Category: Geography

Everywhere

Everywhere, God ….

Wednesday, September 27, 2023

Obstacles or Beauty,

Always, All Things Are

In God’s Hands.

Psalm 95:4

In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also.

Revelation 14:7

He said in a loud voice, ‘Fear God and give him glory, for the hour of his judgment has come; and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water.’

…

Words of Grace For Today

Das DDR Museum feiert am 18. Juli ein besonderes Jubiläum: Vor 30 Jahren wurde am 1. Juni 1979 um 20:00 Uhr in der Samariterkirche in Berlin-Friedrichshain die erste von vielen Blues-Messen gefeiert.

On July 1, 1979 at 20:00 the Samariterkirche in Berlin- Friedrichshain celebrated the first of many Blues-Worship-Services. These services were packed in every available space with youth in East Germany (most not belonging to any church), struggling to find their way in the most surveilled country ever, with demands for adherence to policies and attitudes that everyone knew were impossibly false.

A young man, who was impressed with the diaconate work for the handicapped that the church did, spoke to the youth pastor at the Samariterkirche and offered to do something for the church. What can you do? I can make blues. So a blues worship service started up, led by the youth pastors. The idea spread to churches across East Berlin. Young people flocked to the churches.

The STASI (state security police) attended as well, with all the misery that could mean for pastors, youth and any supporters.

The church hierarchy questioned why all this for people who did not belong to the church.

The youth pastors replied that if they came, it was their job to provide worship for them. And they did addressing the questions of youth that were not allowed to be addressed anywhere else in society, not in school, not on the streets: What of this state controlled life being watched and reported on, and all of it recorded by the STASI, determining often what education and work one could get if one was not thrown in prison? What of forced military service for all youth, of no freedom to ask how life could be better, when all of life from indoctrination in school to lifelong the ‘party line’ had to be spoken even though it was obviously false? And what of the wall and border areas and policies that prohibited people from leaving to the West.

The gloriously coloured West with promise, like a first love, that in fact wears off quickly to reveal a reality that is so corrupt and rotten with excesses and poverty for most, with privilege for the few.

Even to all this – East Germans hardships, the West’s corruptions and poverty – even all this is in God’s hands.

And those blues services provided one piece (allowed by Honecker in conversation with Bishop Schönherr, both survivors of Nazi concentration camps) of a perfect storm that led to the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, and the signing of the Unification Treaty 3 October 1990.

…

Sometimes what we see as great obstacles, mountains blocking our way forward in life, are God’s declarations of magnificent beauty, calling us forward to something new.

No!

Not That At All. Instead

Go and Tell All …

Tuesday, September 26, 2023

Sometimes We Fog Up,

Looking for the Way Out of Our Messy Lives.

God Sends Us Back Into the Mess, to ….

Psalm 31:7-8

I will exult and rejoice in your steadfast love, because you have seen my affliction; you have taken heed of my adversities, and have not delivered me into the hand of the enemy; you have set my feet in a broad place.

Mark 5:19

But Jesus refused, and said to him, ‘Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy he has shown you.’

…

Words of Grace For Today

All too often we ask and even try to demand from God something that we want, something that we are sure is what God would have for us, something that is a sacrifice of all we are and can be, and

God

says

No!

Instead God sends us right back where we’ve tried to escape from, from the grind of daily life, from the hell that daily life is (due to other people, usually), from the past that has dragged us so far into to the pit that we can barely see the horizon.

God sends us back, and tells us to

Tell everyone what God has done for us, rescuing us, healing us, forgiving us, renewing life in us, giving us hope again!

It is that we year and long for everything to be different so that maybe everything will be right in our lives.

Instead, God makes us right with God, so that no matter the circumstances that we live in and under, God can work through us to bring Grace to bear on more and more people.

So it is, this day, we enter our daily lives, looking like nothing has happened to us, and yet

everything has happened,

God has happened,

the Holy Spirit has transformed us poor sinners (actually we are very good sinners, just poorer beyond imagination for it) into saints,

those through whom the Light of Christ shines

through all the brokenness of life

into the heart of the matter, the heart of each person, the heart of God’s Kingdom come near.

