Category: Perspective

Special?

Special Favours

For the Righteous, Really?

Sunday, July 23, 2023

We May See the Obstacles.

God Shows Us the Light

that Gives Life Abundant to All.

Psalm 5:12

For you bless the righteous, O Lord; you cover them with favour as with a shield.

1 John 5:18

We know that those who are born of God do not sin, but the one who was born of God protects them, and the evil one does not touch them.

Words of Grace For Today

Sometimes it just ain’t so, as Scripture seems to tell us.

The righteous are not blessed with special favours. In fact there are few if any really righteous people.

And all people seem to get the same challenges and shafts, enough to send us to the grave happy to escape this mess.

Except the wealthy, powerful, and privileged seem to get away with ‘blessings’ that are really not theirs to have, stealing the necessities of life from others so that they can live in comfort and privilege they certainly do not deserve, unless evil rewards them so!

Except …

Yes, this is the first EXCEPT:

We do not make ourselves righteous. Only God can do that, and God did do that, in our baptisms, as promised through the life, teaching, healing, death and resurrection of God’s son, Jesus, the Christ.

So the righteous do get special favours, not that we’ve earned them, but that God has chosen us and chosen to favour us, even though we do not deserve anything but death.

As for the evil one touching us … well, we remain sinners and therein the evil one gets us each day, also.

So we live blessed and captured by the evil one, both at the same time, all the time, fully so both.

No wonder life never seems simple, except

except when God has us see clearly, God’s grace, God’s love, God’s mercy, and God’s will for us … to share all the blessings we have with others.

Sharing all we have with others is the foremost special favour God shows us.

Simple.

Simply Wonderful.

Simply Beautiful.

On That Day

But Not This Day?

Saturday, July 22, 2023

Amid the Smoke and Fog, Beyond the Weeds One Sees Two Loons,

and

By Faith

One Can Trust That Their Chick Is With Them,

Safe,

Growing,

Beautiful.

Isaiah 25:9

It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.

Hebrews 11:1

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

Words of Grace For Today

Waiting.

Waiting for.

Waiting for something important, or something scheduled, or something freeing.

Waiting is something we all do, if not by sitting still, breathing slowly, anticipating but not moving, then by moving to something else that will take us time, but in the back of our mind we wait for ….

What is it?

The next pay-cheque, so we can pay our bills, or buy something so that something that has broken can be fixed or replaced, or

The crops to grow, so they can be harvested, or

Other people to complete their work, so that we can start or resume ours, or

The neighbour’s music to stop, so that we can get back to sleep, or

The tyranny (by whomever of whatever kind among the so many different kinds that are worked against people) will end, or

The impossible: that real guilt will go away, or grief will turn to joy, or loss into gain, or that we will see again or hear again or move again, or that we will love again, or that we can forgive again, or that we can breathe again, or that we can remember again, or dream again, or sleep at all again, or

That the devil (attacking us in so many ways, also through our enemies who would do us in) will leave us and we will be free to live, laugh, and love, again.

And

That God will save us.

For that day we wait.

Wait.

Wait,

but not so patiently sometimes, many times.

Only faith interrupts our waiting; for by faith we know not only that God will save us, but that God has saved us already,

and we can breathe, and live, and laugh, and love

also this day.

Beautiful.

Sometimes.

Sometimes God!

Sometimes God Simply Astounds Us.

Friday, July 21, 2023

The World’s Wonders Are Visible In Just A Drop

…

Of Love.

Second Chronicles 5:13-14

… it was the duty of the trumpeters and singers to make themselves heard in unison in praise and thanksgiving to the Lord, and when the song was raised, with trumpets and cymbals and other musical instruments, in praise to the Lord, ‘For he is good, for his steadfast love endures for ever’, the house, the house of the Lord, was filled with a cloud, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house of God.

Revelation 21:2-23

And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb.

Words of Grace For Today

The dull-drums of ho-hum life are never more persistent then when problems overwhelm us and we see no progress towards improvement. We have no hope, so we struggle to make ourselves get out of bed. We struggle to get on with any task at all. Getting to work is necessary but we barely make it. Getting home is an insurmountable chore, day after day. Especially if we have no home! Finding a reason to sleep is beyond us.

