Clear, Foggy

Morning

Saturday, October 12, 2024

After It Has Lifted Considerably,

The Fog Remains on the Lake.

Is That Clear?

Genesis 50:20

Joseph said to his brothers: Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today.

Luke 6:28

Bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.

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Words of Grace For Today

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I woke to a clear morning,

early before the sun rose

in the twilight of dawn

in the thick fog

holding visibility to less than a quarter kilometre.

How can this be, you rightfully ask.

Take Joseph’s words to his brothers: you intended to do me harm, but God made something good of it, preserving our lives and helping us grow to a great and numerous people.

If they hadn’t thrown in the pit, and then sold him into slavery, where he served, was falsely accused by the wife of his master, and finally freed by Pharaoh for his wisdom and set as Pharaoh’s right hand, in charge of saving grain to prepare for the 7 year famine to come,

which would have wiped out his family back home,

then Joseph would not have been in a position to save his family.

Things are never just what they seem to be.

Most often things are very complicated, an interwoven set of events, actors, sufferers, and results.

Jesus knows this full well. Bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.

Why?

Because things are never so simple.

The person who curses you today, when blessed may well be the person who saves you on the most challenging day of your life.

But even before that, cursing another person costs the person cursing as much as, if not more than, the person being cursed.

So how is this a clear morning in the soup of thick fog?

It’s complicated and true.

After a very short night’s sleep the night before last, leaving me in a brain fog of exhaustion yesterday, while I had to deal with a vehicle that just did not want to run,

last night I slept long and fast, a full 8.5 hours plus.

So the brain fog is gone. I see, think, hear clearly. I can work without risking making costly mistakes. It’s a wonderful recovery, made so marked by the comparison with how difficult yesterday was.

The fog shrouding the lake and touching even the trees across the meadow may limit visibility, but I need not see far to know what I see actually is what I can deal with, and must deal with.

Of course, I’m not driving or flying, in which case what you don’t see in the distance can literally knock you about until you are silly or never going see, hear, or smell anything ever again.

Today I am thankful (it is that weekend after all) that it is a crystal clear morning, shrouded in a wonderful hug of fog.

What has God done lately to use evil intentions, aimed at you, in order to bring about greater good? What can you be unexpectedly thankful for this morning?

Wild Guessing

Or Hope?

Thursday, October 10, 2024

Here We See What Lies Ahead,

Sometimes.

After Death,

Not At All.

Ezekiel 37:11-12

Then he said to me, ‘Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.” Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel.

1 Corinthians 15:42-44

So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.

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Words of Grace For Today

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Everyone wants to know what happens after we die.

Just think if one could guarantee that one’s information about what happens to us after death were absolutely true! One could control the hearts and minds of many people with that information.

But dying is what we know.

After that it is wild guessing.

Some call that hope, but it really is still a feeble hope built on wild guessing.

Real hope is

to know that God loves us, promises to forgive and renew us in this life (which we need desperately each day, hour, minute, second), and gives us so many gifts we do not deserve, all so that we are equipped to share life abundant with others,

and knowing that

we can

trust that whatever comes our way in this world,

whatever would zap life-energy from our bones

to lay us low and take life from us

God will respond by reviving us

and renewing our spirits:

God will walk with us,

and help us continue

to help others,

and if we die

to bring us

home.

Hope in that, instead of some wild-guess based description of what happens after death,

so that when we lie on our deathbed, we know from so much experience

that God will walk with us

whatever comes next

after death.

Learning

As We’re Made To

Wednesday, October 9, 2024

Learning About Shadows In The Snow,

We Can Do.

About God’s Commandments,

Not.

Psalm 119:73

Your hands have made and fashioned me; give me understanding that I may learn your commandments.

2 Thessalonians 2:15

So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by our letter.

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Words of Grace For Today

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To learn God’s commandments,

The God that made and fashioned us,

it not

merely to read the commandments, and perhaps memorize them, and then be able to regurgitate them for another person.

To learn God’s commandments, the commandments of the God who create us,

is to

know them by heart, mind and soul

so that, like muscle memory,

they become second nature

to our dealings with others

and all we do

as we traverse

the life that God created us to live.

Holding to traditions may seem to help,

but

to actually learn God’s commandments

is something so far beyond anything

we are capable of,

so that we must recognize

only as the Holy Spirit makes us able

can we learn (know, and do, and have embedded in our being)

anything about God

and anything good.

