Category: Cold

The Kingdom

Not of this world, but in it.

Tuesday, May 9, 2023

Even as the Light of Warmth Burns For Us During Cold Days,

So God Rules Even When We See Rampant Injustice.

Daniel 2:44

And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall this kingdom be left to another people. It shall crush all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand for ever;

Luke 22:29-30

and I confer on you, just as my Father has conferred on me, a kingdom, so that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, and you will sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

Words of Grace For Today

What can we hope for? While reports of injustices against other people receive from most a shrug of the shoulders (if even that), the cries for help rise from new and old corners: the newly homeless, wildfire evacuees with nothing left at home, drowning victims of illegal immigrants, volcano or flood or storm or drought displaced, the innocent and cruelly convicted, the victims of unjust wars and conflicts, the victims of spousal abuse (both men and women) … and the children, always the children.

We can hope and work to create a just world, a just kingdom where we rule and provide justice for all. Though this has been clearly demonstrated to be mostly a futile effort. For if we rule, we will rule unjustly like all others. And whatever our efforts may be we can never eliminate injustices in our lands or on this earth. We humans are too perverted towards sin and doing others harm to be able to overcome all that we do against each other.

We can and should still work to bring justice where we can, little as that may be. One case at a time.

We can and should look to God’s promises that God’s Kingdom is already arrived on earth. We may not see it for all the injustices of all kinds in every corner. Yet God has established God’s rule, since the beginning of time.

Trusting God’s promises gives us courage to take on injustices, and keep working even when it seems we make no progress.

Already we feast at Jesus’ table.

Already we enjoy peace that surpasses all understanding.

Already God has judged those who need to be judged.

Thankfully we do not need to be, nor will we ever be able to, judge the 12 tribes or anyone else. Fortunately that is God’s work, and we can trust God to do it right.

This is another day in God’s kingdom, where God rules, and we work as God’s servants to share life abundant with as many people as we are able.

Seeing

Seeing the Unseeable

Seeing the (Seeable) Saints

Tuesday, April 25, 2023

Can We See Beyond The Obvious,

The Roadblocks,

The Hopelessness?

Psalms 112:4

They rise in the darkness as a light for the upright; they are gracious, merciful, and righteous.

2 Corinthians 4:17-18

For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.

Words of Grace For Today

It is one thing to know that others are fighting against one, working to take everything from one, even life itself.

It is a whole other thing to have those closest to you, turn and take advantage of ‘knowing you best’ in order to steal even life itself from you. For then, not only do the enemies possess the most private information about you, they have thus ripped one’s heart and foundation of life right out of you, robbing you of the ability to trust any other person. Then it becomes clear that this was their intention from the start. It was not to share the best of life with you, but to steal the goodness of life from you and to make you as miserable as they had been all along. Perhaps they hoped to enjoy the goodness of your life by stealing it from you, but such joy of goodness is never possible through such treacherous evil. So they continue to find their next victim, and the next, and the next ….

God planned for this, too.

God’s Spirit, by grace alone, created saints in every generation before us, people who despite all efforts to rob the goodness of life from them continue to trust God’s promises, and they lived as they chose (aided by the power of the Holy Spirit) to be gracious, merciful, and righteous.

God’s Spirit rescues us who can no longer trust anyone or anything, sends not only the Spirit to guide us, but saints of these generations, to show us how to trust by seeing what cannot be seen: God’s faithful love and presence with us

each

step

of

our

days.

…

Our enemies may have destroyed us by all worldly measures, but we live blessed in so many ways that we can only give God thanks and praise for,

for

we

too

are

made

saints

in

these

days.

…

And we see what cannot be seen.

We trust beyond experiences that have robbed us of all ability to trust.

We live abundantly.

Waiting

Waiting,

Looking and Waiting

Monday, April 24, 2023

In The Deep Cold and Drear of Winter,

We May Wait for and Look for Spring,

but when hope is destroyed,

can we wait and hope

for life to return to our hearts?

Psalms 130:6

… my soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning.

Jude 1:21

… keep yourselves in the love of God; look forward to the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life.

Words of Grace For Today

How in the chaos of this world, where truth is sacrificed by everyone every minute, or so it seems, can we find the patience to wait for and look for something better?

What I trusted was the foundation of life here in this country, is blown to bits and shambles. Lies were spread like wildfire rumours, devouring truth, leaving angry accusations levelled at me. It mattered not that they were false rumours, for they were taken up as a call to war against an enemy with more lies added at every turn (even by those entrusted to protect us all from evil), and I was made to be for so many self-righteous people the face of that enemy, though I had lived my life standing quietly and effectively against such enemies and against such lies, rumours and false accusations against others.