Not every life is this way. Not every day is this way for most of us.

And then God

Then God shows up in awesome splendour!

Then God shows up in awesome splendour and astounds us!

The trumpets and cymbals may play, but God out plays them all, with stars dancing, winds singing, and creatures humming along.

And the light show prickles our skins and pierces our hearts with colours we’d forgotten if ever we’d seen them.

Just a bit

of God

dancing

for us

to break the dull-drums

off of us

and get us back to thankful living.

Perfect oR

Perfectly Terrible?

Thursday, July 20, 2023

(top is earlier efforts, bottom later)

It Ain’t Pretty Welding,

But For Day One, It’s Not All Bad.

How’s Life Going For Us?

All Bad?

All Good?

Or Blessed Even If A Mess.

Psalm 62:8

Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us. Selah

Luke 8:48

Jesus said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.’

Words of Grace For Today

This from the bottom of CBC’s Morning Brief: https://subscriptions.cbc.ca/newsletter_static/messages/morningbrief/2023-07-18/

“Today in history: July 18

1976: Performing on the uneven bars at the Summer Olympics in Montreal, 14-year-old Romanian Nadia Comaneci scores the first perfect 10 in Olympic gymnastics history.”

Well, that begs the question for us, or at least for me:

Who am I?

After all I am perfect at nothing!

I am not even perfect at being a terribly good sinner.

Sometimes I even do something good, by mistake.

What is life all about anyway, if I (and I would guess most of us are the same even if we don’t admit it) am less than perfect in every way.

I mean it’s one thing to be a master of a trade. And another thing to be master of none and jack of all. It’s yet another thing to be perfectly bad at everything.

It is no wonder then that humans in droves head off into the bizarre and unimaginable to be someone of note.

This also from CBC’s Morning Brief Newsletter, the ‘good news’ on 18 July:

“Of the more than 40,000 achievements in the Guinness World Record database, some are obvious — tallest woman, fastest marathon or most pull-ups. Others, like the one Bobby Dubeau says he’s accomplished, are less so. While he’s still awaiting the official certification, Dubeau says he’s become the fastest person to catch a game at every Canadian Football League stadium. The Delta, B.C., man says he saw a game at all nine home fields in 15 days.”

That effort to be unique and noticed is at least not destructive. So many humans strive toward something that requires they take something from others: wealth, power, fame, just to name a few of the things we greedy humans stick it to others in order to have more than our fair share.

The same CBC newsletter the lead story reports once again: minimum wage will not pay the rent in most any city in Canada. The government of Canada got out of the business of providing affordable housing to the most vulnerable in society back in the 1980s and 1990s. The cost was too much (but the rich kept getting richer and the poor poorer.) Now the cost of providing the basics for a homeless person are greater than providing housing and supports for them to stay in the housing. But the poor still are left on the brink of becoming homeless, and that’s a lot of children going to school without and parents who are stressed beyond reason. Still the homeless cannot be provided for, the costs are too great?! But interest rates keep rising, making housing costs climb and climb and climb beyond reach for more and more people.

We are not perfect at providing housing for people, at providing a livable society for a huge swath of our citizens, residents, and guest workers.

Perhaps the one thing we are perfect at is taking the most we can from the poorest.

Yet, with a good number of people working to help others, to find housing, to find food for each day, to find work, to find community and connection, I guess we are not even perfect at screwing the poor.

Thanks be to God, who is our refuge and our salvation. May our faith make us well, as a society, for right now, as always, we are quite sick.

But we are not perfectly sick, and that’s only thanks to God’s work through many hearts, minds, and hands of the sinner-saints … like us, like me.

Remember Us??

God Never Forgot!

Wednesday, July 19, 2023

Even on the Coldest, Toughest Winter Days,

God Remembers Us!

(See the Light.)

Do We God?