Just another day for saints

to be God’s miracles

for others.

The Cracks

That’s how the Light gets in.

Thursday, September 21, 2023

The Light Is Gold,

The Light Is Distant,

The View Mottled.

How Does the Light Reach Us?

Zephaniah 3:7

I said, ‘Surely the city will fear me, it will accept correction; it will not lose sight of all that I have brought upon it.’ But they were the more eager to make all their deeds corrupt.

Luke 19:45-46

Then he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling things there; and he said, ‘It is written, “My house shall be a house of prayer”; but you have made it a den of robbers.’

…

Words of Grace For Today

In all our efforts to have a ‘good’ life, we most of all deny that we have screwed up life tremendously.

We try to pretend that it’s just a little problem, that we did something ‘not quite right.’ When in fact the result is a crack in the foundation of our lives that tears more than the curtain in the temple. It tears apart our own hearts, minds, and souls.

Whenever God gives us ‘temples’ and ‘houses of prayer’ we turn them into ‘dens of robbers’ in so many ways, so many same old, same old ways, that people have used since the beginning of time, all trying to make our own way in life and make it better than it was. The more God gives us the more eager we are to make all our deeds corrupt, trying to cover up our latest corrupt deeds.

What does God do with us, then?!

God uses exactly those cracks in the foundation of our lives to shine the Light of Christ into the foundations of our lives,

to revive us.

God never repairs the cracks, as if they never were. The wounds heal, though the cracks remain, so that the Light can continue to shine in on us

so that we can live and breathe in the Light

even as we turn yet to more corrupt deeds,

also this day.

By God’s Grace alone, though we can breathe.

Breathe,

and bask in the Light,

and give God thanks,

and trust the call to go out to share the Light with all people.

When I Wake Up

I know who I am going to be!

Wednesday, September 20, 2023

The Moon Sets as the Dawn Breaks,

Who Will We Be This Day?

Proverbs 14:26

In the fear of the Lord one has strong confidence, and one’s children will have a refuge.

Romans 8:35

Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

…

Words of Grace For Today

Knowing who we are is a great start to any day.

Often our confidence in who we are is lost in delusions and dreams unreal.

There is only one identity that we can know of ourselves that will bring us life with each breath and that is …

—

Yet there is, before we speak of it, so much that would tear us from that identity.

Not least of all is our own drive and dreams to be something worth being.

Through hardships we forge ahead, proving we are worth the breath we breathe.

Through distress we dig deep, proving we are made of goodness.

Through persecution we deny our persecutors their satisfaction, proving we cannot be conquered (even as we sink deeper into the abyss.)

We try to survive through famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword, but then the course of nature claims us in our deaths.

Oh, how futile all our struggles turn out to be. And how foolish our enemies have made themselves out to be, as they sink faster into the abyss with each move made against us!

There is no confidence we can have, about anything, least of all about ourselves that will save us.

We are doomed, all of us.

—

The one confidence that we have is a confidence given to us, though we do not deserve it, not at all, not at all.

That identity is one given to us by Jesus: we are the bearers and sharers of Jesus’ love for the world and all people ever.

From this love, nothing can separate us,

because God gives it to us each day, each hour, each minute.

Winds,

Four Strong Winds

Blow us around and off course.

Tuesday, September 19, 2023

Are We Blown Like the Waves Over the Rocks?

Psalm 62:9

Those of low estate are but a breath, those of high estate are a delusion; in the balances they go up; they are together lighter than a breath.

Luke 6:12

Now during those days he went out to the mountain to pray; and he spent the night in prayer to God.

…

Words of Grace For Today

The good times seem to have left us, and left us in the lurch, up a creek of shtako with no paddle or hands even.

We may think we are special, of great importance in the course of history even, or at least for a few people now.

