This is the 25th year in a row that I have come to Alaska to fish for salmon. In the past years, I have fished for 12 to 14 hours each day. I figured I could catch up on sleep time when I got home. The joy of fishing motivated and energized me. But, alas, I am almost 76 years old, and my body won’t keep up or cooperate with my brain anymore. I was supposed to get up at 3:00 am and fish with my son Seth. When the alarm went off this morning, I told him to go without me, and I slept until 9:00 am. The group returned from fishing a few minutes ago and caught lots of salmon, and all said to me, “You should have come, Dee; fishing was awesome!” I felt like a lazy old man. ‘Two Bible verses have become a focus in my meditation lately and have helped tremendously in accepting my need for increased sleep and rest time.

Psalms 37:7 Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him;
Do not fret because of life’s limitations.

Psalms 131:2 Surely I have composed and quieted my soul;
Like a weaned child rests against his mother,
My soul is like a weaned child within me.

Such is life; enjoy it.

In the 75 years I have lived in all the activities and areas of my life, nothing has been more important than my wife, Patty, and our eight kids. The kids are all gone, married with their own kids now, and I don’t see most of them much now. So when I get an opportunity to spend some quality time with any of them, it is a special time. Our son Seth lives in Idaho with his family, so I don’t get to see him often. He just had his 40th birthday, and his family gave him a gift to come to Alaska and fish with me. We fished with our kids a lot as they grew up, and Seth was particularly good at it, even when he was little. We were fishing this morning at 4:00 am, and he caught his second salmon and yelled for everyone to hear, “Dad, one fish, son, two fish!”

The Bible makes it clear that God desires our fellowship with Him. Jesus died for us so our sins, which are the main barrier between us and God, could be taken care of, erased, canceled, buried, never to be remembered again. God created prayer as the primary way to spend time with Him, get to know Him, and experience His presence. When I think of how important time with my kids is to me, I am often convicted by the relatively small amount of time I give to God, seeking Him, drawing near Him, and talking to Him in prayer. I have to set goals, commit to specific times, and keep track of my prayer time. If I don’t, everything in life sucks up my time, and I get to the end of the day and have ignored God.

I am having a very good time in Alaska fishing on the Kenai River. We are catching a lot of sockeye salmon and eating lots of food. George is an amazing cook, and I am sure I will gain at least 5 pounds while here. I am also having incredible times of fellowship with the other guys here fishing. There is something about fish camps and hunting camps that produce a unique bond between guys.

I am big-time sleep-deprived, often getting up at 3:00 am and occasionally fishing all night. I am trying hard to keep up with my Bible reading, Scripture memory, and prayer time, but I usually fall asleep while reading. We see moose most days, as well as otters and other wildlife. A plus for this year’s fishing trip is that my son Seth is fishing with me. Because he lives in Idaho, I don’t get to see him often, so I am very much enjoying this time.

‘I tell the Lord “thank You,” every day for the privilege of fishing in Alaska. James 1:17 says, “Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.”

The day started great as we launched off of Ninilchick beach with my boat. They back you up into the surf with big tractors and pick you up the same way. It is rather exciting. We motored out about a mile and anchored and started catching fish. But after we caught several nice halibuts we started catching nothing but sharks, small four foot sand sharks. So we moved locations and we started having trouble keeping the outboard motor running. In the process of continually starting it we ran the battery dead. We had a small trolling motor on the boat as well and as we started back in with it, it froze up and wouldn’t turn over. We called the launch service and they called a boat that was out fishing who came and towed us into the beach and we were able to get the boat on our trailer. Being out in the ocean with no power is a scary experience. As many adventures as I have had this was one of the best or worse, depending how you look at it.

Lots of Christians try to live their lives with no power. It doesn’t work very well. We need God’s power to successfully navigate life. God loves to give His power to those who ask Him for it, and ask a lot. Believe me, I was asking a lot today.

As we drove from Oregon to Alaska with its various stops, and here in Soldtna, as I went to various places to get stuff to fix the boat, we ran into cheerful people who treated us with respect and graciousness, and we dealt with grumpy people. The tow truck driver who picked up our boat when the tongue broke was one of the grumpiest people I have experienced. The people at the border crossings treated us as a major infringement on their lives.

People who are grumpy, if called on it, always have a justification that has to do with their circumstances. Being nice to people is a choice we make in spite of how bad our circumstances may be. We don’t have to treat people poorly because we are feeling poorly. Treating people with respect, honoring them, and giving them grace by the way we talk are the foundation of Christian behavior. The main command Jesus gives us is to love people as much as Jesus has loved us.

