Category: Winter

Wake Up!

See The Poor

Saturday, March 4, 2023

How Wide Is Your Sky That You Wake To?

What Joy Do You Know

and Share?

Psalms 12:7

You, O Lord, will protect us; you will guard us from this generation for ever.

John 6:63

It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.

Words of Grace For Today

The world is in trouble. Grave trouble. Dark trouble.

We are all going to die.

That’s just how it is.

Knowing that God walks with us and protects us gives us the spirit to move into all that trouble, bringing blessings, peace, and joy.

Harmon wakes cold in the winter and too warm in the summer. His insulated tarp tent is a collection of 2 years of collecting other people’s junk. His greatest boon was when a foreman at a construction site let him pick through the scraps before it was shovelled into the dumpster for disposal. He landed 5 insulated tarps in rough shape, and he came back later to get the few metal 2×4’s and five 2×6’s the foreman let him put to the side because he could barely carry the tarps. Even then he couldn’t manage the 2×6’s so the foreman tossed it all in the back of his pickup truck and had a young worker deliver it and Harmon back to his campsite in the river valley or as near as they could drive. The young man helped carry it all in, he said under orders from the foreman.

It was a tough life, Harmon knew. But it was so much better than living with his uncle up north. There he woke to getting hit before breakfast for he never knew what. His uncle served the same for lunch, supper, and before bedtime. It was better than what his friends managed in the tent city downtown, where the only thing between them and the elements and thieves was a thin piece of tent and their sleeping bags. Though they had ready access to water, showers, supplies and clothes. Twice a week Harmon hiked up the river a mile or so and then across and up into downtown for a shower and supplies, and food, sometimes even a hot meal. Otherwise he was content to collect scrap wood for a fire, read books he got from a helpful woman at the library (they were going to be tossed out anyway), write and draw. It wasn’t much, but along with helping serve meals on Sundays at ‘his’ church, he kept his spirits up.

We are all going to die. That’s 100% death rate for us. But before then there is life. Best to keep it in perspective.

Paul writes that the body is nothing, but Harmon knew that you needed to care for the body or the mind and soul had no chance at all. And you needed to care for your mind and soul or your body had no chance at all either.

What do you wake to each morning? How many running feet of floor or square feet of space is yours to roam? How many hours does it take to provide all that for yourself? Do you provide for others? Do you find time to volunteer? Do you see, hear, know, or remember the homeless, the poor, the ones Jesus came to live among?

Be

To Me, That I May Be

Friday, March 3, 2023

God Gives Us Wide Horizons,

And Paths To Follow the Saints,

to the Light

Psalms 31:9

Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress; my eye wastes away from grief, my soul and body also.

Ephesians 1:18

so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints,

Words of Grace For Today

The greatest distress that any human can face (since it covers for so many lesser distresses as well) is to not be,

to not be seen,

to not be heard,

to not be known,

to not be remembered,

to not be loved,

to not be anything at all.

…

God promises to protect us from the evil that would make this be for us.

God sees us.

God hears us.

God knows us.

God remembers us.

God loves us.

And God makes sure we are something to God, and

that many other people

see, hear, know, remember, and love us.

And God sends us out to see, hear, know, remember, and love all people,

so not one person need cry

Lord, see me, hear me, know me, remember me, love me.

Makes for a full day every day, and a full life lived,

when we work so that all people are seen, heard, known, remembered, and …

most of all …

loved.

Trust

Because God is Faithful

Thursday, March 2, 2023

No Matter the Way Ahead,

Dark or Steep,

God Walks With Us

Genesis 28:15

Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.

1 Thessalonians 5:24

The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this.

Words of Grace For Today

As people born of this world and living in the world we are the problem. That was Lucy’s wisdom for Charlie Brown, and for us. Lucy did not have a solution.

A museum near Niagara Falls holds displays about Blondin. He was a tight-rope walker, who set up his high wire over Niagara Falls. On the day of his show a huge crowd gathered. He began by crossing over and back, carrying his balancing pole above the deadly waters. The crowd cheered loudly. Next, he set a table and chair at mid-wire, and perched there, drinking a cup of tea, with death far beneath him. Again, the crowd went wild.

After several progressively more difficult tricks, Blondin filled a wheelbarrow with water. Amazingly he piloted it over and back and not a drop spilled. He then asked the crowd, how many of you believe that I can carry a person across in this wheelbarrow? As one the crowd raised their hands crying “I do!”

“All right,” he said. “Who’s first?” … The crowd went stark quiet.

That’s the difference between belief and trust.

