Not Found

Zeroed out.

Wednesday, March 12, 2025

Goners

Smoke steals air

on our way to

zeroing ourselves out of life.

Jeremiah 50:20

In those days and at that time, says the Lord, the iniquity of Israel shall be sought, and there shall be none; and the sins of Judah, and none shall be found; for I will pardon the remnant that I have spared.

1 Peter 2:24

He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.

…

Words of Grace for Today –

…

The order was given

by the devil’s generals

to zero us all out.

Out of shelter, clothing, food, water, even air.

Out of energy, movement, thought.

Out of time, out of hope, out of love.

…

Instead God came to zero out our sins

so that we might live free from the incapacitating chains of fear

so that we might live ready and able to give life to others

so that we might be filled with hope and love for all people.

An impossible journey made possible by the only one who made the journey to death and hell to pay for our sins of helping the generals of the devil zero out other people.

So we step forward, against all expectations

into the light of humble penance,

and hope for love that

can transform us

and

the world.

Not to Condemn

But to save … the whole world!

Thursday 6 February 2025

The Glaciers, and a lot else, are disappearing from the face of the earth.

Genesis 8:21

And when the Lord smelt the pleasing odour, the Lord said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.

John 3:17

Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

…

Words of Grace For Today

…

Noah offers sacrifice to God, and God turns, finds the sacrifice pleasing, and promises never again to curse the ground because of humankind, though the inclination of every heart is evil from our youth.

Not cursed, but it’s clear, we really don’t know how to give God God’s due.

Always grabbing for more, at others’ expense, and at our expense, and at the earth’s expense.

Trade war is only the latest in our own backyard.

…

But Jesus did not come into the world to condemn it or us.

I like to take John 3:16 and place it after John 13:17. It helps counter the so familiar v16 being so out of context.

Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

Lots more context is really needed. There is no way we can all line up to believe, doing the right thing, making it right for ourselves with God.

Believing in Jesus is only possible if the Holy Spirit makes it so in us. We of course can refuse, back out, turn our back on it all. But no one can choose to turn to God. That’s all gift, given to us over, and over, and over again, by a God who loves us so.

Then we can, of course, choose to stop condemning others and the earth. That is what God wishes from us: a choice to love – as God loves – all creation.

Rescue

From Shame

Sunday, August 25, 2024

So Wondrous The Forests, Until We Chop Them All Down

Psalm 118:21

I thank you that you have answered me and have become my salvation.

1 Timothy 2:3-4

This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

…

Words of Grace For Today

…

The alarm clock rang, louder than ever, setting off the pounding in his head.

He sat up and nearly vomited all over … a sleeping bag in a tent. Where was he anyway?

He lay back down as his partner turned off his alarm, pulled himself out of the shared sleeping bag, dressed, and disappeared out the tent flap, making noises of getting some breakfast, and then driving away to work, but

he stopped,

by the tree they had felled the night before, and left the top leafy branches across the roadway out

and an old man voice started to reprimand him for the tree felled on private land, the mess of the campfire that looked like a singed garbage can, and the mess all around their campsite.

His partner finally told the old man he had to get going, that he should talk to the ‘other guy’.

So it was his turn, same things, same shame, same weak excuse that the ‘Private’ sign was not at the actual boundary of public-private land. But then it was illegal to down a living tree on this public land. Elsewhere one could get a permit. Not here.

Shame filled over shame and his head throbbed with the loud pain of …

Well the hangover from their loud party into the early hours.

…

And God desires all people to come to know the truth, to repent, and to follow Jesus, the Way of Grace and Truth …

Really even these pathetic excuses for young humans? Where has the promise of youth disappeared? Was it always so hard to find?

And God desires all people to come to know the truth, to repent, and to follow Jesus, the Way of Grace and Truth …

even these and many like them who put reason to shame.

Even those who would judge them, for the judgment is just as valid applied to the one judging.

God have mercy on us all!

Boxing Away

Boxing Day Failure

Tuesday, December 26, 2023

One Day In and

Our Memory of Jesus

is More Faded

Than the Morning Moon

Setting

Isaiah 60:16

You shall suck the milk of nations, you shall suck the breasts of kings; and you shall know that I, the Lord, am your Saviour and your Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob.

2 Timothy 1:9b-10

This grace was given to us in Christ Jesus before the ages began, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Saviour Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.

