Perspective – Page 12

Remember

To Speak … Truth

Tuesday, August 15, 2023

When Our Vision Is Narrowed By Worry and Self-Concerns,

Like Not Seeing a Crossing Tracks’ Origin and Destination,

We Miss Other’s Needs, Paths, and Opportunities.

Proverbs 31:8

Speak out for those who cannot speak, for the rights of all the destitute.

Hebrews 13:3

Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured.

…

Words of Grace For Today

When we know ourselves to be defined by God, our identity not dependent on us ourselves or those around us …

Well then the world seeks us out for the peace we offer,

and we

cannot

help

but

remember

and

speak,

Remember those in prisons, concrete or imaginary, with bully guards or made of rumours, of body or of spirit, by wars exiled out of home or by poverty kept from surviving healthily if at all,

and to speak

for those who are not given voice to speak and be heard,

for whom the world has no time or compassion

or imagination

of their precious worth

to us all.

So today

we remember and speak

in prayer first

and then

in our actions.

For God remembers us and speaks for us,

with grace

and steadfast love.

Wondrous Works

Piled High and Wide

Sunday, August 13, 2023

Is This Inside A Home

Even Though It Is No House?

Only As It Is Lit By Christ’s Love?

Job 9:10

God does great things beyond understanding, and marvellous things without number.

Ephesians 1:3

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,

Words of Grace For Today

After breakfast there’s dishes to be done, coffee grounds to be disposed of, garbage to be taken out, teeth to be flossed and brushed. Not such great works, but over time they add up to a whole lot of time (and coffee grounds and other garbage tossed out. If it was all in one pile how high and wide would it be? And how it would stink!)

Greater works are those that construct homes. The labour of most ‘stick’ houses in North America is not insignificant, though the structures are designed to last 50 years, and then replacements have to be built! In Germany the standard house is built to a code that results in a structure that should last for 200 years. Now that is a structure. Unless global warming leaves Germany as frigid as Canada and those houses are nearly useless for lack of insulation!

The greater work is to turn a completed structure into a home. That takes care, patience, and love for and by all those who live therein.

Still, a home will most always disintegrate back to being a mere house, sometimes a cursed house, where hate, distrust, and destruction are the norm for each day for all therein. The only way to counter the gravitational pull for homes to disintegrate into houses of hate is to actively revive love each day, even in the face of hate, distrust, and destruction run amok, even at home.

Where are the great works? Superhighways? Skyscrapers? Great Walls that divide and defend? Technology enabled defence systems and military systems? Supercomputers that in minutes defeat all encryption? Rise to power over the greatest powers? Controlling the greatest powers from the shadows? Amassing the greatest wealth and properties? Establishing a colony on the moon? Sending people to Mars? Defeating a virus (sort of only as it continues to mutate?) Finding a ‘cure’ for cancer, malaria, antibiotic resistant bacteria? Solving the energy needs of today’s world and with it reversing climate change? Saving people who are trafficked into slavery, even yet today? Helping an addict onto the road of recovery? Raising an autistic child to be able to interact in the world, and one in a million being an unmatched genius, who helps change the course of human history for the better?

By comparison God’s works, and even one of God’s works, is so much more. As Job gives witness to, when everything else seems to be against us and we have lost everything, that is not God’s pronouncement of having abandoned us, instead it is opportunity for us to see clearly how God walks with us, through hell, back into the Light and love of life. God overcomes our fears! God overcomes our darknesses! God overcomes our hate!

God even overcomes death itself!

Piled over time all together high and wide they cover and permeate every corner of the universe.

These are the wondrous works of God

even today

even for us.

Victory

What Is Victory When All Die?

Saturday, August 12, 2023

Is Victory Finding The Right Path?

Or God Blessing Our Path?

First Samuel 2:1

Hannah prayed and said, ‘My heart exults in the Lord; my strength is exalted in my God. My mouth derides my enemies, because I rejoice in my victory…’

Luke 10:20

Nevertheless, do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.

Words of Grace For Today

Elkanah has two wives. Peninnah had sons and daughters, but Hannah had none. Peninnah used that to taunt, belittle, and provoke Hannah, for they were rivals. Yet Elkanah favoured Hannah even so. Hannah’s heart was vexed, for in that time and place one was what other people said one was, and in that time and place a woman’s worth was measured by her ability to bear children, especially sons. (Such it was, as too often since and in many places still today.)

Eli finds Hannah, in the temple severely vexed, mouthing her words silently, and he thinks she is drunk. When she protests that she is not drunk but severely troubled, he dismisses her with a blessing, that God would grant her prayer.

