I fell twice yesterday on my bike while stopping. The load I am carrying is 70 lbs and makes it cumbersome to balance when I slow down to stop, and over the bike goes! I took a ton of ibuprofen during the night but I woke up this morning at 4:00 am barely able to make it to the bathroom. So I texted a friend and he is going to drive over and pick me up. Cliff and Kathy left without me this morning, story of my life😀 though I didn’t feel so bad when I rolled over and went back to sleep when they left. I am in the Oasis Cafe in Juntura, Oregon, now, 58 miles East of Burns, drinking coffee and eating breakfast. This is one of those cafe’s that is insulted if you eat everything on your plate. I figured my ride would get here about noon and I will finally have my breakfast all eaten!

Patty, my wife has fallen several times in the last couple of days going down a couple of stairs so I am in good company. Cliff and Kathy called me Patty yesterday after my second fall. But I must say, that I gave her more sympathy yesterday when she told me of her latest tumble than she gave me this morning when I called her at 5:00 am 😩. Though I did suggest to her that she needed to start using a Walker to get around. Oh well, such is married life🥰

I am feeling old, frail, and wimpy this morning, oh well, such is life at 75. Can’t wait until I hit 85 like my good friend Lloyd. I am going to help out in the “Seniors Ministry” at JBC next year, I will be a natural!

As I take this journey of life I wonder what some of the highlights will be coming up in the days ahead. Lots of adventures, I hope, but easier ones where I don’t fall down so much. As people I know die, I wonder how I will go. I was thinking a car might hit me while I was riding my bike, several honked at me yesterday, but that won’t happen now.

I trust God with every fiber of my being and I know that He is in charge. Life may be hard at times, but it is all an adventure because I am going to heaven someday, soon I hope.

We rode 58 miles today from Vale to Juntura, Oregon with a gradual 2000 foot elevation gain. I fell twice today while stopping my bike. I just lost my balance with that big load I am carrying on the bike. The first time was the worst because it was right in front of a little store and gas station and a number of people saw me and one guy ran over to help me, very embarrassing and hard on my pride.

We were on the road at 5:30 am this morning and it was 65 degrees and we walked into the Oasis Cafe at Juntura at 10:30 am and it was 85 degrees so we beat the worst of the heat. It is now 98 degrees at 5:00 pm. I am not supposed to eat sugar because it is one of the foods I am allergic to but I had a chocolate milk shake anyway. I hope I can sleep tonight.

When we got here after 5 hours of riding I was all out of gas, totally exhausted, but the milkshake helped a lot and I am planning on sleeping 10 hours tonight.

Tomorrow we are riding another 58 miles to Burns and it is supposed to be just as hot. I would write more but my brain isn’t working very well right now.

When we stay in Motels on our bicycle trip I do a lot of investigating online to find a cheap place to stay. There wasn’t a lot to choose from in Vale, Oregon. There was an old Hotel listed so I called about it. The lady was very nice and when I told her we were bicycling and needed a room on the ground floor if possible she gave us this apartment to stay in. It is at least 2,000 square feet with three bedrooms, two baths, a huge living room and a very nice kitchen, and the best thing is that the scales in the bathroom showed me 5 lbs lighter than I was a week ago. And also the air conditioning works great.

Tomorrow we will bike 60 miles to Juntura, then Burns, then John Day, Mitchell, Redmond, Idanah, and then home. We will leave in the morning at 5:15 am to do as much riding as possible when it is cooler, though the low temperate forecast is 68 degrees, but that beats 100 degrees.

When our son, Seth, picked us up this morning at Mountain Home, Idaho and drove us to Vale this morning, I left my IPad in his car. That is what I write my blog on. I am now writing it on my iPhone. So expect lots of mistakes in the next week in my blogs because I can’t see the keyboard very well and my fingers are twice the size as these little keys.

On a trip like this you meet a lot of weird, mean, cranky, and dumb people, but you also meet a lot of very nice people who are kind, gracious, and considerate.

Jesus said in Matthew 7 that each of us ought to treat others the same way we want to be treated. It is a good discipline to notice how people act who you enjoy being around and attempt to pick up their manners and ways of talking.