Grumpiness is selfish, childish., and very displeasing to God. Being nice is a choice we can make at any time because it is the right way to live.

Three friends and I left for Soldotna, Alaska, Sunday at 5:00 pm, pulling my 26-foot dory boat. We planned to drive the 2850 miles straight, stopping only for fuel and potty breaks, rotating drivers, and sleeping in our seats. Our goal was to drive it in 60 hours, which ended up taking 72 hours. The reason for the extra hours was because of all the adventures we had. The first delay was at the border. We must have looked suspicious because they went through the pickup after interrogating us, and we were there for an hour. The next adventure was when we noticed the hull was developing some cracks. The motor was pretty heavy, and the road was very bouncy. We decided to take the motor off and lay it on the boat’s floor. The problem was that the motor was very heavy, and we didn’t think the four of us could lift it into the boat. So I googled “truck mechanics” to find someone with a hoist, and the first one I called said they could help us. We drove to their shop, and a young kid working there helped us unbolt the motor. We used the hoist on their truck to pick it up and lay it in the boat. They didn’t charge us, so we gave the kid $100 for helping us. The next adventure happened at 10:30 pm when we stopped at a rest stop. We noticed that a bolt had ripped through the trailer tongue and that the trailer was about to come loose from the pickup. That would not have been a pleasant experience to have that boat come loose while we were driving 60 mph down the road. We called AAA and had them take the boat and trailer to the next town. It was 2:00 am now, and nothing was open, so we left the boat and trailer at the towing yard and got a motel room. In the morning, we bought a cordless drill, drilled a new hole, and ran the bolt through it. Off down the road we went, wondering what our next adventure would be. We made it to fish camp with no further mishaps, it was kind of boring.

I have been on over 40 short-term mission trips to other countries with groups, hunting trips, fishing trips, and school trips, and on most of them, something happened from a minor interruption to a major crisis. It is always interesting to see how those in the various groups react to the unexpected challenge and how they work together to solve it. My experiences have gone all the way from major disunity to a wonderful time of solving problems together that results in awesome stories to tell later and relational bonding. The amount of laughter is a huge clue to what kind of experience this will turn out to be.

The determining factor is how many in the group have grown in character and faithfully practice James 1:2-3, “Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance.”

At the beginning of each new trial, one of the guys in our group would say, “We are building character!”

Several verses in the Bible scare me. It isn’t the verses that scare me. It is not knowing my own heart very well.

1 John 2:15 Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

Luke 16:13 No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.

They scare me because I don’t know how much money controls my life, and the consequences are severe. I don’t know how much the pleasures of life and the things I own control my life. I say that I love God and say, “I love You, Jesus,” every night when I go to bed, but do I?

I often tell Patty that I love her and have written out ten commitments that my “I love you” to Patty means. The first one is, “You are the only woman in my life, physically, mentally, and emotionally.” I work very hard to control my thoughts, what and where I look, and avoid tempting situations. I have not been perfect at controlling my thoughts and eyes, but I think I am doing pretty well and always getting better.

The point is, I have a good idea of how I am doing being a “one-woman man,” but how well am I loving only God and not money or the world? I am not sure, and that scares me. It isn’t the amount of money we have or don’t have as much as our total focus on God as the source of our joy and security.

It is worth thinking about.

I have memorized 2 Corinthians 5:1-10 and have been reviewing it and meditating on it a lot lately. There have been so many people dying in our church this last year; most of them were good friends, and yesterday, my brother, Jeff’s son-in-law, died of cancer at 41 years of age. One of our kids remarked that Micah was the first of our huge family, besides Mom and Dad, to die. Paul starts this passage by saying, “We know.” That means we are very confident in this truth, not hoping or wishing, but “we know.”

2 Corinthians 5:1 For we know that if the earthly tent which is our house is torn down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.

One of the most important phrases in these verses to me is 2 Corinthians 5:7

“for we walk by faith, not by sight.” It would be so cool if God would allow us to have a five-minute tour of heaven. It would be so much easier to live life with courage and confidence and to have zero fear or remorse over death. But it seems that our faith is important to God, so we have to believe the Bible and meditate on it until the words become embedded in our hearts and souls, and we have courage and confidence even though we have not seen or experienced what is beyond that veil of death.

Paul goes on and says, in 2 Corinthians 5:8, “We are of good courage, I say, and prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord.”

I sometimes wonder who is next in our church or our family. I wonder who is going first, Patty or me? When we all get to heaven, it will seem like a second from beginning to end, but now our days drag on in uncertainty, and we experience the repeated sadness of friends and family dying ahead of us.

