Luke 15:8-9 What woman, if she has ten silver coins and loses one coin, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? When she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin I lost!’

Today I lost one of my hearing aids. I was lying on my back under my boat wiring in tail lights and turn signals, and I was swatting mosquitoes that were annoying me, and somehow one of them fell out. My hearing aids are Bluetoothed with my phone, and I noticed I was only hearing stuff in one ear, so I reached up to check it, and it was gone. I backtracked everywhere I had been and found it under the boat. It was tough to see in the grass, but I suspected it would be a likely place, so I looked for it thoroughly. I rejoiced greatly when I found it, and I texted Patty, and she rejoiced with me.

The point of Jesus’s story was that lost people need to be sought after and brought to faith in Jesus with at least as much earnestness as a hearing aid or a lost coin. A key way to develop a passion for influencing people is to pray faithfully for a list of people you know who don’t know Jesus. Praying for them every day will cause us to be more and more attentive to opportunities to invite them to church or share our story with them. Try it.

When I first started pastoring, my biggest hurdle was coming up with a good sermon every week. I was working part-time besides pastoring, so finding the time to study for and write sermons was challenging. About six months after starting to preach, I had a counseling session with a great seminary professor who taught preaching. One of the things he recommended was to listen to good preachers a lot, at least one sermon a day. He recommended listening to various preachers, but as I did, he said certain ones would resonate with me, and then zero in on my top four to six. He emphasized listening to things that made it easy to listen to and that helped hold my attention. I religiously did that daily sermon listening discipline for years, usually listening to about ten a week. I would listen while driving, milking cows, and mowing the lawn. One of my favorites was John MacArthur. I bought hundreds of cassettes of his sermons over the years. He died a couple of days ago. He was certainly ready to step into heaven, but the news made me very sad. I never met him, but I considered him a good friend. He had a significant influence on my life and my ministry over the years. The main thing that I got from him was to teach the Bible accurately and in a way that held people’s attention and not bore people with poor preaching of the Bible.

I woke up at 5:00 am and was at our meeting place at the JBC parking lot at 6:00 am. Four of us headed to the Portland airport, boarded the plane at 10:00 am, and landed in Anchorage at 2:00 pm. We boarded a small six-passenger airplane and landed in Kenai, Alaska, at 4:00 pm. We were picked up and drove  30 minutes to the Funny River Fishing Lodge. We unloaded all the stuff we had brought, and I got my stuff together and headed to the Kenai River to fish for sockeye salmon. I fished for two hours and caught nothing, so I am in the lodge eating popcorn and typing this blog. I will be here for three weeks, fishing for salmon and halibut and helping other guys catch fish. This is probably my favorite three weeks of the year. God truly blesses me for being able to do this every year. This is my 25th year here, fishing and helping others fish. I expect to catch over a hundred sockeye salmon and dozens of halibut. Life doesn’t get much better than that. God has indeed blessed my life. I have a wonderful marriage and wife, eight exceptional children, 28 grandchildren, a ministry of over fifty years that is God blessed, and I get to come to Alaska and fish. Thank you, Lord, for blessing my life.

Anticipation is what makes life so exciting. I am headed for Alaska at 6:00 am. We will get to the lodge at about 4:00 pm and be on the river fishing at about 7:00 pm. I can think of little else. I doubt that I will sleep very much tonight. I will wake up every 15 minutes and look at the clock, willing it to turn faster. The sad thing is that it will be over in three weeks, and I will be back home. Oh well, I have several other major fishing trips planned and a couple of hunting trips for this fall. I am anxiously awaiting each of those events. The most exciting thing I anticipate is Jesus coming and taking me to heaven. I think about that every morning when I wake up, every evening when I go to bed, read the news, and read my Bible. I am eagerly awaiting the coming of the Lord.