This blog is for yesterday, June 21st, the year’s longest day. I would have written it last night, but I was so tired I just went to bed. It turned out that I had made a mistake in my mapping, and instead of 55 miles, we had 65, with a very long and steep hill to climb. I did pretty well until about noon when the temperature started to climb, it got up to 98 degrees. We decided that camping in this heat would not be fun, so we called and canceled our campground reservations and reserved a room at a motel in Mountain Home, Idaho. The cold shower and air conditioning were excellent and revived my “near-death” body.

After lunch yesterday, I told Cliff and Kathy to go ahead of me because I was going to take more breaks than they were. I started with a water break every five miles, then I dropped it to every two miles, then every mile, and by the time I got to the motel I was stopping every quarter mile, but I made it!

We have decided because of the heat to stay in motels the rest of the way instead of camping so we can sleep at night. We have two nights scheduled at churches and one at a friends house so that will mean we stay in motels four nights.

I saw the funniest sign yesterday. It was next to a field with lots of rocks in it about the size of basketballs. It said, “Petrified Watermellons, Pick One Up for your Mother-in-law.” One of the things about riding a bicycle is you see a lot of things you would otherwise miss, and you smell a lot of things as well!

As we planned out our day last night we couldn’t find any motels within biking distance in the direction we were going. I searched and searched with my IPad with no results and the temperature was forecasted to be over 100 degrees today. So, I called our son, Seth where we had stayed a couple of nights ago and asked if he would mind driving over, picking us up and driving us to a motel. He agreed and will be here soon. He is a good boy, I am sure I messed up a good Saturday that he was planning on spending with his family. So today will be a rest day as we ride in a car to our next destination, which I do not mind at all.

One of my mottos is “Plan your life well, and then adjust the best you can to the unplanned, and don’t fuss!”

We rode 55 miles from our son Seth’s place near Twin Falls to 1000 Springs Resort Campground near Hagerman, Idaho, today. It was a relatively easy ride, with low miles, no significant climbing, and a tailwind most of the day. But I haven’t been on a bicycle for three weeks, and I feel like dirt. This campground has a very nice pool and many hot tubs fed by a hot spring. Cliff and I sat in one for about 30 minutes. The water coming into the tub was 165 degrees, and there was a cold water spicket to cool it down. We rode along the banks of the Snake River all day, and the scenery was nice. We also rode through a lot of Idaho farmland with dairies, feedlots, alfalfa fields, corn fields, and potato fields; the dairies smelled especially good.

Tomorrow is another 55-mile day, but we do have some climbing. I hope ten hours of sleep will make me feel better in the morning. We will be in Homedale, Idaho, tomorrow. I am riding with a heart monitor on, and so far, the heart center that is monitoring hasn’t called or texted me that anything is malfunctioning. I am sitting in a comfortable booth, reading and writing in an eating place next to the swimming pool. Included is a picture of some eating rules in the facility. I don’t think I have ever seen such a strange restriction.

On September 15th, I will begin as the interim pastor at the Jefferson Evangelical Church. If you don’t know, the church is on the main street in Jefferson, across from the grade school and next to Freres Building Supply. I will preach on Sundays, and at some point, I will start to mentor someone to be the church pastor. I will probably preach there for several years. I have moved my Leadership classes to Tuesday and Thursday evenings so that I can take on this new ministry, and I will also preach at our Wednesday night service at JBC, which will start in the middle of September.

I am excited about being able to help this sister church in Jefferson. They have not had a pastor for five years; they just have had a series of interims and fill-in preachers. I did this for Talbot Community Church, Buena Vista Community Church, and our daughter church, Agape Family Fellowship in the past. I enjoyed the challenge and the opportunity to bless the greater “Body of Christ.”

I hope that because we have a Saturday service, three services on Sunday, and a Wednesday night service at JBC, several people will want to attend the Evangelical church with me and a JBC service. This will help fill up the church service, give more life and volume to the worship time, and have more people to laugh at my jokes.

I am at my son Seth’s place near Twin Falls, Idaho, hanging out with him and his family. My brother, Cliff, and his wife, Kathy, will get here sometime today, and we will stay here tomorrow and leave Thursday morning on our bicycles. Thursday will be easy because we will be riding only 60 miles, it is a gradual downhill all day, and the forecast is for a light tailwind. That will be a nice first day for me to get broke in on this bicycle riding stuff! I wish all the rest of the days would be like that, but they won’t. Oh well, such is life!