2 Corinthians 5:6 Therefore, being always of good courage, and knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord—

Sitting in my chair this evening reading, I smelled smoke. I got up to investigate, and Patty said there were some field fires in the Talbot area, but she thought they were contained. That reminded me of a field fire next to our house about seven years ago. It started from a short between two power lines, and a burning piece of insulation fell into the wheat field next to our house. The weather conditions were about the same as what we have now, and the fire spread rapidly through the field. It was burning towards our home, and when it was about 50 yards away, I went out and began beating on it with my coat. It wasn’t very long before a bunch of fire trucks showed up and got it contained and out in about an hour. When they first arrived, one of the firefighters approached me and said, “Good work, Charles Engels, we will take it from here.” I appreciated his humor!

Every summer, field, forest, and brush fires are everywhere in the news. We don’t have tornadoes or hurricanes, but we do have fires. Unexpected emergencies are part of life. Most of the time, we just read about them on Facebook or hear about them on the news. Still, occasionally, we all have unexpected emergencies that cost us money, time, injuries, and sometimes even death. We all do our best to prepare for those unexpected and unwanted events and do all we can to prevent them, but as the Bible says, “Man was born for troubles as sparks fly upwards.”

So, it is just a matter of time before the unexpected and unwanted come into our lives. There are mostly small ones, but there will eventually be a crisis that takes our breath away. The Bible gives us six ways to respond when a crisis comes into our lives.

1. Don’t think or feel like a victim, that God is mistreating you, or that He doesn’t care or doesn’t love you. God designed life to be full of trials, so don’t be surprised when they come into your life.

1 Peter 4:12-13 Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal among you, which comes upon you for your testing, as though some strange thing were happening to you; but to the degree that you share the sufferings of Christ, keep on rejoicing.

2. Ask God for the strength to endure, not that He would fix, change, or take away the trial. The Lord loves to give His strength to those who ask for it, so ask a lot. The most often prayed prayer in the Bible is the one asking for strength. And remember, God usually gives us strength through other people’s encouragement, so don’t be too proud or self-sufficient not to accept and appreciate gracious words from others.

3. Trust God that He cares for you and knows what He is doing. Tell Him, “I trust You, Lord. I don’t understand why this is happening, but I trust You.”

4. Don’t whine or complain about your fire, but rejoice always. If you do, God will give you His strength and cause incredible character growth in your heart.

5. Don’t be passive in your trust; be like David with Goliath, Samson, Gideon, and the rest of God’s mighty warriors; fix what you can fix, change what you can change, and conquer what you can conquer.

6. When the fire is out and life returns to normal, look for others who are going through what you went through and help them, encourage them, and pray for them. God will use us tremendously so that what we experienced isn’t wasted.

One of the more painful things for me is listening to the recording of one of my sermons that I have preached. When I coach other pastors on their preaching, I always make that the first discipline for them to do to help them improve their preaching quality. Often, when a pastor I have made this recommendation to, listens to one of their own sermons, they will say to me, “That was an eye-opening experience; I didn’t realize how poorly I communicate.” My next suggestion to them is to write out their sermon word for word. When we write, we periodically read what we have written as we write new information. By doing that, our thoughts are connected and make sense. It is a simple way of reviewing what we will say before we say it.

A major problem in relationships is that we communicate poorly. A law of verbal communication is, “I didn’t say what I thought I said; I said what you heard and understood me to say.” Those two are often miles apart. It is too bad that we can’t write out a conversation we will have with someone before we have it and put it on a teleprompter! But that is not possible, but what is possible is to acquire the skill of listening to ourselves as we talk; most people don’t do that; in fact, most people can’t do that because they haven’t learned how.

Whenever I have an experience in a conversation with another person where it is evident by their countenance that I have said something that offended them, they disagreed with or confused them, I immediately try to replay what I said in my mind. I don’t usually purposely say things that will cause the other person to be upset or confused, but I often do because what I thought I said wasn’t what they heard or understood me to say. Sometimes, people will quote me as having said something that I am sure I didn’t say. But the law of communication again is, “I didn’t say what I thought I said; I said what you heard and understood me to say.”

A few other laws of communication;

1. Listen twice as much as you talk, and listen attentively, trying to hear what the other person intended to say.

2. If you get emotional in a conversation, especially angry or hurt, listen four times as much as you talk, working diligently to understand what is intended to be communicated.

3. Ask questions instead of giving your opinion or reacting.

4. Take full responsibility for the outcome of a conversation with anybody.

I violate these laws often and regularly, but I try hard to humbly recognize when I do and learn from my mistakes so I can commit them less frequently in the future.

I have many more of these laws of communication that I review so that I can grow as a teacher, as a listener, and as a friend.