…

Words of Grace For Today

Boxing Day

brings to the fore the obvious

necessary

failings of Christmas.

It’s when the commercial xmas takes over, crowds rush to the stores, sales and stock are piled high and wide, and money flows like smoke from a huge, hot wildfire.

Many retail stores turn a profit only because of the huge boost in December, and particularly on Boxing Day. Large stores turn extreme profits on this day, adding to the wealth they collect for stock holders and executives with huge bonuses.

Year after year, we attempt to remember that God is the sole source of our well-being. That God is the only source of a life worth living.

Christ comes as an infant, a sign that God’s true power is not in force or wealth or in possessing or possessions accumulated, but rather in the love that is pure, true, and steadfast.

We gather with small candles lit in the darkness and sing our faith on our sleeves of God’s wonders for us all, and then …

we run to the store the second day of Christmas to spend and get and possess all that we can.

What a huge failure we all are.

Our only rescue is in God’s Grace. God’s forgiveness.

So much for sucking life from the nations of the kings of the world. All that is is poison for our souls.

Pause, amid the hectic, and remember

God’s goodness in the simple, pure gifts of love

that sustain us each day.

The Only One

The Only One Listening

Monday, December 11, 2023

A logging road in the Klanawa Valley on western Vancouver Island divides two landscapes: a cutblock on the right, and old-growth trees that are part of a wildlife protection area on the left. Tara Carman/CBC
*https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/the-forest-beside-the-clear-c*

No One Listens and Cutblocks Eat Away at Our Precious,

Climate Saving, Old Growth Forests

Psalm 38:9-11

O Lord, all my longing is known to you; my sighing is not hidden from you. My heart throbs, my strength fails me; as for the light of my eyes—it also has gone from me. My friends and companions stand aloof from my affliction, and my neighbours stand far off.

1 John 5:14

And this is the boldness we have in him, that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.

…

Words of Grace For Today

Job knew it, as many have since.

It is that experience that everyone and everything has turned against one, even life itself, and there is no one that hears. No one that listens. No one that understands. No one that cares.

Except

That God hears, listens, understands, cares and

and

God even responds, providing what we need to survive even those dark times.

And survive we do, until the sun shines brightly again in our lives and we have all the listening, hearing, understanding, and caring we require

in order to

Give God thanks with our every breath.

Low Blow

Tuesday, November 7, 2023

We Need A Good Shepherd to Guide Us Through the Many Coming Storms.

Ezekiel 34:23

I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd.

Matthew 9:36

When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.

…

Words of Grace For Today

Shepherds, in Jesus day, lived rough, with the flock on the hills, leading them to green pastures and fresh water by day and guarding them from danger by night.

Being a shepherd was not a highly sought after or held in high esteem occupation. Quite the opposite. It was one of the lowest of the lowly ways to make a living.

Being compared to sheep, though, that is a real low insult, that hits out of bounds and lays one flat as fodder for the vultures.

Sheep were and still are very dumb animals. They need protection all the time from predators. They need to be led to food and water. And …

When we were young my brother demonstrated how they follow, absolutely stupidly.

As we were bringing the sheep into the barn he sat out of sight just inside the door. After the first ten sheep passed through the doorway he stuck a broomstick across the doorway about a foot and a half high. The next sheep jumped over it to follow those ahead, as did the next five. Then he pulled the broomstick out of the doorway, and …

the rest of the flock jumped over the none-existent broomstick to follow the sheep ahead into the barn.

Sheep are real stupid.

So being compared to sheep is a real low blow.

The problem is …

the comparison fits us just right.

…

We need a Good Shepherd to have compassion on us helpless people, following most stupidly the most stupid of stupid leaders.

Thank God, God sends us one in Jesus, who saves us,

again.

And

again today, many times.

The Broken

Weary, Kingdom Workers

Thursday, November 2, 2023

A general view shows smoke as it rises following Israeli strikes in Gaza, October 9, 2023. REUTERS/Mohammed Salem

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/live-updates-whats-happening-in-the-israel-hamas-war-as-israeli-airstrikes-hit-gaza-refugee-camp-for-second-day

Out of Sinners,

God Makes Saints,

Is that us, today?

Isaiah 50:4

The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word. Morning by morning he wakens— wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught.

