000 men, their wives and kids were all fed to over flowing. They watched Lazerous hop out of the tomb at the command of Jesus after being dead for days. They watched Him walk on water. They listened to Him teach about Himself being the long-awaited Messiah. And then when he was arrested and crucified they fell apart. It seems strange that so little sunk in with them. It seems like it would have been easy for them to think, “No biggy, He will be back in three days.”

What about us?

Romans 1:19-20
because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.

We are afraid of death, we get uptight about a virus, we worry and fret about our financial future, we constantly are getting our feelings hurt. Do we really have any faith?

Colossians 3:2
Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth.

Friday night at the “Good Friday” service when you eat the piece of bread and drink the cup, say to yourself and to God, “I believe! And I will live like it!”

I learned how to read by reading comic books. I had boxes and boxes of comic books and I would take them to school and trade the ones I had read to others for ones I hadn’t read. I majored in the adventure heroes like Superman, Batman and Robin, Flash, Aquaman, and Spiderman. I was pretty much done with comic book reading when I got to the 6th grade. Up until then, my Dad was in the Navy and we followed his ship up and down the west coast. We had a Plymouth station wagon with three full bench seats in it, and the back one was one of those that faced backward. Everybody in our family got motion sickness riding in the back seat except for me so that was my seat, and I would spend hours riding in that seat, facing backward reading comic books. One of the things about comic books written and published in the 50s was that the superheroes were good guys who did what was right and the storyline always had a moral lesson for life in it. I was a fast reader even when I was just starting in school and I read a lot, I was always reading and needed to trade a lot in order to have new stories. Because of the physical conditioning I received from riding backward in our station wagon and reading while traveling I never get motion sick today. I can go out in the absolute worst storms in a small boat and not get even a little bit seasick. Once we went to a Theme park with lots of super big and fast roller coasters. We had about 8 junior high boys with us and I challenged them to a roller coaster “ride off”. We would keep riding until only one was left. I won that contest easily and had a new reputation when it was over.

Proverbs 12:24
The hand of the diligent will rule,
But the slack hand will be put to forced labor.

Proverbs 12:27
A lazy man does not roast his prey,
But the precious possession of a man is diligence.

Patty and I targeted the character trait of diligence as we trained our kids to be champions for Christ as they grew up. If you target a character trait you need to have it defined clearly enough so that the strategy is clear and measurable. The clearer and the more precise the strategy the easier it is to do and measure the success in accomplishing it.

A person with the character trait of diligence will be a person who has goals, strong desires, and dreams. Diligence can exist for diligence’s sake in mature individuals but it is very hard to instill it in kids without a reason to be diligent. Diligence becomes a means to an end. With kids or with lazy individuals the key to training them to be increasingly more diligent is with highly desirable rewards. The pursuit of the reward will stimulate hard work and after a period of time of working hard to achieve goals or to earn a desired reward, diligence will become more and more an ingrained character trait, or as Proverbs puts it, a possession. Once diligence becomes a character trait the joy of working hard, fast, and efficiently becomes the motivation, working hard becomes fun. Accomplishment in and of itself is very rewarding and fulfilling.

If a person is going to successfully target a weakness, such as laziness, and train themselves to be diligent they will need to have already trained themselves to be humble or have been trained by others. If a person can’t examine their own life and accurately determine that they are lacking in diligence they will never accomplish it. We are so naturally self-protective that we become self-deceived and become blind to character deficiencies. The person who is serious about growing in character will seek counsel and input from a few trusted people who will be a reliable source of information on what they need to work on and how they are doing as they do target a weakness. Recruiting someone to be a personal coach in developing character traits is very, very effective. I am sure that the humility of such a decision brings about great blessing from God.

Mr. Craigett would spend many hours everyday mining for gold on his claim on Rancheria Creek. Gold was only $35 an ounce back then so he had to work quite a lot of hours to make much money. His system of mining wasn’t super fast.

He had built a sluice box out of 1×12 lumber that was about 20 feet long. If you don’t know, a sluice box is a chute, usually about 12 to 18 inches wide and 6 to 8 inches tall and open on the top with riffles in the bottom. Mr. Craigett’s riffles were 1 inch by 1 inch and 18 inches long so they went across the width of the sluice box. He had a riffle about every 2 inches, and they were connected together at the ends so he could take the riffle out and if would look like a little toy ladder.

He would shovel sand and gravel into five-gallon buckets from his “hot spot” carry them about 50 feet and dump them into the top end of his sluice box. He had diverted some of the creek into his sluice box so the water would wash the debris out the end of the sluice. Because gold is heavier than the sand and gravel it would sink down quickly and get lodged behind one of the riffles. One of the variables with sluice boxes is how steep to make it because that determines how fast the water will flow through the chute. If the water goes too slow it won’t wash out the sand, gravel, and dirt, but if it goes too fast it will wash out some of the gold. After he had dumped about 20 buckets into his sluice box he would pull the riffles out and wash what they had caught down and into a bucket. He would then spend hours with a big rusty gold pan, panning the gold out of the stuff that was in the bucket. It was quite an art and skill to sift the contents of the bucket around in a pan separating the gold out from everything else.

