Category: Lake

Great Works

In A Single Day

For Everyone.

Friday, May 5, 2023

Finding Our Way,

Our Wondrously Blessed Way

Through Each Day.

Zechariah 3:9

For on the stone that I have set before Joshua, on a single stone with seven facets, I will engrave its inscription, says the Lord of hosts, and I will remove the guilt of this land in a single day.

1 John 2:2

… and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.

Words of Grace For Today

It is a great challenge to forgive someone who has done great damage to one’s self.

Consider the murder of one’s loved ones.

Consider the foreign ruler who with no just cause invades one’s country and decimates one’s community and livelihood and security … and peace.

Consider the liar who spreads lies and those who believe and retell such lies, until one’s reputation is destroyed and one’s way of life has become impossible leaving one living in the street or bush.

Consider the corrupt police who kill people without recourse. Or the corrupt judge who sentences innocent people to jail and makes decisions that are not even supported by the lies brought as ‘evidence’ to court.

The people so traumatized and ruined by such evil doings is nothing new. It goes back to the beginning of human times. It will continue until there are no more humans to do such things to others. One such new story really is of no interest to most people, since the injustices only can continue to happen when and because almost all people accept these injustices as ‘part of the woodwork’ of life, tolerated as long as they are not directed against them, or protested against (but only by marginalized people, to whom people simply do not listen to.)

God knows all these stories, from the beginning of time to the end of time. God knows such evil destroys not only the victims but the perpetrators. The best of life is still possible for the victims, if they are able to forgive the perpetrators (which is not to simply tolerate that such injustices continue, far from it.) The best of life is only possible for the perpetrators, if they recognize they are forgiven and are on that basis able to amend their lives.

So God provides all that for us, makes it possible.

God forgives everyone, from the beginning of time to the end of time. God makes it possible for us to forgive as well, especially to forgive ourselves. And God makes it possible for us to amend our lives so that we can live lives blessed to be blessings for others.

God accomplishes this again and again in a single day for us all.

What will we do in a single day to forgive the perpetrators who have destroyed our lives, to amend our lives, to share this abundant life with others, and to give God thanks for making a blessed life possible for us?

Getting Changed

Into Saints

Friday, April 28, 2023

Where Will God Send Us Today?

First Kings 20:11

The king of Israel answered, ‘Tell him: One who puts on armour should not brag like one who takes it off.’

Ephesians 4:23

… and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds …

Words of Grace For Today

When warriors go to war, armour is a good thing to put on. When one no longer needs to fight, one can begin the struggle to make peace last. That’s the challenge of God’s holy people.

We don’t start out that way though, or rather we may start out that way but we all get lost early on in life. Instead we work to fight for ourselves and our own. God has other plans for us.

God chooses to transform us from fighters for our own interests into peacemakers, caregivers, life sustain-ers, bearers of words that inspire and give life abundant, actors of forgiveness and grace and mercy, and whatever God gives us to do.

God chooses and we are transformed in our hearts & minds, no longer striving to be good or good enough for God, Accepting who we are, sinners needing rescuing & acknowledging who God is, and then living out for others what God has done for us: loved us, forgiven us, freed us to be now sinner-saints,

We look the same on the outside, but in our hearts & minds, God has transformed us, as God intended at our creations, made us beautiful like colourful butterflies, precious, holy servants, God’s people. God sends us out, volun-tells us to care for God’s precious creation & the creatures in it, including our neighbours, all of them, of all kinds.

Each day there’s the work of love to do, serving others, even if it takes away our very breath, in awe & wonder as God brings us home, to the place Jesus prepares for us.

The Reason

The Real

Renewed Reason To Celebrate

Wednesday, April 26, 2023

Where Once Fishers Fished for Food,

Now Is Empty,

Dying Ice.

Jeremiah 33:10-11

Thus says the Lord: In this place of which you say, ‘It is a waste without human beings or animals’, in the towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem that are desolate, without inhabitants, human or animal, there shall once more be heard the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the voices of those who sing, as they bring thank-offerings to the house of the Lord:
‘Give thanks to the Lord of hosts, for the Lord is good, for his steadfast love endures for ever!’ For I will restore the fortunes of the land as at first, says the Lord.

Titus 2:11

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all,

Words of Grace For Today

How many desolate places are there these days, where no more are there inhabitants or animals to be found? Where conflict and destruction of wars have chased all living things away? Or climate change storms or earthquakes or floods or droughts or rising oceans or … (you name it) have made places uninhabitable?

