A lot of my pastor friends who are my age are retiring. One said, “I am so tired all the time that I have no vision for the future of our church other than the status quo, and they deserve better than that.”  I was especially tired and weary today, and I started thinking how nice it would be to not be running and pushing and dreaming all the time for more fruit, more people to love Jesus, more sermons, more outreach events. I could sleep in every day, leisurely read and pray then take a nap. I don’t like to be in a state of indecision for very long so I tend to decide and then drive a stake in the ground figuratively speaking, that is I make the decision resolute enough that I don’t go back and revisit it over and over again. So I decided that I have a lot of juice left in me, I know more about the Bible than I ever have, that I can rest when I get to heaven. So I decided that health permitting I will go as hard as I can for at least another 12 years. I will be 78 years old and 50’years in ministry at JBC. If I am still alive by then I might retire then or maybe decide that I will go until I am 82, that is the age Caleb was in the book of Joshua when he said, ” give me that mountain to conquor, I am as strong today as I was when I was 40″.  I am praying that Jesus comes back tonight!!

I bought an airow gun today online.  It is a contraption that fastens on my bow and the bow string pushes a plunger instead of an arrow. The plunger goes into a cylinder which creates great air pressure and shoots a 22 caliber pellet. It is great for shooting indoors in the winter to keep the muscles in shape and the old shooting eye sharp. I have wanted one for awhile now and going up to the Sportsman’s Show in Portland followed by a couple of hours walking around in Cabella’s got the hunting juices going pretty good. In a fit of lustful desire I bought it. It will come in a couple of days. So was that a bad thing to do? I haven’t told Patty yet. Probably not a bad thing, but if I did something like that every night it certainly would be in regards to financial wisdom.

When my Dad was dying from liver cancer one of the problems we had  while taking care of him was in the last weeks of his life he wouldn’t eat, because he had no appetite. Yesterday I wrote that I was deciding what my cravings would be.  I want to thirst for God, hunger and thirst for righteousness, I want to desire very much to bear much fruit and more fruit, I want my wife to be the happiest woman on the face of the earth because I love her so much, and I want to be a super Dad and grandfather to my kids and grandkids.

Cancer destroyed my Dad’s desire for food. I believe that my desire for God, holiness, significant accomplishments, and a great family is destroyed by the world and the stuff in it. When I desire the wrong things my desire for the right things will grow weak.  John in the New Testament says that we can’t love the world and God at the same time. As our love for the world goes up our love for God goes down. The tricky part of managing this is that the stuff in the world is not bad or sinful, it is just stuff that I begin to think I can’t live without. We all have some stuff.

Lust is craving the wrong things. Lust left unchecked will grow stronger and stronger. We were created to desire and want and to dream. It is a sad thing to see when my desire for God and the dreams I have to do something great with my life morph into lusting after material possessions that are cool, but empty.

I can’t wait for my airow gun to come!!

I am reaing a book now called “Habits”.  The basic premise of the book is that we can change our performance by changing our habits. The key to establishing a good habit is to identify a craving that we have and connect the habit to the craving in our mind and then anticipate the reward of the craving being satisfied when we do what we are trying to establish as a habit. Interesting question to reflect on, “what are my cravings”? I decided that I would declare what my cravings are because that is what I want them to be not what my flesh craves.

The ultimate craving of my life is God. I want to know Him more. I want to sense His presence around me more. I want to sense His pleasure in me more. Psalms 42:1-2, “As the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants for You, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God”. So I will verbally reward myself when I read the Bible that I have grown closer to God. I will declare  when I worship well at church gatherings that I have indeed grown closer to God. I have a list of spiritual disciplines that I want to establish as strong habits in my life that I know would result in a growing intimacy with God.

Other cravings; I crave to be more and more righteous and holy in my heart, my character. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, they shall be satisfied”.  I crave to do more and more with my life that matters for all eternity. To do more with my life that influences people to move closer and closer to God. I want to bear much fruit for God. I want to accomplish more in the next ten years of my life than I have in the previous 38 years of ministry. I want to love my wife the way Jesus loves the church. I want to be the kind of father to my children and grandfather to my grandchildren  that God is to me.