My favorite service of the year is this Sunday. It is the annual “Baptism at the Lake.” Regular services are cancelled, and we have a service outside at Lake Charles in Talbot. It begins with a fabulous potluck at noon, and then we have a worship time with testimonies mixed in by those getting baptized. The testimonies are people sharing their experience with Jesus and how they got to where they are spiritually on that day. The testimonies are amazing and are an incredible display of God’s work in people’s lives. After the testimonies and singing, we all go down to the Lake, just a few hundred feet away, and watch as people publicly declare that Jesus is Lord of their life. Baptism is a picture of dying to self, being buried, and then being resurrected to newness of life, where Jesus is running our lives now. I am pastoring at the Jefferson Evangelical Church, and we are joining Jefferson Baptist Church for this great event and Agape Family Fellowship in Albany. I don’t do much of the actual dunking anymore, just one person this time, but one of the highlights of my parenting and pastoring is that I got to baptize all eight of our kids. It is so rewarding to see all of them walking with Jesus and serving Him with their lives.

I am 76 years old, so I am officially a senior. I get price breaks in several places, and I no longer have to take my shoes off at the airport. Patty and I enjoy this chapter in our lives, especially with our family. The best part about getting older is that every day I am one day closer to heaven; it won’t be long now. I am part of a men’s group that meets on Tuesday morning, and everyone in the group is an old guy, so we start our meeting at 9:00 am instead of 6:00 am like those young guys do. I greatly enjoy my fellowship with these guys as we tell fishing stories and pray for each other’s ailments. I also periodically attend “Senior Friends” on Wednesday afternoons from 2:00 to 4:00 pm. This Friday, a “Seniors Concert” will be at the park in front of the Middle School and swimming pool at 6:00 pm. They will be playing and singing some “oldies.” I have attended the ones they have had in the past, and they are very good; everyone is welcome regardless of age. I believe God often gives older Christians who have lived a faithful life for Him an extra measure of grace as they finish their lives. That grace gives them a heightened sense of His presence, an increased thinking about spiritual truths, an increase in peace and joy, and an increase in spiritual growth. Maybe even with those who are struggling with senility and Alzheimer’s, they may have more going on in their soul than we are aware of. I end every day by saying, “Thank you, Lord, for my life, it has been a good one, and there is still more to come.”

Today, I went to my orthopedic surgeon for a final checkup and an X-ray of my new hip. Everything looks good. I have very little pain, and I am walking normally. I am ready for some serious fishing. I leave for Alaska on Monday and will be gone for three weeks. I am very thankful for my new hip; my old one hurt so bad that I don’t think I would have been able to fish much. The X-ray on my right hip looks as bad as my left one did, but it doesn’t hurt right now, so I will leave it alone. My surgeon said that, as bad as the X-rays look, he doesn’t think it will be long before it starts to give me fits. We will see. I am hoping Jesus comes back before I need the surgery. It has been just five weeks since my surgery, and the entire experience has been relatively easy, so if I need to get my right hip replaced, it wouldn’t be much of a trial. If anybody is considering joint replacement, I highly recommend my surgeon and his outfit. They were very professional and gracious. I know that as I get older, the probability of various body parts wearing out is high, and that surgeries of different levels of seriousness are probably in my future. I worked hard this last couple of months to always rejoice, pray for strength and peace, and not be a grumpy old man. It is easy to let life get us down, but God will give us all we need to manage the trials, pressure, and pain if we ask Him. That doesn’t mean He will take it away; it’s just that we can endure it, grow, and be a blessing to those in our lives, instead of a pain. 

