Category: Weather

Honestly

Getting Our Numbers Straight

Tuesday 21 February 2023

More than preparations for these kinds of numbers,

We prepare for God’s Gifts

with God’s Number One for us.

Second Samuel 24:10

But afterwards, David was stricken to the heart because he had numbered the people. David said to the Lord, ‘I have sinned greatly in what I have done. But now, O Lord, I pray you, take away the guilt of your servant; for I have done very foolishly.’

1 John 1:9

If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Words of Grace For Today

David, the hero, warrior, leader, blessed by God, and revered ancestor of the country of Israel, takes time to confess his sin.

He counted the people, taking a census.

Now I’m not able to wrap my head around that as a sin, so why is it recorded. We all know that David had other much more spectacular sins that are recorded, not least is his affair with Bathsheba and murder of her husband and one of David’s soldiers, Uriah the Hittite, along with his confession of that sin after his son dies, a dancing down the streets in sackcloth in his grief.

It seems to many that such sins and admissions of sins, and blatant displays of guilt are not at all in the make up of real heroes, especially among those that are God’s own people! Yet this is the record for us.

When Jesus, like so many before and since, taught us to confess our sins, the hope is not that we would somehow imitate the greatness of David by such confession. In fact real confession is rarely displayed as David did. He was the King after all and the people (at least it seems David thought) needed to see that their King had confessed his terrible sins.

Why such a thing as confession? It is avoided by so many people, even pastors and congregational leaders, dismissed as something people are not comfortable with, something that will cut down on the number of people who come to church.

So instead of beginning worship with confession, it is avoided at all cost. Mention of sin is avoided as well, unless it is a hurled at others as a spear to indict them before God, and to justify their exclusion from worship, community and God’s favour.

Yet, Jesus calls us to confess our sins.

Without admitting and confessing our sins we have not begun to understand our place in creation, and our place before God, and our place before each other. We are not perfect. We are not ‘good enough’ even. Not for creation, God, or each other!

As we confess our sins, we start to see the wonder of God’s Grace for us: God forgives us, as God forgave David. God uses us imperfect creatures (and great sinners) just as God used David. We may not be kings, but we are people, precious in not only God’s sight. When we confess our sins we begin to find our humble place in creation, before God, and with others: we breathe only because God forgives us, and hopes for us and all people that we will learn how to forgive others.

What forgotten things have we ignored, forgotten ‘skeletons in our closets’ that eat at our spirits, forgotten or ‘wished forgotten’ sins again others and against God that in the ignoring of them incapacitate us to proceed through even a minute, much less a day, as God’s witnesses (object lessons, really) of God’s amazing love, grace, and forgiveness?

So how to start each day?

How to start each worship service?

How to start each significant conversation and project and hope and dream?

Sin is already there. No need to provide more. It’s always confession that starts us out right.

That’s number one.

So Long!

So short

Monday 20 February 2023

Dark Days, Dark Decades!

Hope Forever?

Job 14:1-2

A mortal, born of woman, few of days and full of trouble, comes up like a flower and withers, flees like a shadow and does not last.

Hebrews 13:14

For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.

Words of Grace For Today

Of all the projects she could have undertaken, Risha knew this would be her legacy. She’d earned her degrees in political science, biochemistry, philosophy, law, and her PhD in Oceanography.

She had designed the filter system and now led the corporation in charge of implementing the system in 100 locations around the ocean shores. While filtering and cleaning pollutants out of the ocean’s waters, effectively restoring water up to 500 miles around the filter, it would siphon off fresh water and provide irrigation and drinking water for areas that had gone dry and deserted over the last 30 years due to climate change.

The real ‘miracle’ of the filtering was that it could be set to consume carbon dioxide at huge rates. Turned and left on it would leave the air for 100 miles unbreathable, but if turned on and then off again, in cycles, the 100 filters could clear enough carbon dioxide from the air in 10 years to undo the carbon increase from the last 50 years, at least in their locations.

If she could just get 10,000 of the filters up and running within the next five years, they could reverse climate change completely, back to the re-industrial age.

That was her project!

Until the truth of Job was borne out again:

A mortal, born of woman … comes up like a flower and withers.

Risha, in the third year, well on her way to the 5000th filter location, came down with cancer. She had blossomed so brightly and so many people had seen and put their trust in her. And then within a month she was gone. Because so many people wanted to get rich from Risha’s project and were fighting with everyone for their own advantage, something she kept at bay while she was alive, the projects ground to a halt, and even the established filters had trouble staying in operation.

Five years later, the last filter shut down for lack of funding.

