One of the mysteries in life for me is the balance between my choices and efforts in living life and God’s sovereignty and part in my life. I need to choose, to obey, to strive, to seek, to read, and to be faithful. It is also clear that apart from God I can do nothing. If I seek the Lord diligently and obey Him completely, will I live forever? No, that is obvious. Well, if I pray without ceasing with great faith, will I be free of all sickness? I would probably significantly reduce my sick days, but life is still life, and sickness, heart attacks, and cancer seem to be part of it by God’s design. I am 77 years old, and my physical conditioning and energy levels are significantly lower than they once were. If I ask God for His strength every day, and exercise, work out, ride my bike, lift weights, eat right, and take the right supplements, can I have the strength and energy of a 20-year-old? I did a devotional for the Santiam Christian High School football team yesterday. Before I spoke, I watched them practice for 30 minutes. The athleticism, strength, speed, and energy of those young men were impressive. I was very envious. No matter how much faith I have and what I do, those days are long gone for me. That too is part of God’s plan. But I want to do as much as I can with the life I have left. I don’t know how many days or how much energy I have left, but I will choose to push right up to the edge. I am not going to be naïve and think that I can do everything and anything. Still, I am going to be diligent to run the race with endurance, be very faithful in exercise, eating right, stewarding my physical body, and then I am going to get as close to Jesus as I can, walk in the Spirit, pray for strength constantly, and look for open doors He is giving me to step through. I don’t think it is a lack of faith for me to admit that what I can do for the Lord is getting less every day, but I won’t let that admission give me freedom to do nothing.

I am leaving on Friday morning for a fishing trip. We will drive for two days to San Diego and board a 120-foot boat, where we will live for ten days. There will be 28 people on the ship, including the captain and deckhands. We will fish together and eat together. I am sure that I will get to know some of them reasonably well in the ten days. I want to be an incredibly positive witness for Jesus during the days we are together. I am praying now that God will work in every heart and that He will give me some divine appointments. I am also praying that I won’t get distracted by the great fishing to miss any of the opportunities that God will supply. I am praying for opportunities, for attentiveness not to miss them, the boldness to step through the doors that God opens, and the wisdom to say just the right thing at the right time, neither too little nor too much. Being a witness for Jesus is one of our primary responsibilities given to us by Jesus. We are His ambassadors. Please pray for me that God will open doors for the Word and that I will make the gospel clear and compelling whenever I share it. I am bringing 30 tracs with me that I wrote with the gospel clearly presented in them. I will be fishing for tuna and for men.

Jefferson Baptist Church has a ministry of picking people up in golf carts after they park their cars on Sunday mornings for worship service and driving them to the sanctuary front door. JBC has two golf carts that they own for this ministry. It is nice because some of our parking is a long walk away from the sanctuary, especially in the winter and especially for older people. No one has been driving the carts for the last couple of months. If no one picks up this ministry I am going to drive one cart for the 8:30 am service starting November 9th. I am pastoring at the Jefferson Evangelical Church and I need to be there at 9:15 am so I can drive the cart from 8:00 to 8:40 am and make it to JEC in plenty of time. The “Golf Cart” ministry is one of the “Men’s Ministry” projects. In our last “Men’s Ministry” board meeting we were discussing how to recruit some people to do it.

As we were discussing it I said, “You can recruit people to a ministry in writing or speaking to the crowd but the best way to recruit people to do anything is one on one, face to face, explaining to them what exactly is involved in doing the ministry. As we were talking a thought popped into my head, “you could drive a cart for the first service and then attempt to recruit people while you are driving them to the sanctuary.” Another big plus would be the opportunity to chat with people who attend JBC. I don’t get to do that much now that I am preaching up the road at another church. One of my life mottos is, “When God opens a door, don’t be slow in stepping through it.” When I have thoughts pop into my head like I had at the board meeting, I am pretty sure it is often a prompting from God, to not just to sit there, but to do something. That motto is why I am preaching up the road half a mile at the Evangelical Church. God opened up a door and I had a thought, “you could do that.” I am having a blast working for God, building His church. Whenever anybody chooses to serve God in His church He gives them the energy, the time, and the resources to do it well. Most people won’t step through doors because they are afraid to take a risk, even a little one. Many people don’t’t volunteer to do things because of the inconvenience factor, it will take away some of their time. People who are stingy with their time in serving God never have enough time as they struggle to get everything done. I am surprised at how few people have volunteered to help with the “Trunk or Treat” event. It is four hours at most for one night.