I have five gopher traps that I have set in my backyard, trying to catch what I believe is one gopher making a mess. I usually have success catching gophers, but this one is wily. He has tripped my traps 4 or 5 times without getting caught. I am using all my years of gopher-trapping experience, so it will only be a matter of time before I catch him. We caught the one making a mess in the front yard, and when I catch this Wily one, it looks like we have another out in the orchard. My Dad hated gophers in the hay fields. The mounds of dirt they made were very hard on the cycle blades on the swather. He would pay us .25 cents for each gopher we could trap. I used to tie a string from the trap to an empty white plastic chlorine jug so I could find them, and then, when the hay got taller, I had wooden stakes with red surveyors’ tape on them. Whenever I see a field full of gopher mounds, I think of what my Dad would say. There are people around who make an income from trapping gophers. Several years ago, a guy pulled into the church parking lot to ask a question, and while we were talking, I looked in the back of his pickup, and it was half full of dead gophers. That was his business. Once, while I was on a bicycle trip, Patty hired a guy to catch a gopher that was making a mess in our yard, and he charged $25. That is a lot more than the .25 cents I used to make as a kid. Gophers are a nuisance, and I have jokingly said that God sends them as discipline for sin in our lives. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that they are demons, messengers of satan, meant to keep us humble. Whatever, I am going to kill as many as I can.

Saah Joseph was at Jefferson Baptist Church tonight and will be there tomorrow as well. He is a Senator in the West African country of Liberia. I first met Saah in 2002 in Sierra Leone right after the end of the awful 20-year civil war between Sierra Leone and Liberia over control of diamonds, often called the “Blood Diamond” war. Saah was a young refugee of the war. Four of us flew over to Sierra Leone to investigate the possibility of starting a mission work there. The four of us along with Saah and the driver of our rented car drove across Sierra Leone. It was the craziest experience of my life. The country was totally destroyed because of the war, people were living in mud huts with banana leaf roofs in terrible poverty. The roads were so bad that we had 7 flat tires and with no service stations getting them fixed was a challenge. We were there for several weeks and while we were there we started two churches. Since that time many more churches have been started along with dozens of schools and a Seminary. Saah and I became very good friends on that first trip over to Sierra Leone and it was so good to see him tonight. I have been back to Sierra Leone and Liberia about 20 times since 2002, and I am looking forward to going back again this April. Tonight Saah said that he would drive down to where I will be when I go, and we could drive around the country for old times sake. The roads are much better now so it won’t be quite like that first trip. A very funny thing happened on that first trip. The car we were in was overheating so the driver stopped by a small creek to get some water to put in. We didn’t realize it but there was an old man in the creek taking a bath. When Saah and the driver started towards where he was he dipped down under the water holding his breath. They took a while to get the containers filled with water and the old man couldn’t hold his breath any more so he burst out of the water making this weird noise as he gasped for air. It terribly scared Saah and the driver and they came scrambling back to the car yelling that they saw a demon! As we looked back and saw this naked old man standing in the creek looking more scared than we were we all got a great laugh out of it, but I am sure that the old guy in the creek had no idea what was so funny.

There are 26 different character traits that I focus on as I pursue Christ-like maturity for myself. I was strong in some of them early because of my parents’ training, such as diligence. I am still weak in some of them, but I am working on them diligently. I think that my weakest character trait is gentleness, and most people who know me well would agree. I know my wife does. Several character traits are mentioned in the Bible that have a lot of blessings from God attached to them, and gentleness is right at the top. God loves gentleness and uses and rewards those strong in this character trait.  Gentleness is one of the two character traits mentioned that Jesus had. Many men are probably weak in this character trait because it seems feminine or weak. The King James word for gentleness is meekness, which sounds like weakness.

A significant requirement by God for those He would use as leaders is gentleness. Not many of our leaders in today’s world would rate very high in gentleness, however you would define it. Gentleness is influencing and persuading people with no irritation or anger. It is motivating people by honoring them. It is recognizing that we all are easily hurt or offended and working hard not to do that. As Jesus defined it, gentleness is treating people as you would like to be treated. Treating people with gentleness takes great strength, self-control, confidence, and godly self-worth. I have several people in my life who are very strong in this character trait, so I have good models to follow, and I am growing slowly but steadily to be more and more gentle.