How had it come to that!?!

There was so much hope for this to save us all, and now our only hope would be in the New Jerusalem.

What a loss? What a typical self-destructive development from miracle and cure to fighting and decay and destruction that would continue as long as one could imagine surviving the onslaught of climate change that had already destroyed a tenth of all the coastal lands, cities and people. Living inland was not easier. Storms and precipitation or droughts had made another 30% of all the land masses uninhabitable, and everywhere else it was more or less a futile struggle to keep going.

God, will we humans ever learn?

Save us!

(yesthereishopealways)

Separated

from the Love of God?

Saturday 18 February 2023

Sometimes Even the Next Step

Is TOO Large!

Psalms 73:25

Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you.

Romans 8:38-39

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Words of Grace For Today

It seemed so simple to ask others to join in his outlandishly expensive garden project gone amuck. Truth is it took Henri a full day and a half to decide he’d take Francine up on her offer. Then it took him a half day again to actually get himself to start the process by calling people.

If one knew what Henri had gone through in those two days one would wonder that he even could come to the decision to invite other people to his farm and was able to start calling people he did not know.

Decades earlier, when Henri was a young man he’d met and fallen head over heels in love with Suzanne, and she with him. They dated all through college and were married a week after Henri’s graduation, to the relief of all their friends and family who wondered if either would dare to take the obvious leap. Both Henri’s and Suzanne’s parents had divorced, and died in their late forties. A trauma for both teenagers that seemed never to end as their siblings then took up to fighting over the inheritances, slim as they were. One would not blame them, their friends thought, if they avoided marriage and commitment and everything requiring trust. Even when Suzanne took a year off with their first child before she finished her degree and graduated suma cum laude with a double major! But there they were, married, joyously so, with 3 children as they broke into their 30’s.

Then … Suzanne had picked up Bert, May, and Zerish, 9, 7, and 5, from school, and headed back out to their acreage-farm. She’d stopped at the railroad tracks for a train when a drunk driver plowed into them shoving the car onto the tracks and into the oncoming train. The drunk driver survived with a few scratches but Suzanne and Bert were instantly killed. Miraculously the other two children were alive when the ambulance arrived. Then May died during the operation to repair a punctured lung and Zerish dwindled off into a coma during surgery to relieve pressure on his brain. Two long years Zerish hung on before he woke up, for two days, before a seizure and a massive bleed into his brain stopped everything. His organs simply shut down in unison.

Henri knew what St. Paul had suffered: arrest, jail time, beatings, whippings, having to run for his life, and how Paul was so certain nothing could separate him from the love of God. But Henri knew then and there that God had deserted him, not just a huge bit like when Suzanne and Bert had died. Not even the colossal bit when May died. No this was complete and ultimate abandonment.

He withdrew. He could trust no one. He went on with work, burying himself in it and became (almost in spite of himself) wealthy. Still he blew off anyone who tried to befriend him. Didn’t Francine know! Even 25 years later in his mid-fifties, Francine would get just a bit too close and bang the door would close in her face.

So when Henri called people to take on his garden project with him, it was beyond difficult for him. It was nothing short of a life-altering miracle. Many people knew it was out of the ordinary for Henri. Everyone, after all, knew of Henri. But Francine was beside herself with wonder. What had God done to Henri, anyway?! She realized that Henri had given up on God, but why had God waited so long to show him God had not given up on Henri? So why and how now?

Same question, she realized could be asked about most of us in our lives.

Even for you and me, today.

Valentine’s Love?

Hardwork?

Valiant with Tiny or Great Expectations?

Tuesday 14 February 2023

Burning Hot, As Hot as 2000 Cherry Red Chimney Pipes,

Love is Wonderful and

Dangerous?

Psalms 73:1

A Psalm of Asaph. Truly God is good to the upright, to those who are pure in heart.

Matthew 5:8

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Words of Grace For Today

Valentine’s Day, the day we celebrate love, and think seriously about what it means in life for us all.

It is rightfully described as that which holds life together, that which covers for so many shortcomings enabling us to live joyful, thank-filled and hopeful lives, that which is not cheap but rather will cost us daily irritations, immense pain, and sometimes even our lives.

Yet this is what God created us to live as: those who are sustained by God’s love, which enables us to love others with self-sacrificial love. The wonders of ‘being in love’ are wonderful, but short-lived. It’s a human body chemical thing at first. However long term one remains ‘in love’ only with tremendous work, growing self-awareness, and so much forgiveness.