Today and tomorrow, I will try to get ahead on my Bible reading, memorizing, book reading, and writing goals. Once I get on the trip, I will struggle to keep up with my disciplines because of tiredness at the end of the day. It will be easy to justify doing less or nothing at all. In the next two weeks, one of my goals is not to let my old, wimpy body control my thinking. We will see how I do.

Hebrews 12:1 says that we need to run the race with endurance set before us. That is an everyday challenge for all of us. Everybody’s life is different, but we all have trials, difficulties, and struggles that wear us out and make us tired, and I, for one, tend to let that psych me out and control my determination and self-control. I will keep working on that, but I wish Jesus would return soon.

Friday through Sunday, I was on a drift trip on the John Day River, fishing for Small Mouth bass. There were four of us on the trip: my son-in-law Mike Hatfield, good fishing buddy Larry King, and my grandson Will. Will and I were in my pontoon rubber raft, and Mike and Larry were fishing in a drift boat. We fished for three days, camped on the river for two nights, and had a great time. The scenery on the John Day is fantastic, and the fishing is even better. We got off the river by 5:00 pm each evening, and after setting up camp and cooking and eating dinner, there were several hours to sit and read or look out on the river and think and pray. We didn’t have cell reception, so I didn’t write a blog while fishing. We got home from the fishing trip last night at 8:00 pm, and I hurried around and got everything ready and then left this morning for our son Seth’s place near Twin Falls, Idaho, where I will join Cliff and Kathy on our bicycle trip that they have been on for the last 25 days. Thursday morning, we will leave and have 12 days of riding back home. Last week, I went to the Oregon Heart Center and got a heart monitor I will wear on the bicycle trip. The monitor sends information back to the clinic, and if anything fishy shows up from the monitor while I am riding, they will call me and let me know. I am sure that after the trip, I will be declared healthy as a horse.

The Bible says that we have a built-in monitor for our spiritual heart, which is our mouth; what we speak out of our mouth clearly indicates what is in our heart. Warning signs of a faulty heart are complaining, slandering and gossiping about others, bitter speech, and angry and critical speech to others. It is an excellent spiritual exercise to think about how we talk and use that to evaluate the health of our inner person, the real us.

This morning, I went to the Oregon Heart Center and had a heart monitor put on. I will wear it for a couple of weeks, and then I will get some report on how my heart is doing. Last week, I had a couple of other tests done. So far, everything is good. My heart is doing its job well.

The word heart is often used in the Bible, talking about our inner person. We are commanded to love God with all our hearts, to trust the Lord with all our hearts, wisdom enters our hearts, we meditate in our hearts, and the Bible says that our hearts are wicked. In Psalms 139:23, David asks,” Search me, O God, and know my heart.”

There is a lot of information on how to have a healthy heart; exercise and diet are the main things. The Bible also lists several things that will give us a healthy heart, and the main thing is to read the Bible faithfully. Psalms 119:11 Your word I have treasured in my heart that I may not sin against You.

Jesus defined success in John 4:34. Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to accomplish His work.” My Dad often gave me a list of things to do on the farm while he was gone. It was easy for me to determine my level of success; that list determined it. When Dad got back, did I get everything done on the list or not? Psalms 139:16 says that God has a list for my life, “And in Your book were all written the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there was not one of them.” God doesn’t hand us the list like my Dad did; he expects us to figure it out. That process began in earnest when I decided I was going to college instead of Vietnam, and what College that would be. After that, the choices that needed to be made came quickly, some minor and others very significant. I prayed a lot, asking for guidance and wisdom. I pondered and thought long and hard about many of my choices. I got married and had eight kids, and then my choices were not just about me; and I needed to include others in the choosing process. Now, I am 75 years old, with few choices left to make. Sometimes I sit and think about the day when I stand before Jesus at the “Judgment Seat of Christ” , and see His list for my life. I wonder how successful I will have been over the years I lived here on earth as a disciple for Jesus. Even though I probably don’t have a lot of choices left to make, I do think, pray, and get counsel for them, I want to do well, and cross off more things on Jesus’s “to do list” for me.