Those sound like good cravings to me. I think I will pursue them diligently.

I lost 45 lbs on my bicycle trip to Portland, Maine, 230 lbs to 185 lbs. I have been determined not to gain any back. It was to painful to lose. Tonight I weighed in at 200 lbs, I have gained 15 lbs back!!! I am so disgusted with myself, I can’t believe I have let this happen!!! I am committing to ramp up the exercise and really take control of my eating. I can’t lose this contest with my own flesh! Help me Lord!

I went to my first Sportsman’s Show in Portland in 1965 with my Dad. I think I have only missed one since then. The first ever Sportsman’s Show in Portland was February 22nd, 1923.  It is a very fun and enjoyable event for me today.  I think that one of the reasons that I just have positive “vibes” about this event is because of going to it with my Dad and how much he enjoyed it and I enjoyed just being with him at something like this. Went today with three other good friends and we walked around and looked at all the stuff and then we went to the new Cabella’s in Tualatin and walked around in there for several hours and then we went out to dinner and had “Baby Back Ribs”.  I  bought a new steelhead fishing rod and reel for my grandson that I am taking to Alaska with me in July. It is a nice rod and reel, and I can’t wait to give it to him.  Life at times is very hard, but then there are days like today that are very good and tons of fun.  On fun days I thank God for His great gift to me and on very hard days I ask God for His strength to bear up the trials with dignity and grace and joy. Day and night, summer and winter, sun shine and rain. that is life. Today was a sunshine day, thank you Lord. A day full of trials is coming, I will not recieve one from You without being willing to take the other as well. I trust You totally with my life, and I am commited to never grumbling but only rejoicing and giving thanks.

One of the questions that I get asked often is “How do I change” to become the person I want to be? Over the years I have refined my answer as I have learned and observed people who fail and those who succeed and also what has worked in my own life. The simple but accurate answer is that we change the same way we learn to play the piano, we practice daily and diligently. We practice the basic disciplines of the Christian life until they become habits. If we practice the piano long enough we will become a very good player who can play effortlessly and very beautifully. If we establish the disciplines of Bible reading, prayer, self examination/confessin of sin, giving, worship, gathering together with other believers and seeking wisdom as habits because we have done them everyday for a period of time, we will grow and change steadily with no turning back. And the cool thing is that the change and growth will appear to be effortless. Trying harder is not part of the equation, but faithfully, daily practicing the disciiplines of the Christian life is.  You become a “self feeder” after awhile, and growth in character is a daily experience. I read my Bible every day, I pray every day, I end every day with a short time of examining my life and confessing all known sin, I commit to not grumbling about anything but thanking God for everything.  Those are not hard, sort of like brushing your teeth, just a discipline that if practiced long enough results in a very godly person. That is what I want to become.

One of the fun things about the “Prayer Summit ” is the friends I have made over the years and the opportunity to hang out with them here when I haven’t seen them since last year. One of the problems of life as I get older is I have a hard time remembering all of my friends. It is so frustrating to be sitting worshipping and praying with a bunch of guys looking around the room struggling to remember the names of many of them. I am pretty sure that when we get to eternity with our new glorified body that is like Jesus’s body I won’t have a memory problem. I will be able to remember every detail of every minute of my life along with names. Even though heaven will be heaven I think that my perfect memory will include sad things as well as happy things. I think my memories will include total recall of my failures and mess ups. Those memories will probably increase my praise for the Lord that I am actually in His presence because of what He did to pay for my sins. I sure wonder a lot about the details of eternity. Won’t be long now!

God manifests Himself in our life through people. God most often speaks to us through people. Our love for God is expressed in our love for people. John says to us in his Epistle 1 John, “how can you say you love God, whom you can’t see, when you don’t love your brother whom you can see?”