She then bears a son, Samuel. And so Samuel’s life, blessed in service to God begins, for Hannah gives her son, after he is weaned, to Eli to be raised and work in service to God.

Hannah claims victory for her shame and worthlessness is overcome, and Peninnah can no longer taunt, belittle, and provoke her.

Yet, is this the victory of life, really? Hannah and Samuel, Peninnah and all her descendants, Elkanah, Eli and everyone else will still die, as we all do. 100% fatality rate for species human, catches us all in the end.

We all have small victories. Peninnah had a series of victories with each child that she claimed each time at Hannah’s expense. Such victories are most common, most ugly, most destructive (even to the world’s Peninnahs), and totally worthless in the end. Hannah’s victory is a victory, a small victory. It is a good victory, a blessing from God. But still a small victory.

Where’s the big victory?

Winning a World War? Only to have another war (or wars) engulf the world in two decades or so! Winning in court with lies? Only to face perjury charges, if not in court then before God! Gathering in all sorts of wealth, fame, luxuries, power, comforts? Only to have it all evaporate as one’s health deteriorates and one suffers long years of agony, begging to die. Or to finally realize that one’s wealth, fame, luxuries, power, comforts always cost many other people their lives.

Victory in life is always fleeting, except one.

To have God walk with one through it all, or in other words to be able to rejoice that our names are written in heaven. That is a victory that lasts beyond time into eternity. And it also makes all the other unjust victories taken from one’s life by others rather moot.

For, given God’s presence in every day, every minute, there is nothing that can separate one from the God’s love, and though there may be days when one finds no path to rejoice in this endless, unmatched blessing, there is always reason to rejoice, to exalt, to celebrate …

and to give God thanks.

And even to pray for the poor souls who live as if small victories like wealth, fame, luxuries, power, or comforts are what life is all about.

Dark

Dark Past

Darker Future?

Friday, August 11, 2023

Mendenhall Glacier on June 8, 2023, in Juneau, Alaska

Daniel 2:22

He reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what is in the darkness, and light dwells with him.

John 1:5

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

Words of Grace For Today

Scientists processed a ‘rediscovered in 2017’ ice and sediment core taken in 1996 below Camp Century in Greenland, in the dark under 4500 feet of ice. Studying that past they determined that 416,000 years ago plants thrived there. While scientists used to think that the ice pack over Greenland had been there for millions of years, meaning it was quite resilient to changes in temperature, this means that the ice pack is comparatively sensitive to increases in temperatures, and

Much more quickly than we thought, with climate change and rising temperatures, the whole ice pack will melt. All that ice gone means the temperatures there will rise as the sun’s heat is absorbed into the ground instead of reflected back by the white ice-snow. It also means that the oceans will quickly rise as much as 23 feet just from Greenland’s ice water being added to the oceans. Greenland will be warm and wet, and the entire earth may be ice-free.

Billions of people live near sea level: large cities like New York and Vancouver’s lower mainland, large areas like Florida, most of the Netherlands and sub-continent India and large areas of Africa.

So out of the darkness comes the light that shows that the future is very dark for billions of people, and by extension for us all.

Enjoy the light while we can, right?

Do something to prepare, except our possible preparations are small (and smaller yet are the preparations we will likely engage in) compared to what lies ahead.

It’s like building a bomb shelter in one’s back yard and stocking it for a few month’s habitation. That was not needed, fortunately. But such preparations would have been wholly inadequate!

Allow ourselves to both do all that is possible, assist others, and pray for sanity among all people. It’s going to get hard.

And when it gets hard some people turn to violence, as if nature’s onslaught will not be enough.

Then the peacemakers will be needed to keep at least a few people sane, able to make a future worth living

for generations to come.

Pray that we will not forget how to dance, laugh, and sing, amid the darknesses to come.

Pray that the Light of Christ will live in and among us.

Pray that the Holy Spirit will teach us now and always to live in that Light, amid the darknesses we know all too well.

Hubris

Catastrophic

Thursday, August 10, 2023

How Small We Really Are,

Minuscule

in God’s Great Universe.

Habakkuk 2:4

Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them, but the righteous live by their faith.

James 1:21

Therefore rid yourselves of all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness, and welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls.