Those who expect love to be easy or only beneficial to themselves, toss out the other either by taking them for granted or by leaving them … and thus they deny themselves the opportunity to love and be loved. Then one lives a short changed life, and all kinds of futile efforts are expended to try to achieve what is missing, for loving others at great cost to one self is an essential for life.

Those who work hard at love, and are willing to humble themselves to being the ones who forgive, not only the other, but themselves, are blessed, for they will find the Holy Spirit has given them the gift of a pure hearts, and that’s a wondrous blessing, each sun rise, sunset and all the moments between.

And for us all, love remains a dangerous thing, as dangerous as life itself: no one gets out of it alive.

Found

In The Silence

Thursday 9 February 2023

God Sees Us,

No Matter Fog, Snow, or the Darkness

of Our Hearts

–

and God still walks with us.

Zephaniah 1:7

Be silent before the Lord God! For the day of the Lord is at hand; the Lord has prepared a sacrifice, he has consecrated his guests.

Matthew 24:44

Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

Words of Grace For Today

When we are still, quiet, calm, and silent what do we hear?

The traffic pounding the pavement, going back and forth, who knows why so many of us have so many places to go, just because we can or others will pay us if we do or we have learned that we must in order to eat (the things we want to eat)?

The bells ringing across the countryside inviting people to worship, or tolling to mark the funeral of yet another person no longer breathing, or clanging in alarm as the war reaches the outskirts of this area?

The manufacturing cascade of sounds of machinery churning, pumping, grinding, and wearing themselves out before their time?

The wild music of alcohol and drug induced partying that can erupt into all kinds of behaviour and violence spilling over into others’ safety?

The squirrels sounding alarm, crows cawing, an owl hooting, and the lynx silently invisibly avoiding the stinky skunks?

The ravages of a brain fully engaged in multiple tracks of problem solving stuck spinning against the slings and arrows of time?

Sometimes, not wanting to be silent is a reasonable protection from the cost of our times of industry chugging along to sustain an unsustainable life-style, nature fighting us into extinction with climate change, viruses, and fungi, and our inevitable defences of rampant escapism.

But

every once in a while for most of us (and always for some ‘blessed’ mystics), when we are silent, we not only hear that silent lynx, but we see that God walks with us crunching footsteps into the snow-pack.

God’s day is here, with us, always has been. Best is to get used to it.

For whatever we are up to, God is up to it with us, celebrating our thinkings, sayings and doings, or suffering the same.

Smile you are on ‘candid camera’, God’s view of us each and all, as it has been since before we were born, and even before time was created

when God consecrated us to ….

Most Assuredly –

Uncertainty and Certainty

Sunday 5 February 2023

No Matter How Broad Our View

Or How We Look More Closely

.

.

.

.

.

.

Or Even Most Closely At Our Lives,

the only sure thing is

God is

and God is with us.

Ecclesiastes 7:14

On the day of prosperity be joyful, and on the day of adversity consider; God has made the one as well as the other, so that mortals may not find out anything that will come after them.

Matthew 6:26

Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?

Words of Grace For Today

It is pretty near impossible, but the only way to be assured of one’s own worth is to find that worth only as a gift from God.

The birds may not sow and they eat, but they starve, too.

We may sow, and work extremely hard to provide for ourselves and ours, and we may think we are worth more than the birds, but we to will succumb and it may be much sooner than we anticipate.

There may be days when we are quite sure that as a result of our own work we have succeeded and we prosper … and we do well to celebrate. There are for every human days when no matter how hard (or not) we have worked we will fail and fall into great need, and suffer for it.

So God sends us both? And of course there is no way of knowing what will come next.

As long as we measure our days and reasons to celebrate by the ‘success’ of our own labours, then we have no way of knowing if tomorrow will be a day to celebrate success or to suffer our losses and great needs.

When we place our worth into God’s hands, and rely on God alone to determine our worth, as God does with love, forgiveness, renewal, and purpose (called and sent out to be little Christ’s in the world for all creation), then we can know with unwavering certainly what will come tomorrow. Tomorrow God will succeed, and since God accompanies us through each day, we also will succeed at God’s work (by grace alone, of course.)

Another day to celebrate how valuable God deems us to be (by grace alone, of course.) Ditto tomorrow and each day thereafter.

Planting For The Harvest

Giving More than a 10th

Saturday 4 February 2023

Cold Days,

Time to Plan

And Plant

for the Harvest.

Genesis 28:22

… and this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God’s house; and of all that you give me I will surely give one-tenth to you.

2 Corinthians 9:6

The point is this: the one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.