Today was the second day at the “Pastors Prayer Summit” at Cannon Beach Christian Conference Center. As I worshiped with, and prayed with, and ate with, and visited with 80 plus pastors I truly have had a blessed time with God that has been super refreshing for me. I hope I have had as much “God influence” on others as they have had on me.

in the evenings after everything is over it has been a joy to read the Bible, pray,  think and reflect after such a blessed day. I am looking forward to tomorrow.

I left the family dairy farm in Trout Lake, Washington and began pastoring Jefferson Baptist Church in Jefferson, Oregon the first Sunday of October in 1976 when I was 28 years old. I had very little knowledge, understanding, or skill in what I was supposed to do as a pastor. I had two years of college at Western Baptist Bible College majoring in Bible, but nothing in being a pastor. The church was small enough, about 20 people, and they were gracious enough that anything I did seemed to be OK. JBC actually grew and we bought land and built a small chapel that would seat about 150 people. We even built it with special offerings and with all in-house donated labor so that when we moved into it in October of 1979 it was all paid for. The next year went pretty good, but then in 1980 conflict began to happen. It was a lot of little things mostly that I did that people reacted to and got upset about. I worked hard to try and fix things, but it seemed like the harder I worked the worse it got. It seemed at times that I could do absolutely nothing without it causing some kind of reaction and complaining. More and more people left the church, and I got more and more depressed and frustrated with my failure and inability to lead and pastor in a way that created unity.

At the beginning of 1989 I had made up my mind that I had somehow missed it when I thought God was calling me to be a pastor and I needed to quit and go back to dairy farming, however I could make that happen. I was pursuing a number of options in that direction when I recieved in the mail an invitation from Dr Joe Alldrich, President of Multnomah Bible College in Portland Oregon to go away for 4 days to Cannon Beach Conference Center with a group of about 60 other Pastors from the greater Salem area and pray for God to bring revival to the State of Oregon.  Very reluctantly I went, and while I was there the first week of February, 1989 God worked in my life in a very powerful way.  While there I made a commitment that I would  remain a pastor and I would stay at JBC until I died unless they kicked me out which seemed a very real possibility.   I also made a major commitment to prayer as a way of life, not just something I did along with dozens of other things, but that prayer would be the number one activity of my life. I would devote myself to being a man of prayer. I wrote 7 specific goals in regards to the discipline and activity of prayer and have been pursuing those goals ever since.

The last 26 years since that water-shed event in my life have been characterized by God blessing my life and ministry well beyond what I was actually capable of accomplishing in my own skill level. These years have been very much an adventure with God building His church.  I have been back to the “Pastors Prayer Summit” at Cannon Beach every year since 1989 and I am here now as I write this blog. This is my 26th year and I always come expecting for God to meet me and work in my life. It is the end of the first half day and that is already true. I can’t wait for the next couple of days and see what is going to happen to me.

Who could’ve predicted a super bowl ending like that!!?? Wow! What is interesting now is all the discussions on “why?”, “what if”, “if only”.  I don’t know how many times I have made a choice I thought was best, and then it blew up in my face, and then I thought, ” Oh, why did I do that!”. How I wish I could have a “do over” on that one! Probably the worst choice I ever made was to farm on my own instead of sticking with my Dad. That resulted in major failure and loss of lots of money and major blow to my pride, but only about 20 people really knew about it. It is hard to imagine making a choice that millions of people see on television and critique  for months to follow.  A Bible verse that I think about a lot is 1 Corinthians 4:5 which says, “Therefore do not go on passing judgment before the time, but wait until the Lord comes who will both bring to light the things hidden in the darkness and disclose the motives of men’s hearts; and then each man’s praise will come to him from God.” I wonder as I read and meditate on the meaning of that verse what is the extent of the audience of the phrase “bring to light the things hidden in the darkness”. I hope it isn’t all of heaven that gets to see what I thought I had hidden well!! I guess I better make sure I have confessed all known sin to God so He will cast it into the deepest sea to never remember again!!