Psalm 74:2

Remember your congregation, which you acquired long ago, which you redeemed to be the tribe of your heritage. Remember Mount Zion, where you came to dwell.

Matthew 18:20

Jesus said, For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.

Words of Grace For Today

We often pray to God to do something for us, to remember us, when things are ‘going straight to hell in a hand basket’ and we find ourselves ‘up a creek without a paddle.’

Most often there are things we ought to be doing to help our own situation and the situation of the other 8 billion people on earth, or a good number of them that we can make a difference for.

Instead we do little to nothing and pray. Not that prayer is a bad thing; rather it is a quite good thing indeed! But prayer without action is just laziness of heart, mind, and hand.

Praying to God when we feel abandoned is exceptionally good. Praying that God remember us misses the point all together. God never forgets us. We forget God. I suppose it’s terrifying to realize that in the worst situations we get ourselves into (or put others in or others put us in) God certainly is remembering us, and letting all that is bad happen to us, to smarten us up, or to (and I think this is the best explanation) allow us freewill: free to choose to love God, Creation and all Creatures; AND free to not love God, Creation and all Creatures, especially those 2 legged humans that seem so hard to deal with … and then suffer the consequences of our choosing to not-love what God has given us.

It’s easier to fool ourselves into thinking that God has abandoned us.

But God has not. God is here all the time, remembering us and all other people always.

God always offers us mercy, steadfast love, and hope.

So let’s hope we come up with some good ideas on how to FIX the MESS before the earth eliminates us as the fix.

A small start to another day, eh?

Just A Bit

Probably Not More

To Start

Monday, July 17, 2023

It Will Never Be Big,

But It Will Be a Tiny, Red, Beautiful, and Tasty Strawberry.

What Will We Be?

Hosea 8:12

Though I write for him the multitude of my instructions, they are regarded as a strange thing.

Matthew 7:24

Jesus said: Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock.

Words of Grace For Today

If only one had the words

the words to make it right

the words to make what is broken heal

the words to bring life back where it is no more.

…

Without these words

one is lost.

…

Then Jesus speaks

and we find our way home

at last

as the colour returns to earth

and light shines in our darkness

for our home is built on the rock

of our salvation

and

just a bit

we smile at the universe.

What

Or Who

Have We Lost?

Sunday, July 16, 2023

Is This The Path To Laughing, Loving, and Living?

How Can We Know?

Isaiah 25:8

… he will swallow up death for ever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken.

John 16:20

Jesus said: Very truly, I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will have pain, but your pain will turn into joy.

Words of Grace For Today

In the movie Collateral Beauty, the father cannot face the pain of having lost his daughter, so he goes into withdrawal from life, a living death.

He cannot say anything about his daughter, not even her name, the disease that killed her or her age at her death. Nothing. For anything is already too much to bear.

Death is that thing that robs us of …

of everything,

everything that holds life together.

It is, therefore, quite the promise that God will swallow up death forever, that our tears of grief will be wiped away, and our pain will be turned into joy.

When death has taken life and breathing itself right out of us, these are promises we cannot trust, not at all, not at all.

And then God does something, not centre stage,

but off in the wings,

off some place we have to look to see

or we will miss it.

That’s the collateral beauty that God sends our way, not to rob us of our grief and the healing that can come, and the strength from healing,

but rather to start us on our healing path,

a path that takes

forever.

And then

finally

we are home

and

we

get

to

see

beauty

and

breathe in

joy.

In the end the father comes to see his daughter’s face dancing with him and say his daughter’s name, Olivia, GBM (a rare form of cancer) and that she was six.

Those things are not life, but facing death’s reality, …

well that allows us to begin to live ever so slightly

so

that

love can reach our hearts again,

and we can laugh

once more.

If ever so little

and softly.

Seeing

The Light

Friday, July 14, 2023

Looking To The Stars …

Deuteronomy 14:2

For you are a people holy to the Lord your God; it is you the Lord has chosen out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession.

1 Thessalonians 5:5

… for you are all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness.