God sends Abram, Sarai, and us into the unknown. Do we trust God enough to go? Do we trust God enough that we are born from above? Disciplining ourselves into a spiritual life will never be enough, though.

The problem remains that we are us. Neither our self-chosen belief nor our self-built trust saves us, especially when God sends us out into the unknown.

God planned for that, too. Jesus tells us, as he did Nicodemus that God gives birth to us again, this time it is a ‘birth from above’. God solves the problem of us being us. God gives us a new origin, new honour, a new ending, and a new way to live. Actually none of it’s new. This is how God created us to be. God doesn’t want us to be different than ourselves. God wants us to be who we really are, God’s own people. Trusting God always.

We trust God because God is faithful. We trust God because God is always with us, and when God promises to bring us home, it will be so, even if we have no home here on earth.

So on with this day, this blessed day, with opportunities to be blessings to others, as God created us to be.

Just Coffee?

Or Mysteries Requiring A Seer’s Interpretation?

Wednesday, March 1, 2023

Can You Smell That?

That Oil Processing Plant?

That’s Progress, We Used to Say!

Really!

Daniel 2:47

The king said to Daniel, ‘Truly, your God is God of gods and Lord of kings and a revealer of mysteries, for you have been able to reveal this mystery!’

Acts of the Apostles 26:27-28

‘King Agrippa, do you believe the prophets? I know that you believe.’ Agrippa said to Paul, ‘Are you so quickly persuading me to become a Christian?’

Words of Grace For Today

King Agrippa had a question for Paul. Mine is not that important but I’ve asked and not even gotten to the meat of the question yet: what is it about that skunk smell everywhere, anyway? It’s not really a question or a mystery that needs a seer to explain it is it? Not like Daniel revealing the mystery of God’s power to save him from the lions, … or?

There was only one other time I had to deal with such a strong smell as that day when the skunk decided stepping into the squirrel trap would be it’s last step.

That was when I was building a house for our family of four to live in and a skunk decided to come for a visit. It had encountered a porcupine. I’m not sure what the porcupine suffered in the exchange, but this poor skunk had a snoot and chest full of quills. It was not doing well. It fell into the trench I was laying water lines, in to bring the well water from the old house up 200 yards to the new house. For hours as dusk approached this stinking thing wandered up and down the trench with the pipes already laid into it. That meant I could not shoot or attack the skunk while it was down there. I had to keep working. So while it wandered up and down that trench I’d work in the trench where it was not, getting the final things in place for the pipe including finishing a junction. So it wandered. I worked. Finally I was ready to fill the trench with the backhoe, and wonderfully it wandered out by itself. As it continued up the hill our youngest son followed it, feeling sorry for it. Finally our son came back. All was good. The trench was half filled in. And then the skunk came back following our son, and it wandered right back into the trench down to the end near the old homestead house with it’s leaky roof, mice galore, and barely any insulation which kept the old oil furnace working hard in the winter and the fans futilely spinning in the summer to keep it cool enough to live in.

I finally stoned the poor creature. Not with pot, but with two large rocks, carefully dropped so as not to damage the plastic pipes I’d so carefully laid. The pipes and the skunk got buried as I finished filling in the trench with the backhoe. A respectable burial as any for a stinking skunk. And then, on went the work on the new house.

That strong, terrible, debilitating skunk smell hung around outside our kitchen and bedroom windows in the old house and the construction site for more than a week. And for a month there remained a hint of it that we only noticed when we came back from being away in town or flying pipeline patrol, which was my income back then.

So when I opened the Starbucks coffee and more than a hint of that same smell wafted at me, it made me stop and wonder:

What is it with this skunk smell anyway?

Is it a deterrent as the skunks use it? Maybe a good warning for those smoking pot? Maybe for us all around the world who drink coffee, all those 2.5 billion cups each day!?

Or is it a stimulant, great in coffee in tiny doses, but nearly lethal in large doses like in some pot or in skunks’ defence systems?

What is it with this skunk smell anyway?

Can’t be all that good, can it?

Yet, I’m having a cup or two of that coffee this morning.

And I count it as a good start to any day, as do billions the earth over, not that that makes it right, eh?

What will we do with it otherwise anyway, the coffee and more importantly, each day that is a gift from God? That seems a bit of a mystery each morning, that gets answered by the time we fortunately lay down to sleep at night.

Wafting

Justice and Coffee, with Mercy and Milk

Monday 27 February 2023

As the Sun Begins To Shine,

Is It Coffee Time?

Who’s To Judge?