So we pray each day:

with thanks for everything that keeps us alive,

for forgiveness for all our sins,

and that we may do what is good and what is necessary,

which is to trust that the Holy Spirit will be with us through it all,

giving us what we need

to do what is good and necessary each day,

even today.

Especially today.

All-Everything

God

Sunday, October 6, 2024

Even Our Grandest Views of God’s Beautiful Creation,

Pale Compared to

God’s Love

Made Visible in Us Loving Each Other,

Even Our Enemies.

Isaiah 40:15

Even the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as dust on the scales; see, he takes up the isles like fine dust.

Romans 3:29

Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also,

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Words of Grace For Today

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The muck we get ourselves into is most often rooted in our forgetting or rather refusing to remember

that God is Almighty, Omniscient, Onmipresent, and all the other Everythings that God is, Divine, Immortal, All Loving ….

and we think we can get by without God

all on our own.

Thankfully God planned for that

and waits for us to repent, and turn back to God, ask forgiveness (which is already promised and given) and be renewed with the power of the gifts given to us in our baptisms,

even today

no matter what you did yesterday or before.

For God waits

as long as it takes,

for each and every one of us to humbly ask God for forgiveness,

so that we can all be renewed in God’s great, generous, gracious love

by giving the same to others in need.

To Grouse

Or Not to Grouse

Saturday, October 5, 2024

Always, There’s Colour in Our Days.

Seldom A Grouse,

or Reason to.

Jeremiah 14:21

Do not spurn us, for your name’s sake; do not dishonour your glorious throne; remember and do not break your covenant with us.

Romans 11:2

God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew. Do you not know what the scripture says of Elijah, how he pleads with God against Israel?

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Words of Grace For Today

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how do we know God has not abandoned us?

There’s a landscape that I often see and take photos of. It’s not unlike the landscape painted by the fictional painter Povel Wallander. He painted it, and only it, over and over again, even when he tried to paint something else: a hill, trees of dark outlines with whiter bark, on a background of the north, mostly grey tones, sometimes with a grouse. Sometimes not. These landscapes tell a story about life, but only part of the story. There’s much to be filled in.

The photos that I take, which remind me of Povel’s grey landscapes, seldom show only the grey tones of our north. Most often they burst with colour and light in every season. Only the winter photos show more grey, but even they are pulled towards blues and remind me of taking a familiar jazz piece and putting a new riff into it.

We know that God has not forsaken us because,

even if we think there is much to grouse about,

there are always full colours in our days,

and new riffs in our nights.

Siblings Many

One God

Friday, October 4, 2024

We crawled out of the soup eons ago,

what for?

Psalm 119:82

My eyes fail with watching for your promise; I ask, ‘When will you comfort me?’

Hebrews 4:16

Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

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Words of Grace For Today

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The Siblings

Two brothers:

One ate oatmeal for breakfast every morning, sometimes before bed as well. Slim, fit, though he worked little with his hands, arms, legs, and body. His was a labour of the mind, teaching students in high school, mentoring them on how to live in this wide world of challenges unending, as he provided the basics for them to become responsible citizens of Canada.

The other never disclosed his diet though it obviously was always sufficient, for his body was rotund. He also worked with his mind, a farmer of a large operation. And he worked with his hands, arms, legs and feet, labouring hard at various times during the year to raise crops and animals to feed many, many people well.

Two sisters:

One, solid and sturdy on her feet, worked endlessly to secure a safe and secure life for herself and her five children. The costs of raising children was immense, and her securing sufficient income was always on her mind, always dictated her decisions. She drove her husband harder than she drove herself, for he shared her focus, to earn enough money to secure a good life for himself and his family. Until he could not anymore, for the lies he had to tell in order to continue in his job were too much to bear. He switched occupations and started a thriving store, making more money than he ever could have before. But his body and his mind could not keep up with the pressure and after a year of severe sleep deprivation added to the stress of his own and his wife’s demands on him he succumbed to the depression that had haunted him since he was a teenager and he killed himself.

As a widow this sister continued working the store and her own job, letting the children raise themselves. As she approached 55 years old she looked back on her life, and forward to her future and she succumbed to deep depression. Her oldest daughter had murdered at least two people, and gotten away with it. Her to older sons had left home as soon as they could and never talked to her. Her younger daughter in her late 20s, still fully dependent on her, had followed her father’s exit from life. Her youngest son stayed in touch. Everything he did was about earning more money, and he was fundamentally unhappy, trying anything from travel, to drugs, to sex, to danger to try to find some meaning to life.