I am getting all jazzed about my tuna fishing trip out of San Diego. My friend and I are leaving this Friday at 5:30 a.m. We are taking two days to drive to where we will launch out on a 120-foot boat, live on the ship for ten days, and fish. I first wrote this down as a goal in 2019 while I was up at the Portland Sportsman’s Show. The Sportsman’s Show features approximately 800 booths that sell every type of sporting goods imaginable, as well as hundreds of fishing and hunting guides and lodges. I stood and watched videos at a booth advertising fishing trips out of San Diego for over an hour. I was totally mesmerized by the number and the size of the fish being caught in the video. There was a drawing for a free trip, which I filled out. Although I didn’t win the free trip, I did receive advertisements from them every month after that.

I have a place on my cell phone where I write down ideas for future goals, and I typed in that I was going to go on a ten-day trip out of San Diego before the end of 2025, and here we are, October 2025. The trip costs $5,200, excluding gas for driving down and back, three nights in a motel, fish processing, fishing gear, and tips for the deckhands. I have been saving for the trip ever since I wrote it down as a goal way back in 2019. I even have a little extra money left over that I may use to do a fish mount of a 100-pound bluefin tuna. If Patty reads this, she will want the extra for grandkid gifts for birthdays and this upcoming Christmas. I wrote this in my official goals that I sent out to all my friends and posted on my blog for the first time in 2020. A Pastor friend who reads my blog and saw my goals told me that there was a fellow in his church who did a trip like I wanted to do every couple of years. He gave me his number, and I called.

We had coffee together and talked about his past experiences. This was almost two years ago, and he said he was signed up to go in October 2025. So, I decided right then that I would go with him. Here we are, only five days until we leave. Many people don’t set ambitious goals for five or even ten years in the future. As a result, they don’t do any huge things with their lives. Big goals, whether they are ministry, occupational, or fishing goals, take time to accomplish. If you don’t have the confidence to dream up big goals that take time to accomplish, you won’t achieve many, if any, big things with your life. Over the years, Jefferson Baptist Church has planted and adopted ten different churches; seven of them are still going strong today. Very few churches have done that. We set a goal in 1990 to plant our first church by 2000 and another church every two years thereafter. Ten years later, we started Agape Family Fellowship in Albany. Big goals require time to pray about for God’s guidance and blessing, time to plan well, and time to save up the necessary funds to accomplish them. All of the buildings at JBC are paid for, as that was the goal. Several of our buildings took ten years to finish, but that was the goal. Dream some crazy dreams. Dreaming is free. Be open to promptings, ideas, and experiences. Anything is accomplishable if you have enough time.

As a 77-year-old man, husband, father, Pastor, hunter, fisherman, and builder of boats and other things, I recognize that certain events and activities in my past were foundational in shaping my life and making me who I am. One of them, which many would be surprised at, was sports. One of my strengths in life has been my drive and passion to accomplish my goals and achieve success. The surprising thing about that is that I was never very good at sports. I wrestled, ran track and cross-country, played basketball and baseball, but I mostly lost and was usually on the bench. I started in grade school, competed all through High School, and into my first two years of college before I got married. An interesting twist in my journey, which is different from many, is that losing, being last, and being on the bench created in me a blazing fire to succeed in life. With most people, regularly losing causes them to become comfortable with the feeling and the experience, so that they don’t constantly feel like a loser. They learn to compensate by reducing the importance of winning in basketball. I have heard so many Pastors over the years say that they were comfortable with their small, non-growing church because if God wanted their church to grow, He would make it happen. In my leadership class, I award points to everyone who completes the various assignments. Each week, I total the cumulative points and rank everyone in the class based on the number of points they have. In the past, there have been individuals who were last or near the bottom of the class who claimed they didn’t care. That is a coping mechanism that puts out our fire and makes us lukewarm, or keeps us that way. When I lost or failed at anything in life, I complained bitterly to God, asking Him why He was doing this to me and pleading with Him to help me do better. I had a few wins and accomplishments, just enough to keep me from quitting. I think it was God’s carrot. I am getting closer to the finish line of my race, and I thank the Lord for every lost game and minute of sitting on the bench in basketball.