Psalms 98:9

at the presence of the Lord, for he is coming to judge the earth. He will judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with equity.

Revelation 15:4

Lord, who will not fear and glorify your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship before you, for your judgments have been revealed. ’

Words of Grace For Today

I’ve read recently that coffee is the most popular drink in the world.

2.25 billion cups a day are swallowed by all kinds of people. It’s all kinds of coffee, from black to expresso to au lait, and of the many kinds of coffee beans only two are most used to make coffee that we drink, Aribica and Robusta.

I drink mine out of necessity the au lait way. Cuts the acid which is wickedly painful, even cancer-forming and deadly, on top of GERDS. But it’s still strong coffee I’m told, but it’s what I’m used to from my year in Germany. Thin tea-translucent coffee just doesn’t seem right. That’s what my old sponsor taught me while I visited here in her smokey apartment. She was the head of the German American Club that did their part in providing the scholarship I’d been given for a whole year free to study in Germany.

Now that bag of coffee is of course not just coffee. Can’t just be plain coffee from the food bank. It’s Starbucks’ Expresso. Now I never did feel I could afford Starbuck’s coffee, and certainly I can’t imagine now wasting that kind of money on a cup of coffee since the same money can buy me a week’s worth of SILK, soy milk, since I’m allergic to dairy. What a change, no SHOCK (might come closer) that was, giving up dairy and paying twice as much for ‘milk’!

Of course with GERDS I cannot drink and never have liked my coffee black. I always cut the acid with milk, and now with pricey SILK. I start out half SILK and half coffee. Drink half that and fill up the coffee and continue until after soothing my stomach with more SILK the last cup is a strong cup of coffee with 3 dollops of SILK.

But back to that skunk smell that started all this.

While we choose many things about how we live, in the end the One that judges us all and everything about us, from coffee to skunk smell, from good works to evil intentions, and from kindness to malicious hatred is still and always will be God.

God will judge, and we rightly fear God’s name, and rightly so love God and God’s name, for God judges with equity all the people. And before God judges, like adding milk to the acid of coffee to make the taste even milder than Arabica (the most consumed coffee bean) compared to Robusta (essentially the ‘other’ coffee bean that has more caffeine in it and is more bitter) God’s mercy, gracious forgiveness, love, and will to save us is to be trusted, as Jesus taught us.

It’s not at all related, or maybe it is: I trust coffee with milk (or SILK nowadays) but I trust God’s mercy, gracious forgiveness, and love even more than anything else.

Tends to make for good days, good enough for this day as well.

So how do you like your coffee and your trust in God’s judgments of us all?

Smell

Confidence or Skunks?

In Coffee and in Life.

Sunday 26 February 2023

One of the Good Things About Winter,

Is That There Are

No Skunk Smells About.

Proverbs 3:26

for the Lord will be your confidence and will keep your foot from being caught.

John 17:15

I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one.

Words of Grace For Today

I’m not sure if the Devil is like a skunk, but lately I’m sure the Devil uses skunks and skunk smells to invade otherwise good living, to break down our confidence in God’s goodness carrying the day, carrying us through what ever comes our way. See lately I’ve had to ask what is it about that skunk smell anyway? It keeps invading life, even parts that I thought were wonderful, essentials and extras, necessities and luxuries … and safe.

It goes like this:

I got a bag of coffee from the food bank the other week that smelled like skunk. The can I was dipping my morning coffee from finally ran out. I’ve cut back to one scoop per 3/4 of a one litre coffee press. Yeah, I know, others call them French Presses, but they press coffee, so that’s how I think of them. The coffee presses don’t need electricity, just boiling hot water and the wood stove, ‘the monster’ (because it eats so much wood to keep the shelter inside those insulated tarps warm), and the presses only cost $10 from Ikea. Well they used to anyway before inflation. I bought one to start with 8 years ago, and when I broke my first one, I bought two more. When I broke the first one of those I bought a replacement, and a spare replacement. Then I broke another and could not find but one replacement, since I had to borrow a sea-can 12 km away to store stuff in. That was before I bought a junk camper for $150, and a second for $150 and spent about that much to get an old truck camper all to store stuff in. The first one I fixed up to usable for 3 season camping, and I store stuff in it besides use it now for it seems the once a year trip to the mountains.