How many desolate places are there these days, where inhabitants and animals are to be found? Where Covid isolation, strife among neighbours and within families, or greed for power has pitted some against others, or greed based lies have destroyed the foundations of trust, decimating all that remains of a place of safety where one used to acknowledge, converse, suffering with, mourn with, and celebrate joyfully with others?

Covid is no longer treated as a pandemic, yet long Covid has taken a greater toll than just the number of those who have succumbed to death because of Covid. And such a greater number of people all across the world have suffered irreparable damage because of the mostly sensibly enforced isolation of Covid restrictions. Elderly people in care homes, seniors with age and health issues, those suffering dementia, those already caught in the grips of addictions to alcohol, drugs, or anything else, people of all ages with compromised health, children of all ages, school age children deprived of years of learning opportunities and community with other children, extroverts of all flavours cut off from what energizes them, and even introverts and hermits driven further from others.

So many people suffer and will not recover. Others are slowly recovering, like feet that slowly recover feeling more than two years after a rather simple case of Covid early on before the variants of concern became household things.

But how does one reach out?

How does one welcome others, when welcoming them places everyone at new and unseen risks, even risk of death?

How does one carry on without contact with others, giving and receiving the simplest kinds of care?

This is not the first time we have faced such challenges. Many times in millennia gone by, we cried to God to save us,

and God brought voices of mirth and joy to ring from places so desolate not one human or animal had been found there, where before desolation took hold the hustle and bustle of life and community had been vibrant.

These are exactly the kind of challenges we face as people, for which Jesus came, lived among us, taught, ministered to and cured all that ails us, and demonstrated the power of God, not in acts of taking over worldly powers, but in the weakness of loving humans, all of us, just as we are, and showing us how the power of forgiveness gives new life to us all.

So we too, in slow recovery, will sing this day. We will sing God’s praise and pray that those lost will be found, those sick will recover, those dying will be set free to come home to Jesus.

Let the choruses ring out, and once again mark the land as blessed in all ways.

Looking

For Jesus

Monday, April 3, 2023

We Build Houses,

Even For Fishing With Jesus For People.

God Has Other Plans

For Us.

Psalms 16:8

I keep the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.

Hebrews 12:2

looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.

Words of Grace For Today

For us all, all too often we see God as our right hand power that enables us to succeed in the world. Our enemies should lay down and worship, if not God, then us, for the power we wield.

Except life is not like that, and God’s Word for us is not either.

Instead God deals with the reality of life … which ends in death for us all.

God frees us from our sins, and our ultimate fears of death,so that we can live.

On Easter we will say: Christ is Risen! Christ is Risen Indeed! As enthusiastic as we may have learned to proclaim this wondrous news, the power of that news is clear only when we know deep in our bones and hearts what has come before: Jesus has died. Jesus has died a terrible, torturous, unjust death.

That’s what Holy Week is all about. It reminds us of the reality that Jesus addresses with his death and resurrection.

Make no mistake there have been plenty of deaths recently. Among them:

Five siblings, their spouses and children and friends gather to bury the siblings’ parents killed in an accident. An earthquake rocks the mountain overlooking the cemetery and buries them all. A tank runs over an orphan soldier crushing the breath out of him forever. An addict dies alone and helpless poisoned by xylazine cut into his drugs. An old man dies forgotten in his soiled bed. Two women are stoned to death by a crowd of self-righteous zealots.

And then this Friday we remember also that Jesus was falsely accused as many before and since, was strung up and left to die on a cross.

Anyone who is paying even a little bit of attention knows the searing sadness, and profound sorrow of death. That’s life on earth. We get used to such news.

God planned for that, too.

God lets us dive into the familiar of death, and then jars us out of our comfort zones with Jesus’ resurrection,

Turning our worlds all topsy-turvy, back upright,

Where only God is in control, and we live and breathe only as God gives us these gifts … to share.

Whatever

Cup we are given

Thursday, March 30, 2023

No Matter the Beauty,

or Ugly Evil,

God Is With Us

In Every Season.

Ecclesiastes 3:1

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.

Luke 18:31

Then he took the twelve aside and said to them, ‘See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished.’

Words of Grace For Today

Have a great day!

So we wish others, and wish for ourselves.

But

the world does not always comply with our wishes.

Some days are not great.

In fact some days are some of the worst in our lives, even the worst days in history!

While we may wish for easy, comfortable, luxurious even, days that we can slide through without any great challenges, life is not that way.

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.

And that means, come what may, it is all going to eventually come our way, too, the good and the evil.

How can we prepare?

For the greatest evil there simply is no preparation that would be sufficient.

We can at best lean on God to accompany us, whatever comes our way.

To take even the bitterest cup with sure hands, knowing that even death cannot conquer us, for Christ is for us, is with us, and will always welcome us home, even in death.