This widow’s sister was in comparison frail of body, though she had been graceful in her youth. Most certainly beauty had passed her by and she made little attempt to cover the awkward mismatched features she’d been born with. She had excelled at school, for it was the only thing she could do well. Music and math, history and languages, hard sciences and psychology, and even religion engrossed her. She had earned multiple Ph.ds. Her classes at a small university were always overfilled. She engaged her students, pushing them to not only master the subject before them, but the questions of life that lay beneath it all, and their place in the whole project of life.

She was still happily married to her first love, also a professor, he in philosophy. They had two children who had families of their own. Each made their way around the world on projects, one as a medical volunteer with various NGOs, the other as an organizer, speaker, and counsellor to leaders and vulnerable children alike.

The focus of this sister’s life, and her families’ lives, was to share God’s gracious generosity in any and every way they could with the people most in need. No one was wealthy in the family. More than a few times the children had come to their parents for help, sometimes for money. Lately the parents had gone to each of their children for help, organizing a project to educate and inspire people of all backgrounds to reach out with compassion to people in the greatest need around the world, starting in their backyards, with the homeless people in their city.

This year for Thanksgiving the second sister and her husband, with both children and their whole families, travelled to Tanzania to help start building a new medical clinic that would eventually become a full fledged teaching hospital outside the capital, Dodoma.

The first sister, with more than 8 million dollars in investments and assets, worked at her store, and exhausted spent the evening at home, taking a phone call from her youngest, asking for more money, this time to buy a new motorcycle to travel with some friends somewhere to the south. She transferred $80k into his account, sat on the couch in her fancy living room and a huge emptiness engulfed her, and she wept for hours like she had never wept before. The next morning she woke up feeling worse than if she’d had a hangover, which she’d had plenty of in her life.

Fraternal Twins, a boy and a girl

Fraternal Twins, a boy and a girl, were born yesterday to a distant cousin of the brothers and the sisters, in a small town near the SK border. Their parents attend church irregularly, aren’t really driven to do anything they do not need to, but they get by on their income living a rather simple if not poverty consumed lifestyle.

Where will each of these twins find themselves in 20 years? In 30 years? In 55 years? Will they find meaning and joy in life? Or will they pursue life selfishly only to find life meaninglessness easily engulfs them?

Could we make a difference if we knew these twins, these sisters, these brothers? Does God equip us to share humility, purpose, joy, reasons to give thanks, and grace with those most in need?

Who are we?

Happiness vs Thankfulness

Not all that related as we might think

Thursday, October 3, 2024

If you lived here, would that make you happy?

What would make you give thanks?

What would bring you to give thanks?

Isaiah 44:24-26

Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer,
who formed you in the womb:
I am the Lord, who made all things,
who alone stretched out the heavens,
who by myself spread out the earth;
who frustrates the omens of liars,
and makes fools of diviners;
who turns back the wise,
and makes their knowledge foolish;
who confirms the word of his servant,
and fulfils the prediction of his messengers;
who says of Jerusalem, ‘It shall be inhabited’,
and of the cities of Judah, ‘They shall be rebuilt,
and I will raise up their ruins’;

2 Peter 1:19

So we have the prophetic message more fully confirmed. You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.

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Words of Grace For Today

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When God created, God promised many things. Here God promises that Jerusalem and the cities of Judah shall be rebuilt.

Does God ever promise us happiness?

Yes, I suppose many times over.

But is there a link between happiness and giving thanks?

Do we need to be happy to give thanks?

If we are happy will we give thanks?

If we give thanks will that make us happy?

If we have all that we can dream of, will that make us happy?

If we have all that we can dream of, will we finally be thankful?

At first glance one may think these relationships exist, but

they really do not

and there is endless evidence of wealthy people ‘with everything they could ever want’ being the most unhappy and thankless people on the earth,

and

there are millions of people who have almost nothing, not even the basics of life or security, who are both happy and thankful.

Perhaps the link is that God gives us everything good, happiness included, and when we realize that

we cannot help but being thankful for all the good things God gives us.

For life is corporal, and does require the basics for us to live on.

But life is only partially corporal, and the rest of life is what makes or breaks us being happy, and thankful.