When I was 12 years old, my Dad retired from the Navy. We had primarily lived in Navy housing, apartment buildings, Quonset Huts, and small houses that Dad bought and sold as we moved up and down the West Coast. When Dad retired, we purchased a 120-acre farm. That began a long list of new experiences and skills I learned. I caught my first trout, and my first salmon. I shot a gun for the first time; I bought my own rifle from a military surplus store for $12. Dad helped me, and I shortened the barrel. I bought a piece of black walnut and, using a wood rasp, made a new stock for it, a Russian 7.62.

I shot several deer with that rifle. I milked a cow for the first time, butchered a pig, and a whole host of other animals. I learned how to plumb and wire a house, how to trap a beaver, how to operate a chainsaw, and how to split firewood and fence posts. I learned how to run a DeLaval cream separator and how to churn butter by hand. I learned how to pan for gold and how to tan rabbit hides. I had hundreds of new experiences and learned about as many new skills in five years before we sold the farm and moved again to a much more modern dairy farm setup. That first farm was 120 acres of blackberries and poison oak, which we cleared with goats and pigs. We farmed it using horse-drawn equipment, pulling it with our 1948 Ford pickup. The house was a sheep barn. We chased the sheep out, shoveled out the sheep manure, and moved in. Over the next five years, we added a water supply, an indoor bathroom, electricity, an electric oven, a water heater, and glass windows with swinging doors. I was at an age when all those challenges and changes were an adventure and very exciting. My Dad made it exciting as we worked together to make our little farm profitable and a home. We sold that farm for a nice profit and were able to buy the dairy in Trout Lake, Washington. At 77 years of age, reflecting on my life, I am sure that most of my character growth occurred during that brief five-year period. When we bought our present house in 1990, it was over 100 years old, leaning like the Tower of Pisa, full of rat nests and bats, leaking like a sieve, and the walls and windows were so porous that an average wind outside would blow your hat off inside. Many people questioned our decision to buy that old house, but I was so excited for our eight kids to have some of the same experiences that I did and to grow the same way I did. I considered our old house a gift from God.

At almost 77 years of age, my most significant issues are the aches and pains in my joints and muscles, and the lack of energy that I have. I recently had a new hip put in on my left side and will have one put in on my right side soon. A lot of the pain I was having went away with my new hip. One of the things I read is that muscle strength is essential for maintaining mobility and energy.  I have lost a lot of strength over the years. Sometimes when I lie in bed and look at my arms, I think, Wow, my muscles are much smaller than they used to be. Exercise is the key to maintaining and even increasing muscle strength, but the hip pain I was experiencing kept me from doing much of that. However, now I am exercising a lot and plan on doing even more once my right hip is free of pain. Another key to energy and good health is maintaining a healthy weight. As my muscle tone and strength decreased, my weight increased, which is a bad combination. I started a serious diet about a year ago and have lost 35 pounds so far. My goal is to lose another 20 pounds and reach a weight of 180 pounds, which is what I weighed when I graduated from High School, and then maintain that. Another issue with my health and energy is my diet. So, I have eliminated almost all sugar from my diet, as well as processed foods, additives, and artificial sweeteners. I am also taking vitamins, minerals, and supplements that are recommended for older men who want to maintain their health. So, with 50 pounds less weight to carry around and two new hips, and reasonably good health, I should be able to accomplish a great deal more with my life in the next 20 years. A favorite verse of mine is Psalms 92:14-15: “They will still yield fruit in old age; They shall be full of sap and very green, to declare that the Lord is upright.” One of my major life principles over the years is that God guides, gives strength, bestows blessings, and protects. Still, He expects us to be faithful, responsible, disciplined, diligent, and wise in following the fundamental laws of human life and living. God’s grace, love, and care for us are not intended by him to bail us out of the consequences for poor choices and an undisciplined lifestyle.