Words of Grace For Today

Human pride pushes the boundaries of reality with deceptions powerful so that we may think we can save ourselves, and even convince us that we have, yet pride dupes us also to think and believe that we are left

alone

By faith the Holy Spirit, implanted in us as a gift from God, revives us so that we can see reality, the reality of how low we are, so that

we may meekly beg

beg

from God that we might live again in the sureness of God’s grace, able to breathe, dance, and laugh

as the Holy Spirit returns our spirits to health

for by love alone

God’s steadfast love

are we saved and can we live abundantly

of spirit, mind, and body

no matter what may come our way.

Peace

Even When Stumbling

Wednesday, August 9, 2023

Even In The Darkest Times, God Dwells Among Us Providing What We Need.

Psalm 119:165

Great peace have those who love your law; nothing can make them stumble.

Colossians 3:16

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God.

Words of Grace For Today

Living

Living fully

Living fully always with thanks

Living fully always with thanks for all God does among us,

Living among us, God chooses to carry us through all life’s challenges.

Living among us is God bringing us gifts beyond our imaginations

Living among us is God healing us of our every ill

Living among us is God sending us out to share

Living among us is God’s Light

Living among us is God

Living among us

Living

…

Loving.

Gifts

Gloriously Plenty

Tuesday, August 8, 2023

Gloriously Plenty …

Dandelions?

Jeremiah 31:14

I will give the priests their fill of fatness, and my people shall be satisfied with my bounty, Says the Lord.

1 Peter 4:10

Like good stewards of the manifold grace of God, serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received.

Words of Grace For Today

On the walk to the lake the path is covered with pine cones fallen from the trees, and husks of pine cones eaten by squirrels. One steps on the path, after so many days of pine cones coalescing into a soft carpet, with comfort even for arthritic feet and hips. This just as the view of the lake’s waters opens between the branches of the trees.

This is repeated in a few places where more pines grow than the weed-like trees, the poplars.

And the population of squirrels need not forage for food at all. So they multiply, and multiply. And steal more and more insulation from my camp.

God also provides plenty for us. If you have ever seen a combine off-load it’s grain into a waiting trailer, filling and sometime overflowing, the cavernous grain haulers, which in turn off-load their fill into even larger trains of semi trailers, which in turn off-load their fill into grain bins, wider and taller and more in number every good harvest year, which in turn are loaded into mile long trains of grain cars …

If you have ever seen this process of grain hauling, grain flowing, grain filling larger and larger containers then

well then you have seen an example of how God provides gifts to each one of us, and multiplies them as we gather to share what we have.

God does not give gifts for us to hoard them. God’s gifts of wisdom, intelligence, physical strength, determination, communication, charisma, leadership, handiwork, trades skills, compassion, inspiration, faith, and (most of all) love really only shine and provide us the goodness of life when we share them with others,

as the pines share their pine cones to form a cushioning carpet, and to feed those darn squirrels.

So, yes, sometimes what we share with others does not produce blessings.

God knew this, and prepared for it,

and walks with us to bring us through the evil that others ‘share’ with us,

(and to help others through the evil we ‘share’ with them),

and renews life with forgiveness, redemption, healing, and a bounty of more gifts,

and always overflowing, steadfast love

like a cool, refreshing breeze

that cannot be held,

only enjoyed.

Jail Time

Di-Lithium Time

Monday, August 7, 2023

Jail-Time Allows Only Dreams

of Moonlit Nights,

and Much More

Genesis 39:20-21

And Joseph’s master took him and put him into the prison, the place where the king’s prisoners were confined; he remained there in prison. But the Lord was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love; he gave him favour in the sight of the chief jailer.

Acts of the Apostles 16:25

About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them.

Words of Grace For Today

After a long, hard time in the roiling heat of the di-lithium chamber of climate change there’s nothing quite like waking up to a cool breeze blowing in off the lake. The fresh clean air, after days of smoke. The slight chill against one’s face. The comfort in the long sleeve shirt and durable jeans, a head and neck covering hat, and rubber boots, all so that one can make the morning hike to the lake shore and up the hill (for aerobic exercise) to the reclaimed oil lease, and back to …

back to what is left

after losing

everything

to lies,

jail-time and

a criminal record for crimes that never happened.

After a long, hard time in the roiling heat of the di-lithium chambers of jail there’s nothing quite like waking up to a free, cool breeze blowing in off the lake.