One of Mr. Craigett’s little secrets (his words) was when he had panned for a while he would pour a small vile of mercury into the pan and roll it around in the pan. Mercury will attract and hold gold inside the glob of mercury. He would do that until his vile of mercury was saturated with gold dust and wouldn’t pick up anymore. He would then take a potato, cut it in half, scoop a little hole in the center of one side of the potato and then he would pour the vile of gold-saturated mercury into the hole, he would then put the halves back together and wrap it with aluminum foil. He would then put the potato into a little campfire he had built. The mercury would evaporate, the gold would melt and all the little specks of gold would run together into a nugget about the size of the end of your thumb. He had a pint jar that had all the nuggets of gold he had mined.

When Mr. Craigett died my Dad filed on the claim. After I had started Pastoring at Jefferson and he had sold the cows and dairy to my brother he would take a couple of weeks every summer and go down and mine for gold. He would stop and pick me up and we would spend two weeks trying to get rich together. That was a great way for me to spend time with my Dad. I kick myself for not filing on that claim after Dad died, it would be a great summer activity with my grandkids.

Mr. Craigett didn’t have any transportation. Someone would drive to his house about once a month, we assumed it was family or friends bringing him some food and supplies. He had a mailbox on the main road, and he would walk from his house about once a week, climb over the metal gate which was across the BLM Road, get his mail, climb back over the gate, and walk home. We told him on numerous occasions that the gate was not locked, he could just open it and walk through instead of climbing over, but for some reason he just kept climbing over it.

Mr. Craigett didn’t have a shower and he would occasionally take a “spit bath” using water in his pan in the house on his shelf with a wash rag. He would always wear two pairs of long underwear. He would buy a new pair once every six months and he would put that pair on next to his skin. The outer pair he would throw away and the old pair that had been next to his skin became the new outer pair. You could smell Mr. Craigett a long-time before you saw him. I remember thinking that it was kind of a cool smell, a tough man smell.

One time Mr. Craigett came to our house and asked if someone could please drive him to the hospital in town. He always carried an old army surplus 38 caliber pistol in his belt. While climbing over the gate the pistol went off and shot him in the butt. The bullet evidently went all the way through and didn’t hit any bone or anything vital but he was bleeding pretty good, but the two pairs of long underwear seemed to be acting as a good bandage. Mom took him to the hospital and then took him back to his house when they were done with him at the hospital. We all were anxious to hear how he was doing and we were waiting for Mom to give us the full story. She said his wound was going to be fine, but that on the 13-mile drive to the emergency room he kept fussing about his underwear, he was very angry that he had shot a hole through both pairs! Mom said that while she was waiting for him she went to a store and bought him a new pair of long underwear. He was very appreciative.

He did start opening the gate after that instead of climbing over.

The farm that we lived on in Myrtle Creek, Oregon from 1960 to 1965 was bordered on one side by BLM land. There was a road that went through our property into this BLM land and it had a gate across the road to keep our beef cows from getting out. It was the entry into thousands of acres of timberland and great hunting and fishing. Up the road about a mile lived an old man named Mr. Craigett. He had a gold claim on a little creek called Rancheria Creek. His house was a one-room shack about 12 feet square. He had an outhouse for his bathroom, and in the house, he had a shelf with two pans on it, one was for washing his face and the other was for washing his dishes. He hauled the water in five-gallon buckets from the creek and poured the used water out just outside the door of his house. On the same shelf, he had a propane camp stove, and he also had a little pot-bellied wood stove that he could cook on as well. The shack was lit with a propane camping lantern hung from the ceiling. On the opposite wall from his wash bench was his bed and in the middle of the room was a small table and several chairs and he also had a rocking chair. The shack was built with 1×12 boards with no insulation, with no windows, and when you walked up to it at night light showed through the walls around every board.

Us boys would walk up there occasionally to visit him and listen to the cool stories he would tell. One time he invited us to go fishing with him, we loved to fish so we went with him. We walked up the creek a ways where there were some beaver dams that formed some fairly large ponds. In the ponds were swimming a number of salmon that had swum up the creek to spawn. Mr. Craigett had a long willow rod with a large 6/0 hook fastened on the end with some baling wire and tape. He slid the willow rod along the bottom of the pond and when a salmon swam over it he would snag it and drag it out of the water. After he got one he handed off the rod to us boys and we each caught one as well. That was the best salmon fishing trip that I have ever had. Mom and Dad didn’t know what to think when they got home and there were three big salmon in the kitchen sink. We had been corrupted by Mr. Craigett.

We always thought that Mr. Craigett was so lucky to live in such a cool house.