Today may be a normal day, or a great day, or a day that astounds us with amazing things. Or it may be the flip of that, and astound us with the amazing destructive power of evil.

May it be, that we are led to trust God’s presence with us, whatever it may be.

Welcome

Brilliant Light?

Monday, March 27, 2023

Brilliant Light Is Only Welcomed

By Those Who Have Nothing

To Hide.

Psalms 48:11

Let Mount Zion be glad, let the towns of Judah rejoice because of your judgments.

Matthew 10:7

As you go, proclaim the good news, “The kingdom of heaven has come near.”

Words of Grace For Today

God’s judgments are good news for those whom God does not condemn. Since God turns right-side-up the world’s upside-down way of living to gain for one’s self at others’ expense, those who have ‘succeeded’ and found a life of privilege, power, and comfort for themselves will be condemned. They will lose all their privilege, power, and comfort – indeed all their life – for eternity when God judges them. Those who the ‘succeeders’ have put down, cast out, and sucked the life out of, those people will gain a place in God’s Kingdom for eternity. They will live forever as God’s own children.

If Zion and the towns of Judah are to rejoice because of God’s judgments, then it must be that they have suffered while others have sucked life out of them.

God’s judgments are good news. But they are not good news for everyone!

Proclaiming that the Kingdom of God is near, may indeed be good news, but those who do not recognize their own terrible sins will be caught, and for them it’s not good news.

The thing that is terrible is that many people who suck life out of others know full well what God’s judgment against them will be. They also know full well that anyone proclaiming that the Kingdom of God is come near is not proclaiming any good news for them.

Watch out proclaimers of ‘good news’ for the privileged, powerful, and comfortable will do everything possible to stop the proclamation. Taking life is a regular venture for them.

Who could have guessed that proclaiming good news to all people would put one’s life at such risk?

Anyone who reads the Gospel,

and gives God thanks for the saints who have gone before us.

Today: more proclaiming the good news is our task, ready of not!

Can We

See or Control God?

Sunday, March 26, 2023

It May Seem We See

Only As If Through Fog,

But God Is Here

To Be Seen Clearly.

First Kings 8:27

But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain God, much less this house that I have built!

John 1:18

No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

Words of Grace For Today

Finding the meaning of life is an unending challenge every day of every life, unless …

unless one fools oneself.

That usually ends badly for that person and many around them, sometimes nations and continents and even the whole world.

Now if we could only meet God, talk with God, and have God tells us what our lives are supposed to be like, to what end God created us, and what the purpose of our lives actually is, then …

Then life would be peachy, right?

Not really.

God did send the Law, the Prophets, and then Jesus to teach us all that and more about God and what God intends for us.

But we so easily hijack and pervert to our own ends all God’s efforts to communicate with us. That’s corrupt human nature. It leaves many puking out any idea that God actually exists, or talking at all about God is helpful. Perverse ideas about God are more destructive than almost anything else people can come up with, after all!

So many people have tried to contain God inside their own buildings, their own ideas of God subjugating others to their own whims.

God planned for all that, and in each generation God sends us saints, saints who see and hear the saints from previous generations, and who share with us God’s purpose for us.

The purpose of life is not that hard to see and know and live by: to love one another as oneself, and even to love one’s enemies, and to give God all praise and credit for the goodness and beauty that permeates all of life.

Living that out each day is the challenge of each day. Light work, it is, also for this day.

Conflict

Resolution-ers?

Saturday, March 25, 2023

We All Throw Shadows In the Brilliance of Christ’s Light!

What Effect Does Our Shadow Have On Others?

Proverbs 16:32

One who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and one whose temper is controlled than one who captures a city.

Matthew 5:9

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

Words of Grace For Today

The basic human attitude when we allow ourselves to become wholly unsure of ourselves or anxious is to become angry. Well not in one step without options. We can count to 10 or 90, breathe, and subvert the panic. We can learn to acknowledge hurt, even hurt when we know the source as another human, and then divert our impetus to anger in more constructive, less destructive (to others and ourselves) attitudes.

We can learn, guided by the Holy Spirit and the saints, to be peacemakers for ourselves, turning what could become anger and escalating internal and external conflict, into a peaceful manner of living with all the hurts, disappointments, attacks, and great losses that life and other people will throw at us.

As we learn this, and practice it, for no one is ever perfect in maintaining even one’s own peace, then we can reach out to others caught in anger, anxiety, pain, loss and others attacked by other people; we can, by God’s Grace alone, guide them to find peace with themselves and with all life offers, both good and bad.

The world needs peace, as desperately now as ever.