But I’m getting away from the skunk smell just a tad. Where was I? Yes, the coffee can of Costco dark roast that I’ve gotten so used to, and my cutting back to save money on coffee, and to help me sleep better. Cutting my coffee intake in half, all for breakfast, actually cut my waking up at night in half as well. Makes one wonder if I cut our all coffee, just gave up coffee all together, if I’d sleep through the night. But then I’d not wake up to notice it getting cold and be ready (sometimes not so ready, but mindful that I must get up anyway) to stoke the fire when it burns down to a few coals. That stoking process takes a half hour or so: poking the ashes around so they fall through the grates into the ash tray, sometimes emptying them outside in the cold onto a pile that I’ll use to preserve wood and other things in the summer rebuild. Then there’s taking the warmed up, ice and snow melted off of, wood that’s been stacked pretty much beside the monster and feeding the monster a full mug full, as many whole logs as possible so it burns longer, some more green for a longer burn, some way dry so that it burns at all. Then topping up the monster with thin pieces of wood or logs that are split into narrow pieces, until that monster has a full maw of wood to chew on. After refilling the wood inside from the wood stacked on the step outside (stacking wood there each day from the piles of wood 10 or 200 feet away, makes for less cold feet at night since sometimes I forego the boots and just have my sandals on) I sweep and sweep so the place is clean for the next time I come in and put one knee down on the 8”x3” pieces of floor foam so I can feed the monster without wrecking my back. Instead my knee pays for it.

So I stick with enjoying what is about 2 cups of coffee in the morning.

After all, I get to enjoy this world, too, don’t I? Jesus does not ask God to take us out of the world, but to protect us in this world from the Evil one. So here I am in the world, enjoying coffee, and hoping that I can keep it up, because for years as a teen I could not stand coffee. It was more than an acquired taste. Then in my late university years as I stayed up all night or more often stayed up too late (past my 22:00 bedtime to get up at 6:00 on the dot) I used coffee to stay awake to study and I fell for it. But then in my forties I had to give it up because of GERDS. Then in my fifties I could drink it again, as a replacement for a medicine that nearly killed me, as long as I cut it’s acid with milk. So now, it is a pleasure, and a sign for me that God protects me from the Evil one, like that medicine and the abuse that nearly killed me. Life is good when God walks with us.

There’s more about that skunk smell, but that’s for another day. For now I try to be confident that God will keep me from getting my ‘foot stuck in it all.’

And maybe that’s the best one can hope for this day or any day.

Ask

Or Not –

Here It’s Near Perfect

Saturday 25 February 2023

Just Cold Enough

Just Warm Enough

Just Calm Enough

Just Bright Enough

…

Clearly Peaceful Enough

To Be Perfect.

Hosea 4:1

Hear the word of the Lord, O people of Israel; for the Lord has an indictment against the inhabitants of the land. There is no faithfulness or loyalty, and no knowledge of God in the land.

James 1:5

If any of you is lacking in wisdom, ask God, who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly, and it will be given you.

Words of Grace For Today

If ever there were evidence ….

It’s one of those perfect winter days, it occurs to me as I make my way down the path, having climbed up for exercise after the peak ‘heat’ of the day is past, but still lingers. Earlier at sunrise to be out would be possible, though the air would bite at one’s face after just a few minutes and one would have to bring extras, like scarves, to warm the air to keep from torturing one’s lungs with the dangerous air. Now though, the air has warmed up a good 20⁰C from -35⁰ to a mere -15⁰ or so.

And that sun, now a month short of the equinox, shines with a mighty effect, warming one’s face (when one looks towards it) to take away even the pleasant reminder of cold from one’s cheeks and nose. Low in the sky, for it really doesn’t get all that high anyway, it tosses rays through a lot of air to get here and gets a bit confused so that against the bright blue sky it reflects off the snow with a golden touch even as it casts long, marked shadows across the different ‘elevations’ of the snow tracks left by a moose and many deer … and me.

It’s peaceful. The only sounds are the occasional wood pecker here and then there ‘knocking to come in’, though she’s already in after the bugs on her own. No engines. No people messing about, except for my tromping through the woods. Not even the oil processing/electric generators of the nearby plant is making noise. The wind is almost not at all, just a touch that moves the wood smoke from the chimney in a lazy pattern.

Inside above the stove it’s nearly 75⁰C, and mid way up the wall it registers in at 55⁰C, keeping the critical things from freezing and providing enough heat that by regulating it with the door more or less closed it stays nearly 31⁰ at the ceiling and 19⁰ at the floor. Warm socks and long underwear deal with the chill down there and the occasional open ceiling vent keeps the head-space from overheating and the air fresh and replete with oxygen.

As I said, it’s a nearly perfect day, a nearly perfect winter day, one that in the heat of summer with bugs and mosquitoes and wasps and bears and lots of people and party noise one only dreams about. For all that nothing can be done. A little cold though, and even a lot of cold like-40⁰ can be dealt with using wood, a wood-stove, and good insulating tarps.