How can I wait for and look for God to fix this unfixable chaos that has left me so far in debt I will never see my way clear of it, even as I live as frugally as possible, off the grid in the bush (freaky hot in the summer and hellishly cold in the winter), heating with a rebuilt wood stove, insulated by tarps cast off pieces of foam held in place by cast off pieces of lumber, a door rescued for reuse on its way to the landfill, all built, repaired and held together by ropes and duct tape and lots of wood screws – constantly needing repairs and replacement.

And then I read with new eyes from centuries past poetry, psalms, prayers and literature. People have sighed, plead, and cried aloud for help from much worse betrayals of self and goodness and civility and honesty and love and hope. My life goes on with blessing abundant in the peace of life beside a small lake in the relative quiet of the bush (though fighter jets landing at the nearby base shatter ear drums and peace at all hours, and the nearby oil installation – an old, ear splitting loud electricity generator growls and pounds on and off for days on end, and bush parties in the summer — all this noise when it disappears for hours or days or even weeks makes the quiet, peace, and solitude then so much more noticed and vibrant.)

What chaos and destruction we humans have wrought on others, and on ourselves. It is not that we have not and do not continue to work to bring a just order and peace to bear on this chaos. Many give their all towards such efforts from large and even world-wide to small and personal. Many work outside any lime light, go completely unnoticed during their active efforts, and are forgotten even before they die. For every step forward it seems at least a step is taken backwards. Here we ended slavery of black people. But the world around even today, people are still enslaved. Even here people are held in bonds that control all choices and steal away all fruits of their labours.

Where is our hope?

my soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning.

As the sun rises each morning the Holy Spirit creates hope where there is no reason or evidence for it.

The greatest burden we each bear is that (if only we were honest with ourselves) we all participate, blindly perhaps, enjoying the benefits of this continuing slavery, and contributing to the chaos that consumes life at every turn, stealing bits and pieces of life from others, and even finally their lives — all so that we can live on, as it were.

For this burden steals life from us, either in our acknowledging it, or worse in our trying to deny its weight in our lives. We try to swim and still we sink into the chaos. We try in so many ways to try to convince ourselves we can fix it and save ourselves.

keep yourselves in the love of God.

It is futile.

At best we can beg God to keep us in God’s love, save us, free us, and guide us to

look forward to the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life.

Today,

Another day begging God

Receiving from God

Thanking God

Sharing God’s blessings

whether we are so fortunate to live off the grid in the bush or in the tumult of the city.

Looking

For Jesus

Monday, April 3, 2023

We Build Houses,

Even For Fishing With Jesus For People.

God Has Other Plans

For Us.

Psalms 16:8

I keep the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.

Hebrews 12:2

looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.

Words of Grace For Today

For us all, all too often we see God as our right hand power that enables us to succeed in the world. Our enemies should lay down and worship, if not God, then us, for the power we wield.

Except life is not like that, and God’s Word for us is not either.

Instead God deals with the reality of life … which ends in death for us all.

God frees us from our sins, and our ultimate fears of death,so that we can live.

On Easter we will say: Christ is Risen! Christ is Risen Indeed! As enthusiastic as we may have learned to proclaim this wondrous news, the power of that news is clear only when we know deep in our bones and hearts what has come before: Jesus has died. Jesus has died a terrible, torturous, unjust death.

That’s what Holy Week is all about. It reminds us of the reality that Jesus addresses with his death and resurrection.

Make no mistake there have been plenty of deaths recently. Among them:

Five siblings, their spouses and children and friends gather to bury the siblings’ parents killed in an accident. An earthquake rocks the mountain overlooking the cemetery and buries them all. A tank runs over an orphan soldier crushing the breath out of him forever. An addict dies alone and helpless poisoned by xylazine cut into his drugs. An old man dies forgotten in his soiled bed. Two women are stoned to death by a crowd of self-righteous zealots.

And then this Friday we remember also that Jesus was falsely accused as many before and since, was strung up and left to die on a cross.

Anyone who is paying even a little bit of attention knows the searing sadness, and profound sorrow of death. That’s life on earth. We get used to such news.

God planned for that, too.

God lets us dive into the familiar of death, and then jars us out of our comfort zones with Jesus’ resurrection,

Turning our worlds all topsy-turvy, back upright,

Where only God is in control, and we live and breathe only as God gives us these gifts … to share.

Fool’s Day?

You Bet!