Words of Grace For Today

The James Webb Space Telescope looks into the universe, back in time, displaying light of many kinds captured, processed, and presented to us in our visible spectrum of light and colour, in our time.

It’s images have changed our view of the universe around us, all around us, and in that we have come to know ourselves differently.

Yet, we are the same.

We are the same God chosen, blessed people.

We are the same God chosen, people of the Light and Colour.

(See https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/james-webb-telescope-marks-1-year-of-peering-into-far-corners-of-the-universe-1.6904609 for details of each photo, including credits, a series that summarizes the first year’s photos from the JWST.)

Sweet Jesus?

Or Christ Crucified!

Wednesday, July 12, 2023

You Can Call It What You Want.

It’s Still A Rabbit, and Always Will Be,

Until It’s a Meal.

Some Things Are Obvious,

When We Aren’t Playing Games On Ourselves.

Joel 2:17

Between the vestibule and the altar let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep. Let them say, ‘Spare your people, O Lord, and do not make your heritage a mockery, a byword among the nations. Why should it be said among the peoples, “Where is their God?” ’

Titus 2:14

Christ it is who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds.

Words of Grace For Today

‘There’s enough sugar in that bowl to power a train from here to Toronto.’

That could be said of a lot of breakfast bowls.

It won’t make it true.

But it could be said, given how much sugar is packed into cereals these days.

It is as if the cereal companies and us eating them are trying to make our worlds a little sweeter … any way we can

even if it makes us foolish and fat, over-feeding our frenzy for sweetness.

These efforts of our may well be sublimated attempts on our part to make up for our inability to set ourselves right with God and God’s creation.

The only answer for that un-rightness is in God’s own work to reach us, so Jesus, the Christ, is born, teaches and reaches out to us hoi-poloi, heals us of every ill, equips us with unimaginable gifts, and sends us out to share those with other people, others of the masses of hurting humanity, so desperately trying to set themselves right with

…

well, many don’t even know what with.

The ‘priests can cry in between vestibules and the altars’ all they are won’t. Such are their efforts.

The people will none the less cry “Where is their God?”

For it is all too easy to let God’s works go unnoticed, if we are on the train to ‘making the world sweet’ for ourselves.

We do not need to share more ‘sweetness’ with others.

We can share God’s gifts that heal our every ill, give us renewed life, and set us on a mission like no other.

It’s not Mission Impossible, though sometimes it is a mission unimaginable, like reaching out with kindness to the very enemies who would do us in.

Eating cereal for breakfast with berries is simple. Cutting the grass may be needed. Sharing God’s gifts … well that’s out of this world and sometimes seems crazier than anything else we’ve seen or heard of

unless we read of the saints, who have done it all before.

Miserably Dumb

Or Thankfully Joyous?

Tuesday, July 11, 2023

Break Life Down,

Like A Coffee Press, To It’s Many Pieces,

And One Misses

The Wonder and Spirit

Given To Us!

Like Coffee,

It’s The Joy and Thanks

That Matters Most.

Ecclesiastes 3:22

So I saw that there is nothing better than that all should enjoy their work, for that is their lot; who can bring them to see what will be after them?

Colossians 3:17

And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Words of Grace For Today

Ecclesiastes always is a rather big downer. Think of a way to take the joy out of living and the writer found a way to explain it and pound it home.

It’s our lot to work, might as well enjoy it for who knows what comes next! And even if we knew how could we, the hoi poloi, actually understand what was told us!?

Great words of comfort. Work hard. Die miserably. Such is life.

How could a writer so off-base with God’s goodness and steadfast love for us be considered significant; and then significant enough on top of that to be included in scripture?

Colossians, written in the style of Paul, at least knew the perspective to take: one where God is creator and we God’s creatures:

whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

I’ll take that for this day, and each day. There may be lots of work, hard work, this day and each day, just to survive. I’d rather go about it aware of all God’s blessings, with a thankful heart, joyous spirit, and busy hands. Ok, with arthritis in the hands, two out of three will have to do for today and the rest of my days.

Joyous spirit and thankful heart is a good start to … to anything.