Words of Grace For Today

Henri put in a garden. He’d been meaning to do it for years, and now the prices of groceries finally put the fire in him to do it. He wanted a huge harvest, so he tilled up a good two acres of deep, rich soil. Then he bought manure from a neighbour farmer and tilled that in. He marked out the areas, made the lines, and after the last snow in late April he planted seeds of all kinds: corn, peas, beans, asparagus, carrots, potatoes, squash of 5 kinds, pumpkins, melons, sweet potatoes, zucchini, 2 rows each of raspberries, strawberries, and blue berries.

Looking at the huge area he anticipated lots of weeds and he wasn’t into picking them for hours on end, so he went out and bought a small tractor with a harrow that he could adjust to the width of his rows. Then he thought about all the deer and rabbits that would eat out garden before he could harvest it, so he bought fencing materials and built a 12 foot fence all around with the bottom 6 feet a tight woven mesh.

Next he thought about the dry summer that he’d heard were so possible and he built a reservoir for water, a powerful pump, and mobile sprinkler system so he could water the whole garden when it needed it. Then he modified all the eaves troughs on his house, garage, and shop so that the water was collected, filtered, and piped to the reservoir.

Next he realized that a huge harvest would need to be picked, cleaned, and stored, either by freezing or canning most of it. So he built a special insulated and heated shed, adding fresh water and waste water and electricity to it. In it he built a processing ‘kitchen’ for canning and for freezing. Next came two large stand up freezers, and shelves upon shelves for the pantry.

Since he really did not think he was at all interested in spending hours harvesting the garden he hired five high school students for the whole summer. They had helped him with everything starting with the planting. Yet Henri still spoke to everyone and to himself as he had done everything himself.

Francine, an ‘on-again, off-again’ friend of Henri’s for as long as she could remember, had been putting in a garden for decades before Henri finally got around to starting his. She started off with 2 raised beds, each 3 feet by 12 feet, and slowly increase it to a total of 6 last year. Each bed had a gravity watering system for it from a tank she filled when it needed it.

It was a small garden by local standards, but those small beds produced more than any other garden in the area, mostly because she had learned so much through the years and tended to the beds with tender care.

She shared her produce with a number of people in the area, usually in exchange for some good manure for fertilizer or help fencing, tilling, planing, weeding, and harvesting. But she was in her garden working at it more than everyone else combined.

At the end of every year she would tally up her expenses over the grocery store value of her harvest (just her own). She usually came in at about 1/3. Her worse year it was 1/1, and her best had been her third her when it was 1/6.

She met Henri this past summer, and having heard of course about his garden, congratulated him on finally getting around to his dream garden. She asked what he expected his expense-over- harvest would be. He hadn’t stopped to consider that. At home he sat down and calculated out that he’d spent nearly $150,000 on infrastructure, $40,000 on the tractor, $2000 on seeds and another $5000 on 1 each of 5 different fruit trees that should grow in the area. Then he added in the cost of fuel he planned for the summer and the wages of his workers. If he divided the long-term assets over ten years he figured the summer would cost him around $30,000. Then he thought of how much he had spent last year and anticipated spending on the groceries his harvest would replace, that came to about $5000 or so, maybe more with prices rising. Even if he estimated it at $6000 that still meant his ratio was 5/1. He spent five times as much for his large garden than he would get out of it! He nearly had a heart attack!

….

This year, with the increase in groceries, no less that 2 dozen new people had contacted Francine about ‘helping’ in her garden in order to share in the produce, so she invited everyone of them to come on over. Each family built a new raised garden if not 2. One large family built 4. Everyone chipped in as they could with money, materials, fertilizer or muscle to build the new fencing and establish the new beds. The same went for all the work throughout the summer.

….

When the gardens in the area had just started to produce a harvest, the carrots always seemed to come in first, a hail storm hit and wiped out nearly half of Henri’s garden and everyone else’s, except the beds at Francine’s. They were small enough that people had put up a steep-peaked frame work over one or two off them at a time, and with the threat of hail they’d thrown tarps over the frames, anchored them well, and watched most of the hail bounce or rolled between the beds. The ice was a foot deep in places, but when the tarps came off only a few plants had been destroyed by hail that broke through the tarps.

…

Everyone knew (except apparently Henri, and he was just stubborn and a bit slow to pick up on the obvious) that while the Bible said those that plant much will harvest much, it rarely turned out that way in life, not just in the garden, but in all of life.

Makes one stop to think that Jesus’ story is about God ‘planting’ and us getting the benefit of the ‘harvest’ of forgiveness and renewed life! Francine reflected Jesus’ story as well: We receive great bounty so that we can share all we have with others, so that they will live abundantly. Most of all we get to share God’s bountiful, merciful forgiveness, compassion, and healing presence!