Seeing the results of one’s own labours to survive one day at a time, and then one season at a time, and then one year at a time, and after 5 years to be able to prepare for the next year’s hard winter, and the next year’s hellishly hot summer. Setting one’s sleep schedule to fit one’s own life instead of a jailer’s schedule. Resting in a bed one has made. Working at a desk that one has made. Knowing that one’s small abode will not get tossed without notice, and without recourse. Eating food that one prepares oneself, food that one’s body tolerates and is nourishing for it. Taking medications that one keeps oneself, at the hour one needs to take them, and always properly in relation to food intake, keeping throat cancer at bay, and not risking the medication ripping a hole in one’s gut. Being able to live a (hopefully safe) distance from actual criminals and unpredictable, violent addicts. Exercising when one chooses, canoeing on the lake when one is able, working and resting as one chooses, reading what and when one chooses, writing and learning as one chooses, exploring the universe (via the Internet).

After a long, hard time in the roiling heat of the di-lithium chambers of hell there’s nothing quite like waking up to the blessed, free, cool breeze blowing in off the lake.

For having learned the hard way (for there is no easy way to learn this) that God is gracious and walks with one,

into and out of every kind of di-lithium chamber the universe can capture one in,

one knows and trusts that every breath, no matter in or out of a di-lithium chamber of any kind, is the most precious gift, a reminder that God gives blessed life

and nothing is more precious,

nor is anything more required

than breath,

and sharing breath with others,

for life to be blessed,

abundant,

and complete.

Compassion

From the Highest One

to the Lowest Ones

Sunday, August 6, 2023

God’s Compassion Is Spread,

Like Sprays of Cloud,

To All People,

Through Us.

Psalm 22:5

To you they cried, and were saved; in you they trusted, and were not put to shame.

James 5:11

Indeed we call blessed those who showed endurance. You have heard of the endurance of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful.

Words of Grace For Today

God knows we get a lot of grief, ridicule, and judgment from other people, and that we hand out more than a fair share of it to others.

Compassion may flow occasionally from us and to us, though anyone with eyes to see and hearts to know will know full well that there is not enough compassion in the world, nor in any single human’s life, not since the beginning of time, nor to the end of time.

God walks with us, saves us, redeems us, and sends us out to share God’s mercy and compassion with others. God models compassion in Jesus’ life many times, also when he seeks private time to grieve John’s death at Herod’s hands and sword … and then a huge crowd intrudes on his solitude and grief. Jesus has compassion on them, teaches them (in Mark) and heals them (in Matthew- and teaches and heals them in Luke).

The Spirit inspires us to be compassionate with all people. It’s not like we can do it on our own.

So where, when, how will the Spirit bring compassion to people today, through us?

Prayers or Charms

Watch What You Ask For

Saturday, August 5, 2023

Magic Mushroom,

God’s Spores of Poison

Cleaning the Ground?

Psalm 5:2-3

Listen to the sound of my cry, my King and my God, for to you I pray. O Lord, in the morning you hear my voice; in the morning I plead my case to you, and watch.

Mark 11:24

So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.

Words of Grace For Today

Prayer works kind of like a charm.

If you think the charm works you will see it working (kind of making it up to see it) and if you think your prayers are heard you will see and hear God answering (though, not really making it up to see and hear God.)

The charm thing is our brains reaching for rationalizations to affirm our crazy need to have some control over our lives (or at least explain how someone or something else has made things better for us, assuming the charm is good. I guess the same thing would apply to a curse?)

The prayer things is our brains and spirit being pulled into God’s reality that is everything, though many times we think to separate ‘our world’ from God’s reality.

Like the old saying goes, though, be careful what you wish for, because

Because if you look for charms and curses, you will find them plenty enough to build an undying fear in your bones – fear of what curses lie ahead and fear of what charms you will miss out on!

Because once you allow yourself to see and hear God nothing remains the same!

What you thought was your own life, your own possessions, your own rights and obligations disappear like the last smoke from a snuffed candle. You may ‘smell’ the smoke of all that was yours for a long time, but it just is not there. Everything you thought was yours is clarified to be God’s on loan to you for you to be a good steward of, and to share in the best possible way with those most in need in God’s good creation.

Then every morning, noon, and night you will find yourself in conversation with God your creator, asking and pleading, and complaining and grouching, thanking and praising. The life that God loans to each of us is never easy, and it can only be tolerated if we finds our own value and worth in God: created by God, measured by God, redeemed by God (at the highest price possible, God’s Son’s life), purposed by God, and accompanied by God.

As we see and hear God walking with us, then what may look to others, and even to our old sinful selves, to be intolerable or undesirable, in truth is the best life has to offer.

Charms and curses befuddle us.

Prayer connects us to God’s reality for us. And then

Watch,

As our lives constantly change

to be as God intended us to live, when God created us.

Today is another day, running in fear from reality or seeing and hearing God (and seeing and hearing God changing us).