These non-corporal things are all gifts from God.

We cannot attain them or possess them, not by our own efforts or otherwise, except that God gives them to us.

We can wake up each day, each minute, and realize again

how much God gives us

that makes us happy, that brings us to unavoidably be thankful.

To Thirst

And Receive the Living Water, each day.

Wednesday, October 2, 2024

The Living Water Moves,

Often Wildly,

And Is Seldom,

though sometimes,

Still

Isaiah 49:10

they shall not hunger or thirst,
neither scorching wind nor sun shall strike them down,
for he who has pity on them will lead them,
and by springs of water will guide them.

John 4:15

The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.’

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Words of Grace For Today

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While I work physically and focused making preparations to survive another winter, harder, colder, bleaker … or easier than previous winters

I often forget to drink enough.

Alcohol it isn’t of course. Can’t afford it, money-wise or other-wise.

Never like surrendering the clear senses my brain has provided me my life long. Why sacrifice it to … to what? What would alcohol provide?

But good water, yes!

Sweet apple juice for a sugar boast, yes!

Hot tea, yes!

Always, no matter what the day will bring or demand of me, I begin with the living Word, the Body of life and hope, and the Blood of sacrificial love.

There my thirst for the essence of life is quenched, the living water flows through all those thirsts that could rob me of life abundant,

and

…

Well, it’s a simple, sacred, overwhelming blessing

to start each day so.

How will this day begin for you?

Solitude or Not

Blessed

Tuesday, October 1, 2024

Is This The Promise or

The Curse,

The Bleak or

the Peaceful

Solitude?

Psalm 18:49-50

For this I will extol you, O Lord, among the nations, and sing praises to your name. Great triumphs he gives to his king, and shows steadfast love to his anointed, to David and his descendants for ever.

Revelation 15:4

Lord, who will not fear and glorify your name? For you alone are holy.
All nations will come and worship before you, for your judgments have been revealed.

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Words of Grace For Today

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“These words and mysteriously similar paraphrases of them have been found in the writings of 50 hermits, spanning time from years before Christ, likely around the times of Jeremiah and Isaiah, all the way through to these recent years. And even more mysteriously from the writings of a hermit found just last year, that seem (according to the experts who date paper, ink, and other things) to be from 500 years in the future:

I never chose to become a hermit. It’s just after the betrayal and suffering caused by ones who professed to love me, this is where I ended up. Alone. It’s not that I don’t like the solitude. It is holy, sacred. It feeds me well as God provides in many and various ways. Most remarkably I’ve come to know that I am never alone, really. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit never part from me, walking through each challenge of surviving as I age, each provocation and threat by people who do not understand solitude as a gift or who believe the lies spread far and wide by my betrayers.

I have learned to be thankful for the little things: Clean air. Fresh water. Simple food. Clothing. Protection from the elements. Labour that is purposeful even though I seldom see any results. Most of all that there are a few people (very few really) who I still can safely love, who love me, with whom I communicate.”

When we know that God shows steadfast love toward us, then alone or in the multitudes, we can find peace, and

know that God walks with us

each day.

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Where is God today for you?

Do you see, taste, smell, hear, and sense God walking right there …?

Living by the Sword

In a Word

Monday, September 30, 2024

Like the Clouds Pouring to the Sunset-Horizon,

So People Have Died Unnecessary and Early Deaths

at Our Hands.

Second Samuel 2:26

Then Abner called to Joab, ‘Is the sword to keep devouring for ever? Do you not know that the end will be bitter? How long will it be before you order your people to turn from the pursuit of their kinsmen?’

Matthew 26:52

Then Jesus said to him, ‘Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.

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Words of Grace For Today

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As Jesus and many others have said:

‘Those who live by the sword will die by the sword.’

But that is not the problem for most people.

The problem is that those who live by the sword

have helped thousands of millions to their unnecessary and early deaths.

The truth is

that there are lots of ways we help others to their unnecessary and early deaths,

starting with ignorance and apathy,

a cruel or unthinking word,

an action to ‘protect our interests’

while decimating others’ interests and lives directly.

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How not to particiapate in this popular project?

Compassion.

Thoughtfulness.

Prayer.

All that Jesus directed us to with the greatest command:

to love our neighbour as ourselves.

…

And how will we do that today,

in a new

and newly effective way?

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That is every day’s challenge, now isn’t it!