Yet, of greatness or lacking any importance to anyone, we are all but like a breath that passes, of necessity for life to continue, to make room for the coming generations, for evolution to proceed bringing God’s blessings to us through the generations.

What are we to do?

Give up?

…

Go full bore ahead, damn the cost to others, making our way in life?

…

Bury our heads in the sand and pretend all is okay?

…

…

Lots of options, we people have come up with.

God offers the only one that does us any good:

to head to the ‘mountain’ and spend the ‘night’ in prayer.

The mountain is not so far, or merely a geographical location, just as the night is not merely the time between sunset and sunrise. The mountain is that place where we have encountered God, many times, sometimes even noticing. The night it that darkness that threatens to overwhelm us, against which darkness we can do absolutely nothing.

So we pray.

We pray, God save us!

God save us, sending four strong winds to blow us home again to you, home between the seas and foreign lands, home to rest in your breath, the fifth wind that gives us life, which is really the first wind,

the first wind of all life, and

the last wind.

Spirit.

Forever Judgment

And Doom, OR?

Friday, September 15, 2023

God’s Hammer of Judgment Looms Over Us

—

OR?

Hosea 11:8-9

How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I treat you like Zeboiim? My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.

John 12:47

I do not judge anyone who hears my words and does not keep them, for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.

…

Words of Grace For Today

Through all the generations the fear of God is fomented in and among us by threatening us with God’s judgment. “In the end everyone will be judged according to what they have done, said, and thought! Therefore be good lest you end up in hell – suffering – forever!” And so go the similar admonishments and threats.

It just about scares the living daylights and joy and hope right out of each one of us. For the result is not a great effort to be good. Rather it drives us to deny our own sins, and create great facades of being good enough.

All that drives us, individually and as a community, further and further from the goodness that God created us to be for each other and all people.

Then we read these passages: God is in our midst and does not come in wrath to judge and condemn. And Jesus comes into the world not to judge it and all in it, but to save the world.

Which will this day be for us?

A day wherein we strive to be good or rather to create the illusion that we are at least good enough to avoid God’s wrath?

Or

A day wherein we rest assured of God’s saving efforts to forgive us our own sins, and set us free to extend God’s grace to others?

…

If our record is any indication then more the former than the latter.

…

If we accept God’s record as determinative then God’s forgiveness will bring us out of the former into the latter

and

life will be a miracle of goodness,

also this day.

The Answer is

(NOT always)

Love!

Wednesday, September 13, 2023

https://entertainmentmesh.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/deep-red-rose.j

Roses Are Red

And Violets are Blue

But

Love

Can Make You

Dead, Through and Through.

Or make you wish you were.

Psalm 22:23

You who fear the Lord, praise him! All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him; stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel!

John 17:22

The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one,

…

Words of Grace For Today

When we are young (ish) and we search for a mate for life, some of us come up with some real doosies!

No names of course, for that would embarrass us all.

The man who marries a young woman and then, despite conversation and promises to be faithfully monogamous, insists that it is his right to have sex with other woman.

The woman who in her 60’s continues to hoard canned food. Already more than 100 lbs overweight she remains fearful that, impoverished as they are for his having served as a pastor, … that they will run out of food. Her hoard fills all their living space, living room, dining room, extra bedroom and even their own bedroom. It takes an extra moving van to move the cans.

The female synodical bishop who aspires to be the bishop of the national church and uses every means to run off or ruin any pastor or congregation who challenges her autocratic, unjust, and even illegal actions to secure her ‘power’.

The woman, to compensate for her insecurities, who cannot accept responsibility for anything she does wrong always blaming it on someone else (as ludicrous as her reasoning often is), who latches on to a fat man who is ‘going places’, and then ridicules him to his literal death, to avoid a divorce and the loss of half their accumulated wealth (more than a little of it legally gained.)

The senator’s wife (a senator who serves on the committee for space exploration) who all her money and tries to send his to a scam artist, who sends news every month of the ‘little green men’ in their midst and his negotiations with them to keep them from overthrowing the government.