Here there is no question that God walks with me, and that God is faithful and loyal!

If you don’t see God each day, if you don’t have the kind of wisdom that gives you that visual, then ask God, who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly, and it will be given you.

I didn’t even ask, but I needed this near perfect day, and it was given.

No sense in suffering. Go ahead, ask God for what you need. Ask even if you do not know what you need.

Trust God’s generosity and grace, even for you.

God’s Word

Forever Yes

Friday 24 February 2023

Over Us All,

And All Our Endeavours,

God Brings

Light

and God’s Life Affirming Word

Isaiah 55:3

Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David.

2 Corinthians 1:20

For in him every one of God’s promises is a ‘Yes. ’ For this reason it is through him that we say the ‘Amen’, to the glory of God.

Words of Grace For Today

We all know too well the ‘no’s that the world throws at us and so many others. We are well practised at tossing our ‘no’s into the mix … where they do not belong (for they rebound back on us more than they impact others).

God has always had a contrary way (contrary not to the universe, but to our perverted way of being in it) of working with creation and us creatures.

God says Yes! Yes! YES! And forever YES!!

To all of life’s goodness and to us in it (though we are full of so much that is not good) God says YES! And forever God says YES!

While we waste away life filling it with ‘no’s, God calls us to be those who also proclaim God’s YES! to all people.

And that starts by confessing our sins, accepting forgiveness and renewed life, and accepting that we are God-sent to say AMEN! to all God’s YES!’s.

Just another little challenge for this day, too, again, and again, …. forever.

Amen. (may it be so.)

God’s Pleasure

Us As Examples of Sin

Re – Redeemed!

Thursday 23 February 2023

Like a forest laid like waste after oil is extracted,

We’d wish evil could be also eradicated!

Ezekiel 33:11

Say to them, As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why will you die, O house of Israel?

Matthew 6:13

And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.

Words of Grace For Today

We would like to eradicate evil from the earth, especially by wiping out others who are caught in evil they have little interest in escaping.

Evil-cide!

‘Let it be gone forever!’ We cry, until we realize that would eliminate us, too!

Then, having come to our senses, we start to notice once again that God’s way of dealing with evil is not to kill it off, but

to forgive it, transform it, and use it

as a demonstration of how Great God’s Deeds are in redeeming us who are irredeemable, really!

So we are bold to pray that we might not succumb to the Evil One, but that God would once again save us.

That’s a good start to the day.

Now our purpose also this day is to be God’s instruments by which others are saved from the Evil One. Not a small task, and it’s only possible by the work of the Holy Spirit in us.

Another day. Another miracle. Lots of work.

Why Sing?

Or Dance?

Wednesday 22 February 2023

It’s Cold.

It’s Dark.

It’s Frosty.

It’s Brambles even!

It’s Just the Moon.

And It’s God’s Gift of Beauty

For Us Again!

Jeremiah 20:13

Sing to the Lord; praise the Lord! For he has delivered the life of the needy from the hands of evildoers.

Luke 1:46-48

And Mary said, ‘My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;’

Words of Grace For Today

The world is in trouble, and it appears more dire than ever before. War, Climate Change’s storms and upheavals, Nature’s Fight Against Human Overpopulation with Disease new and old, More and More Lies and Deceptions that Polarize Populations into Chaos Making Room for Fascist Rulers, Greater and Greater Inequity Between Peoples, Swings for Correction like Me-Too that have become just as destructive as the horrors they try to rectify, and on goes the list!

And personally for us all. I’m sure that you have your own list of disasters just waiting to blossom like nuclear mushrooms in your life, just as I do: thanks to a justice system gone amuck, and drugs and greed bending weak minds towards homicidal endings of me like I’ve never encountered before.

So why should we sing thanks to God?

Like Mary, when God steps into our lives in a visible and undeniable way it usually does not produce wealth, power, and privilege the likes of which we’ve only dreamed. On the contrary it usually brings great hardship to our mornings, noons, and nights.

So how on earth are we to sing God’s praise for all this?

Simple. Start by recognizing that the everything we are and have and can do, starting with breathing, is a gift from God – that we invariably mess up – and that we only continue to breathe at all because God’s wondrous Grace and Love reach out to us to forgive us and give us new life, as God has done for all the needy in every generation …

no matter what comes our way, or we throw in our own way.

So sing, and give God praise, and dance a jig of thanks

again this day.

And breathe, wondrously.