How will we hang on to truth and share peace this day, even with our enemies?

More Light work for the saints.

Holy

Rock

Sunday, March 19, 2023

Rocky Shores,

Rocky Lives,

Rock of Salvation

First Samuel 2:2

There is no Holy One like the Lord, no one besides you; there is no Rock like our God.

1 Peter 1:15

Instead, as he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct;

Words of Grace For Today

It was just a four day outing into the Boundary Water Canoe Area. The first day the sun shone bright and warm, the winds were light and mostly at their backs. Camp that first night was everything they’d dreamed of for their honeymoon. What neither could know was that it would all dramatically change soon enough.

Brent and Nellie had this planned since they were seniors in High School. During University they’d continued to date, except for those few months when they’d fought and broken up and tried to imagine life without each other.

It was the last thing each had wanted, but in their chemistry class the professor had assigned them to work together on a lab and demonstration to teach the complex events of nuclear fission compared to nuclear fusion. It had nearly cost them their sanity as they tried to work on the project without being anywhere near each other. It was that fusion part that had, ironically, brought them together to film their presentation to a class of High School students and their parents.

After they got over their awkwardness and moved into the presentation everything started to flow, like it had for them before. Then the slide presentation simply quit. The computer died. So without missing a beat they started to really click and work together, one talking while the other drew on the presentation paper they had for ready to record questions on, then switching roles as each led with their strengths. That paper and their voices were their only presentation medium. Like a dance couple they had pulled it off with grace, and in fact their impromptu final demonstration of fusion, a completely unplanned kiss, drew applause … and their chem prof used the video of their presentation as a demonstration for their class and for years afterwards of what an A+ presentation looked like!

That kiss rocked their worlds, providing balm for so many hurts.

Within days they both knew from their own experience so much more about God, their Rock and Salvation, than ever before … most of it was about mercy and forgiveness.

That’s God’s holiness in motion, even for us today.

So what will we do with it, again this day?

Barren

Wild (-erness) Love

Thursday, March 16, 2023

Sometimes

Christ’ Light Draws Us

To The Far Shores

…

of Our Imaginations

to See and Be

God’s Love for All People

Deuteronomy 32:10

He sustained him in a desert land, in a howling wilderness waste; he shielded him, cared for him, guarded him as the apple of his eye.

Or perhaps better pro-nouned:

God sustained the people in a desert land, in a howling wilderness waste; God shielded them, cared for them, guarded them as the apple of her eye.

1 John 4:16

So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.

Words of Grace For Today

Led out of slavery, across the land of a hostile despot, pursued by well trained, deadly soldiers, saved by a miracle crossing the Red Sea into the wilderness, and then?

What good is it to be freed from slavery only to end up in the wilderness to die of thirst, or hunger, or empty hearts and souls unable to imagine God’s grace?

So God sustains, shields, cares for, and guards the people in the barren howling wasteland. God sustains, shields, cares for, and guards the people with love, for there is nothing so powerful.

Seeking to establish a democracy leaders of the country (politician, banker, and publisher) arrive at the White House for a week of consultations. The brilliant writer leads them to craft a wonderful constitution. The President ‘interferes’ by bringing two of the greatest minds into the room with them. The greatest minds are from opposite parties and from opposite ends of the spectrum of thought, especially about how a democracy should function … except for one basic foundation.

Stymied by the constant arguing that prevents any consensus about what should and should not be included in the new constitution, the writer finally seeks out the President to silence the arguing. They only have one day left to finalize their document!

The President advises the writer that the goal is not a constitution, written and sealed for adoption. The goal is to teach by example, and in that example reach into the leaders’ hearts, minds, and souls to show them that the foundation of democracy is not any written document or anything else, except for the willingness to listen with respect to one’s opponents. If this small group of leaders learn to respect that one foundational principle, not in writing, but in their hearts, minds and souls, then they will teach others by example back home. With that principle they will be able, not easily, but successfully, to write and adopt … and the hardest part … and to follow the constitution with respect for all opinions honestly presented for consideration. (From West Wing)

Our foundational principle for life is not merely for the worst of all forms of government, (except all the others). Our principle for life is what God gives us, love. Living that love, trusting that love, listening to each other with that love, these are the things that Jesus does for us setting an example, so that we may live, trust, listen with love for others, so that they may learn to live, trust, and listen with love. With this miracle, for it can only happen by miracle transforming our hearts in spite of ourselves, God brings us through every barren wilderness to the Promised Land.

Today we get to live out the love that God has for us.

That’s Light work, spreading God’s miracles with abandon across the landscapes of all creation. Ready or not God already has sent us.