Saturday, April 1, 2023

Finding Our Fools’ Paths … Daily.

First Samuel 12:22

For the Lord will not cast away his people, for his great name’s sake, because it has pleased the Lord to make you a people for himself.

2 Timothy 2:13

if we are faithless, he remains faithful — for he cannot deny himself.

Words of Grace For Today

One might say to the passages today that since God is most powerful and therefore God can do anything, including deny himself, and through history God certainly did cast away God’s people in many and various ways …

…

April Fool’s!

….

And that is no small April Fool’s joke on us.

It goes to the heart and foundation of life and faith and hope.

If it is all an April Fool’s joke on us, what is left?

?

?

?

Breathe.

Notice that God walks with us, right in step with us, carrying us when we falter, suffering with us when we suffer and rejoicing when we rejoice.

The heart and foundation of our life and faith and hope does not depend on us or the scripture getting it right all the time.

In fact, God created us knowing full well that we would get it oh so terribly wrong all too often.

Today it is enough that God works a few miracles through us for others, so that others may live knowing God’s blessings are also for them.

Watch

and be amazed.

And don’t forget to breathe.

God created us so that we work best when we breathe.

…

And scripture got it right: God is pleased to create a people for God’s self, that people includes all people of all time. In that God is always faithful, by choice.

What a choice, eh?!

Considering all the fools who get it so wrong, what a choice!

Delivered

From Our Enemies (Mostly Us)

Friday, March 31, 2023

Our Paths Are Never Without The Shadows of

…

our own evils.

Judges 3:9

But when the Israelites cried out to the Lord, the Lord raised up a deliverer for the Israelites, who delivered them, Othniel son of Kenaz, Caleb’s younger brother.

Luke 1:68

Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has looked favourably on his people and redeemed them.

Words of Grace For Today

God delivers us

mostly from ourselves

as the agents of evil that permeates all our lives

in surprising and oft denied ways so that we may too easily think all is coming up roses

when in reality the things we do stink more than the sewage pipe from the city dwellers before the first treatment plant.

Which is to say, collectively we make quite a stinking mess of the world.

Lately we see how the world comes back on us and all life, trying to stop us from destroying everything. Wild climate change storms and events that threaten all life on earth.

What are we thinking

other than only for ourselves, the future be damned.

Well it is. The future is quite damned by what we do and fail to do.

We need a saviour, not so simply as a warrior to defeat the enemy soldiers attacking us to rule over us and make us slaves.

No, this saviour needs to save us from ourselves. From our greed, avarice, and wilfulness that leaves us willing to destroy others (and ourselves and all our futures) just so that today (and a few of our tomorrows) may be ours to ‘enjoy’ in comfort.

Ahh! What was God thinking when God created us so capable of such destruction and evil …

if not

that God also created us capable of equally such great love, care, respect, and goodness.

Today, which will we choose to live out?

Carry

What Is Most Important

Tuesday, March 28, 2023

If We Make Our Own Way,

Everything Becomes an Obstacle.

God Would Carry Us Through It All,

Focused Instead On Giving Life to Others.

Psalms 103:14

For he knows how we were made; he remembers that we are dust.

2 Corinthians 4:10

[we] … always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.

Words of Grace For Today

If one is confused about who one is then one can carry so much with one each day (baggage, sins, dreams, memories) that do one no good at all.

Take Kurt or Jane or Kjeet or Norique, all who earned more than $500k a year, and sometimes with bonuses netted over $1million. Each ‘earned’ their salaries by taking from others, one on the stock markets, one as a corrupt lawyer, and one as a drug dealer with a day job of librarian, who loved to gamble just a lot too much. The last one had lied constantly to the children, the police and the courts, in order to get ahead by destroying others who seemed to be in the way forward. It was all a delusion, but the results were devastating to everyone. All four ignored the destruction that they left in their wakes, and consequently they carried all that destruction as baggage into each day.

Then there was Rolf, Srijet, Olaf, and May. They were all so poor each day was a struggle to survive. Two were homeless. One lived in the bush. The other couch surfed, from friend to friend, then changed cities and repeated it until there were no friends not ‘visited’ and then the cities-friends were repeated.

Not one of them was happy. All worked each day to have yet more money, thinking that would make them happy. Such thinking was at best mere futile wishes. At worst, through neglect, it destroyed others and themselves, for not one of them gave any attention to the other people around them who struggled just as hard to survive. Their selfish drives to get more for themselves drove them deeper and deeper from anything like life that God created them to enjoy.

Knowing one is made from dust and born of God’s Spirit one can choose well, though not perfectly, what one carries into each day.