The question each day is: what are we planting today, that someone will harvest in the future?

Up-Right!

OR Upside Down?

Thursday 2 February 2023

Don’t Let ‘Em Snow-job ya!

Let that be the pines load.

Jeremiah 1:12

Then the Lord said to me, ‘You have seen well, for I am watching over my word to perform it.’

Matthew 5:17

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. (Jesus)

.

Words of Grace For Today

Jesus did so much that challenged the understanding of the Law and the Prophets, as it applied to daily life.

Yet, Jesus did not come to abolish the Law and the Prophets, but rather to fulfill them, which out to scare the ebiejeebies out of us, unless we have listened well to God’s Word,

and understood that most of the time we humans turn God’s Word upside down to fit into our own plans for our own lives.

And Jesus did not do that, so seemed to ‘upset the apple cart’, when he actually set it back upright.

And Jesus demonstrated God’s attitude of love, forgiveness, and sacrifice to save us … in such a way that we might know we are saved from all that should scare the ebiejeebies out of us, the work of the devil, which we too often embrace, and which in turn grips us tight in a death spiral …

until God frees us.

So this day we live free, now

what will we do with it?

And It Begins

And It Continues As Before.

Tuesday 31 January 2023

Since the Murky Mists Of Time’s Beginning,

We and Creation Have Evolved

From Generation to Generation.

Only One Never Changes!

Psalms 102:26-28

Long ago you laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you endure; they will all wear out like a garment. You change them like clothing, and they pass away; but you are the same, and your years have no end. The children of your servants shall live secure; their offspring shall be established in your presence.

Revelation 1:4

John to the seven churches that are in Asia:Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne …

Words of Grace For Today

The week is underway.

The news reports things that have long since been: football wins with the last play, a field goal; inflation giving way to recession and jobs underpaid and worker shortages and ticket scalping, which are all the chaos of capitalism or called more honestly, futile efforts to limit legalized and unchecked greed; movies that win awards which makes money for more greedy people; and fear of the survivors and refugees in Canada as those, who darn near succeeded in finishing them off in a nearly ‘successful’ genocide, return to Canada; and the weather forecasts a dip to below the mid minus 30’s tonight.

John starts his writing with a greeting, one that had been underway for sometime: Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come …

But these people John writes to live under great oppression and threats to their lives, thus the coded manner in which John writes.

After pleading that his life not be cut short, as he has taken ill, the Psalmist honours God as the creator long ago of creation. God will endure always even as people age and die and are replaced with others. In this cycle God has established the children of God’s servants, of God’s people, and the children of the children, and the children of each generation as it passes from life leaving the living to the following generations.

And this has been underway for quite some time now.

Not that getting ill and anticipating ones early death is easy or to be taken lying down (so to speak.) Nor that getting old and anticipating one’s timely death is easy nor should be taken ‘lying down’, if one can ‘stand’ at all any more.

But there is comfort in knowing that God provides for all God’s people, and all their children. The future, as we have seen it come to be our history, is and was in God’s hands, as it always will be.

So even the particulars of this day are in God’s hands, even as the temperatures drop near -40⁰.

Still, there is work to be done, to prepare, to survive, and to flourish in this life abundant that God provides for us, holding us always in God’s hands.

Not AGAIN!

Monday 23 January 2023

The Ideal, Which Sadly Exists Seldom:

A Church and

The Rock,

And Christ’s Light

Psalms 25:20

O guard my life, and deliver me; do not let me be put to shame, for I take refuge in you.

Matthew 7:25

The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock.

Words of Grace For Today

It’s snowing again, and whether, due to weather, the house falls is not really an issue, since the flakes are teeny, but after a few storms and 3 feet of snow like we have now, though some has melted into ice, the weight of all that gathered on the tarps may just put the tarps on the ground and ‘the house will fall.’

So we cry again in the drabness of yet again more days of snow, deliver us!

We take refuge but the rains and snows continue to fall, the winds will blow hard, it will beat on the house we have built.

Then our only hope will be the house that God has built for us, built on the Rock, Peter, the Church of Jesus the Christ.

But it’s been corrupted as well, so we are left, in the teeny flaked snow falling on tarps that we have to clear by hand, waiting for the sun to shine to give solar power so we can write more gratitude-filled words, words of grace.

Stand by

for better weather and the light.

(But there’s still work to do today, so have at it, with all we’ve got, as we wait for the light.)