I don’t know if it is common with older people, but I spend a lot of time now reminiscing. I don’t do that negatively; it’s more like reading a history book – just remembering and enjoying the memories. I mostly do that while looking at the pictures on my iPad. Today is one of my grandkids’ 18th birthday, and I think, how is that possible?! I have also been thinking about my old friend Jack Knight, who passed away this past week; he was 97. I looked it up on Google and saw that only one in one thousand live that long. In the Bible, life is likened to a race, with a starting line and a finish line.

Some people run a 100 yards, and others run a marathon. Jack ran an ultramarathon. The primary emphasis in the Bible on running the race of life is to run it with your eye on the finish line, not on the sidelines. Run it with endurance; don’t sit down. Walking is okay, taking a drink is OK, but keep moving and finish well. One of the problems that many people have, especially young people, is that at the beginning of their race, they take detours off the main route. When you are young, it seems like the finish line is so far away that a few detours won’t make that much difference, but they do. So, what if you have made some major detours? What now? Paul understood that issue. He didn’t start running the race until he was well into life. His basic response was, Make this the first day of your race and run it right from here to the finish line. I will be 77 in 18 days, 20 years younger than Jack. If I live to be that old, I have a lot more running to do. I will probably walk a lot.

Philippians 3:12-14 Not that I have already obtained it or have already become perfect, but I press on so that I may lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus. Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

 Hebrews 12:1-2 let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

One of my every morning commitments that I make to the Lord is, “Today I will do my part to build your church at JBC and around the world, and I will thoughtfully step through any door You open for me to serve You and Your church.” One year ago, a door opened for me to Pastor the Jefferson Evangelical Church. I was still involved in several ministries at JBC, but my weekends were free, so I took advantage of the opportunity and stepped through that door. Several people asked me, “Why?” My answer was simple: “Because I have made a promise to God every morning for the last 40 years that I would not ignore any opportunity that He gave me to serve Him and His church.” When I decided to pastor JEC, I knew that God would give me all that I needed to accomplish this ministry and to be a blessing to His bride, the church. At 76 years of age, having faced many struggles in the past trying to discern God’s will for my life, I have grown to the point where I am confident that I am making most choices in accordance with His will for my life. When I believe that what I am choosing to do is His will, I have little fear that I will fail. The fear of failing is what keeps most people from trying to do something significant with their lives. A question I often ask people I work with in my leadership classes or in other mentoring relationships is, “What would you attempt to do if you knew you couldn’t fail?” Most people are not consciously aware that the fear of failing controls their decisions in life, but it does. It is hard for most people to break free from that way of living.

I went deer hunting last week and killed a nice 3×2 buck. I missed a much bigger buck several times, and I was bummed about that, but I have had many years of deer hunting in the past when I didn’t even see a deer, so I am thankful for what I got. I replayed my mistakes 10,000 times in my mind, and I am confident that next time I will not make the same mistake. But at my age, I may never have a next time!

One of the reasons many people do not set goals for themselves is that they dislike the disappointment of not achieving their goals. They find it easier to take what comes without getting their hopes up for something great or big in their life. There is undoubtedly less disappointment in life when we don’t dream big and don’t set ambitious goals for ourselves, but there is also much less accomplishment in our lives without the passion and drive that goals inspire in our minds. The key to satisfaction in life isn’t to eliminate the potential for failure and disappointment that comes from unrealized dreams by going with the flow, but to manage our self-talk when we fail to accomplish a goal. The formula is to dream big, aim high, work hard, be very grateful for whatever the results are, and plan how to make the next time a success. It is incredible how quickly disappointment fades when you rejoice in everything, figure out what went wrong and why, and make new goals.