Matthew 25:39

And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?

…

Words of Grace For Today

As I write this it is All Saints’ Day. The Hamas – Israel war continues, and continues to kill civilians, and Hamas continues to use civilians, even hospitals as shields.

There are few prayers which are sufficient. One prays that God will remake the catastrophe into something life-sustaining. It seems only God can do that.

In the future a few years a young family of three will tour the ancient cathedral in Gaza with it’s wonderful stained glass windows. Bombed in 2023 the windows were cracked, some missing pieces. One stained glass artist works on the second to last window, repairing, but not removing the signs of the damage, filling in the gaps and repairing the cracks with silver, gold, and blue glass pieces and structural materials. As the family looks at each window, the parents will explain the scene and name the saints depicted. Afterwards, the young daughter will burst in on grandma and grandpa sitting at home and exclaim, “Grandma we saw the saints today!” Grandma asks, “Who are the saints that you saw?” Without pausing the daughter responds: “The saints are the broken people the light shines through.” (decades old story, reworked)

What God does as always, is call broken people to shine the light of Christ on all that is, and all that can be.

Let us so shine, even in our brokenness.

Even though those in need are so many and the needs so great and our help seems so little.

Walk!

Walk it off?

Not a chance.

Saturday, September 16, 2023

https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2021/covid-19-and-fungi-a-nightmare-in-the-making

John Hopkins: Fungi Nightmare in the Making

Lamentations 3:58

You have taken up my cause, O Lord, you have redeemed my life.

1 Peter 2:21-23

For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps. ‘He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.’ When he was abused, he did not return abuse; when he suffered, he did not threaten; but he entrusted himself to the one who judges justly.

…

Words of Grace For Today

CBC health newsletter reported how a man came home for a long weekend, walking up his drive he vomited blood on his driveway, ended up needed a new liver (cause of cirrhosis unknown), four years later went in for a liver transplant, and spent more than a month on IVs with multiple superbug infections (infections resistant to antibiotics).

And this is more and more common. Surgery is getting to be dangerous, because of the killer infections that come with it. Covid should have woken us up to the huge risk we are at, across the world, to unstoppable infections. Instead people want Covid to be over so they say it is over and behave as if it’s over, but it’s not. We will suffer greater death and losses of health because of it. People don’t want that to happen, so they live as if it is not already happening. Wanting it to be, does not make is so.

A walk up one’s drive, after a long, hard work week is supposed to be the beginning of a kind of rest and recuperation. The walk is the beginning of ‘walking it all off’, so that one is ready to be with one’s family, and then ready to return to a productive work-week.

Sin is worse. We cannot just ‘walk it off.’ We can pretend it does not exist, which only deepens the sin’s ravaging in our lives, like superbugs denied and thus let loose to run havoc more freely in our midst.

Only God’s forgiveness can save us from sin.

Also from the sin of denying Covid, and the dangers of super bugs: bacteria, viruses, fungi.

Without God’s forgiveness, redemption, and renewal of us, we cannot engage to help one another survive come what may.

So we celebrate each morning, noon, and night (and also this day) with the writer of Lamentations: ‘You have taken up my cause, O Lord, you have redeemed my life.’ And we pray that we may be delivered from diseases that cannot be cured, again today.

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.

These are the

Things …

Wednesday, September 6, 2023

Our lists are as helpful as clouds are for planning a meal.

Not at all.

Zechariah 8:16

These are the things that you shall do: Speak the truth to one another, render in your gates judgments that are true and make for peace,

Romans 14:19

Let us then pursue what makes for peace and for mutual edification.

…

Words of Grace For Today

It’s easy to find lists of things about which one can justifiably say, these are the things. One can even find lists of things about which one can justifiably say, these are the things we should do.

Peace always tops the list and love others is almost always in there, … as long as the list of things to do is a list of how to be good.

The trouble is that we

too often

try

to be bad

even in spite of ourselves wanting to think we are good.

here’s a list of things that we can always be sure we will do:

etc until the last one is: die

…

Empty lists of things that we can be sure we will do followed by a sure thing: death.

How did God ever expect us to make anything good come about when death is the only sure thing we know we will do, and it’ll be good because we leave room then for the next generation and for evolution??!

If that is a real question for us, then it’s time to take a break….