We all know the saints, who regardless of their circumstances, turn their focus each day to helping others find the true meaning of life.

Are we one of these saints?

What will our day look like today?

Are we aware we are dust, carried in blessings and glory abundant by God’s grace alone so that we have more than enough to share with all people in need?

When we live, by grace alone aware that Jesus’ died for our bodies, minds and souls (along with everyone else who has or ever will live), with the marks of Christ’s death freeing us from anxiety about our own deaths, and our own lives, THEN our bodies, lives, minds, and time will reflect the glory of Christ resurrected to save us all, by the power of love’s apparent weakness.

It is simply like dust made alive with breath: a miracle each day.

Finding Us

In the Fog

Wednesday, March 22, 2023

Freezing Fog Is

God’s Painting

Beauty

In The Cold and Dark

Ezekiel 34:16

I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice.

Luke 15:6

And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbours, saying to them, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.”

Words of Grace For Today

The bones are dry, dead, gone.

God assembles them.

Breathes on life into them again.

And we live.

…

The cantankerous ram is lost, yet again.

He’s found by the dedicated shepherd caught in a thorn thicket, unable to free himself.

The shepherd suffers cuts and tears and blood and time … rescuing the ram from the thicket.

And then the walk home, the ram limping along, not able to fight or think of running off again.

And we celebrate.

…

The enemies are strong and attack from afar.

The powerful and rich are greedy and corrupt and rot the nation from within.

Many people suffer lives of agony without the necessities, yet with joy that God is with them. They are the winners, even as the corrupt bask in their wealth and power, for

God comes to rescue the lost, the ones suffering, the ones denied life, and the fat, corrupt, unjust, and cruel powerful and rich are brought to their knees and left destitute on this earth and still devoid of a soul.

…

These we know as surely as the fog of the night is captured in beauty in the morning light on all the tree limbs and brush of the wilderness.

So our hearts, though suffering oppression and abuse, are filled with the free beauty of God’s creation and the cold of the night,

While God warms our hearts, minds, and spirits by the fire.

…

How shall we enter this day if not with unending thanks to God, and clarity of our mission to share life abundant with all people.

Blessings

By obeying?

Saturday, March 11, 2023

Think We Can Find Our Way To God’s Light

Passed All Obstructions?

Think Again!

Deuteronomy 11:26-28

See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse: the blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today; and the curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn from the way that I am commanding you today, to follow other gods that you have not known.

John 15:10

If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.

Words of Grace For Today

Sheila worked hard every day as a nurse, and made sure she took at least one day of rest per week, when she recuperated, worshipped with the Eucharist, and prayed. Her prayers also included assembling a list of things she was thankful for that she would read each morning before even getting out of bed and people she would find time to pray for each day.

She knew that she ‘abided’ in God’s love, and that obeying God’s commandments she was blessed, and certainly not cursed. She had given up on all her family and friends, one by one, as they did not ‘obey’ God’s commandments to her standards.

Then …

Sheila had a small seizure on her way to work after weeks of 16 hour work days and a small celebration with ice cream cake the night before for her 35th birthday. It wasn’t a big seizure. Just long enough that she veered into an oncoming semi. Both were only going 50 kph, but it was enough. She woke up days later in the hospital, not working as a nurse, but as a patient in the ICU.

After the first long and dreadful chaos and confusion of getting her bearings and understanding that she could not move her legs or her arms, panic set in and she understood from the inside what a curse was. That barely subsided through the whole 7 days it took before she was finally able to speak her first word, and ask what had happened to her.

So much for obeying God’s commandments and avoiding curses!

God planned for that, too.

For us? Yes, for us, too!

Our days, whether we obey or disobey God, whether we humbly repent or remain stubborn and proud, will be determined by what God chooses for us. And God chooses that we will be so blessed without rhyme or reasons.

Will we notice?

That’s the challenge of each day.

Peaches and Cream

It Ain’t

Friday, March 10, 2023

How to Get To Our Goals?

Yep! Lots of Reasons to Fret!

Yet,

Worry

Won’t Help A Bit!

Psalms 121:4

He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.

1 Peter 5:7

Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you.

Words of Grace For Today

Each day has challenges, worries, and failures waiting to overwhelm us, if we care to take note.

God sends us into the world, knowing that we will succumb to the evil One if we go it on our own. So God walks with us.

And keeps watch over us, without pause.

And listens to us, giving us an ear to hear our anxieties, fears, and trepidations.

We need not bear the weight of life on our own.

Not this day.

Not any day.