The obscenely rich land developer whose wife never runs out of energy or appetites for other people, without their clothes, who has to be sent to one of their other homes to interrupt her appetites run amok.

…

For some people the blessing that we may be one as Jesus is one with the Father, is not such a blessing.

The words of wisdom certainly apply, no matter for what else you marry someone, marry someone kind.

At least then, no matter how crazy they (or you) turn out to be, at least they will not try to bring about your death.

Best to be humble before God, confident only in God’s grace, for in many awesome ways God demonstrates God’s saving grace for us, not only for the Hebrew slaves escaping across the Red Sea into the wilderness, but for all of us, from our slavery to whatever oppression or sin, into the wilderness where we can learn to serve others God’s own grace, instead of our confidence in things that will always fail us.

Gifts

And Promises

Forever … or Not.

Saturday, September 9, 2023

Everything Points To …

Psalm 105:8

He is mindful of his covenant for ever, of the word that he commanded, for a thousand generations,

Romans 11:29

for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.

…

Words of Grace For Today

God remembers and does not revoke God’s promises for us, for more than thousands of thousands of generations.

God does not revoke the gifts given, nor the call to us to share those gifts, the requirements of life abundant, with others.

But we surely can deny those gifts in us and the call given to us.

And from that immense dismay, hurt, sorrow, and destruction have covered each generation.

Let us pray today that God will guide us to share the gifts with those in need, so that our hearts may know the peace that surpasses all understanding.

Breathe,

Breathe In

And Take Share in Adam’s Atoms Yet Again.

Friday, September 8, 2023

We Walk Short Distances,

But the Atoms from Our Breath Circle the Globe,

in a year.

Isaiah 26:19

Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise. O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a radiant dew, and the earth will give birth to those long dead.

Hebrews 12:1

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us,

…

Words of Grace For Today

When we breathe in we breathe in atoms that have been breathed in by all creatures who breathe up to about a year before we breathe. When we breathe out, in little more than a year, our expelled atoms will be breathed in by every living creature that breathes in air.

That’s a connection.

That’s a significant reliance.

That’s a dependency.

That’s … scary, considering what we are doing to the air around planet earth!

When we realize that the atoms we breathe in integrate into the bodies we are, which when we die decay back into the earth (one way or another), it is not difficult to acknowledge that when any new life is born or hatched or otherwise begun, it contains part of all who have gone before. So out of the dead rises new life, just not quite like themselves, usually.

This happens almost no matter what we do. Cremation or burial both lead to the same thing, just in different ways on different timelines. If we shipped our body off in a spaceship towards some distant galaxy, only then would our atoms not reenter the life stream on earth.

Laying aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, as the writer of Hebrews admonishes us to do, is on the opposite end of possible for us; it’s impossible on our own.

This we can only appear to do as the Holy Spirit accomplishes it for us. So we ‘run with perseverance the race’ before us, knowing that even putting one foot in front of the other is a gift from the Holy Spirit. Our place in the race is a rather humble one; God runs us for us.

For that we can be thankful this day, again.

Of course, we always have the choice to stop running. God does leave us freewill. Stopping God’s walking us is something to avoid each day.

But we don’t avoid it, not at all, not at all. So God needs to rescue us many times each day.

Thank God, God does rescue us; also this day, again, and again, and again.

After

After the Break

It’s time to …

Thursday, September 7, 2023

After a Dry start, summer rains have not let up and the grass Grows Lush,

likewise

we live as God favours us with God’s Grace.

Second Chronicles 18:4

But Jehoshaphat also said to the king of Israel, ‘Inquire first for the word of the Lord.’

2 Timothy 3:14

But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it,

…

Words of Grace For Today

It’s time to continue in what we have learned and firmly believed, namely that God prepared for us to be good sinners,

sending Jesus to show us that God still loves us, saves us, forgives us, revives us to full life, and sends us out to be that love for others.

This is the Word of the Lord.

On that we can base our whole lives

and

all will be well,

all will be well!

All manner of things will be well.

For that’s how God created the universe to be.