March 2023 – Page 3

Curses

From not obeying?

Sunday, March 12, 2023

Think The Brambles and Branches

Of Our Sins Are Too Many

For Us Weak Sinners

To Find God?

Think Again!

God Is Always With Us!

Deuteronomy 30:9

and the Lord your God will make you abundantly prosperous in all your undertakings, in the fruit of your body, in the fruit of your livestock, and in the fruit of your soil. For the Lord will again take delight in prospering you, just as he delighted in prospering your ancestors,

Philippians 2:13

for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

Words of Grace For Today

Roxy, not unlike the character in that fancy, up-beat, perverse show Chicago, did everything she could to get some pleasure for herself out of life. And she ruined every relationship she had in the process, and as the cost of her high living came to roost in her late 30’s she lost control to her alcohol and drug consumption. Life was no fun at all any more. One morning she woke with her face in her own vomit, her clothes dirty from weeks without washing, and a splitting body ache that felt like she was on the rack.

If she had ever heard of Moses’ blessings and curses, and Jesus’ abiding in God’s love, she would have known that she suffered outside God’s love and dead centre in Moses’ curse, and pretty much every other curse ever spoken or dreamed up.

But God planned for all that, too.

Roxy crawled all of three feet towards the cheap wine bottle before she passed out from the pain. It was more than luck that a person passing the construction shack she’d passed out in noticed her, called an ambulance which got her to the hospital. She woke up in the ICU unable to move or speak. She found herself wondering what great miracle had landed on her that she was still alive, and sober for the first time in longer than she could remember. She knew she was sober because she ached all over, her mouth was dry, her head pounded, but she could see straight for the few moments she could endure the pain of keeping her eyes open. That all slowly subsided over the whole 7 days it took before she was finally able to speak her first word, and ask what had happened to her.

Each moment she realized she was still alive, she gave God thanks. The awareness of God as a merciful, gracious God welled up in her from her childhood at St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church.

So much for dis-obeying God’s commandments and reaping only 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.

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 35^th 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!

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.

These 40

Years

Thursday, March 9, 2023

Hardly Wilderness,

Always Barren Living,

When We Try To Abandon God

Deuteronomy 2:7

Surely the Lord your God has blessed you in all your undertakings; he knows your going through this great wilderness. These forty years the Lord your God has been with you; you have lacked nothing.’

Luke 22:35

He said to them, ‘When I sent you out without a purse, bag, or sandals, did you lack anything?’ They said, ‘No, not a thing.’

Words of Grace For Today

If we live life in order to have more money and a full purse,

If we live life in order to have the best bag of everything,

If we live life in order to have the best footwear,

… If we live life in order to have things, power, status, …

Then …

Well then we will always not have enough and we will lack for what we think we need.

This is the way of the world, and it brings more destruction, disease, and destorying to others and to oneself, always more, but not goodness, always evil running others and oneself closer and closer to meaningless and death. If you want an eye-full of that watch Succession, the HBO series, or simply open your eyes to see how so many people live in the world around us.

This is not a fun way to live, no matter if people party hard and seem to be enjoying themselves. In truth this kind of living can only be pursued if one hides from one’s self, one’s real self.

God created us not to take from the world and claim it all to be ours. God created us to receive enough and share everything we have with others.

Jesus sends the disciples out with everything they need: kind hearts and a message of God’s love for all people! They lack for nothing.

God leads Moses who leads the people into the freedom of the wilderness, out of slavery, and though they barely have enough to survive, and it’s touch and go more than a few times, they always have enough … as long as they remember that God has led them and accompanied them all their years, even their ‘40’ (which is a symbol for ‘lots and lots – more than enough to count’).

Today we live in circumstances that outwardly do not appear to be wilderness: there are roads, vehicles, cities, barns and houses in farm yards, and industrial sites of many, many kinds. We call it civilization, but no matter what it looks like from the outside, if we do not have hearts ready to share God’s Word of Grace, all this is mere cover and running, running hard in the barbaric wilderness of humans bent on destroying, making ill, and destorying one another.

What will our day be like today, if not another blessed journey with God walking with us? Breathe. Give Thanks. We lack for nothing.

Word

To the Wise and the Perverse

Wednesday, March 8, 2023

Living Simple,

Off-the-grid, The Best Choice Of What’s Left,

Makes Choices Clearer,

Not Easier or More Pure.

Only God’s Presence Saves Us.

Jeremiah 22:29

O land, land, land, hear the word of the Lord!

Matthew 10:27

What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.

Words of Grace For Today

Oh that we might all see, hear, and follow God’s Word.

Recommended by a CBC economics writer I’ve watched 3 seasons of the HBO series “Succession”. It’s horrible. Or more frightening it’s an honest portrayal of capitalism today, in all it’s corruption, denigrations, and perversions at the highest and greediest levels. I would not recommend anyone suffer watching it.

There are better things to occupy one’s time and mind on.

Like Yellowstone, which portrayed an abusive, violent, and corrupt life of cattle ranching and all around it in Montana, Succession uses the wealthiest, selfish, greediest levels of corporate owners as the setting to display murder, perverse sex, alcohol and drug use and addition, and abuse of all kinds. Even the ‘best’ of characters, of course ‘pure’ mid-westerners from Minnesota, play out unbelievable abuse against other people, to no one’s benefit.

At first one can pretend anyway that these things do not really happen. Then the onslaught of repetition wears down one’s defences and one capitulates: this is how people actually live. There is some basis in reality that is used to portray these pathetic ‘hero’ characters, events, and disasters of humanity.

One must think: what has the world come to, anyway?!!

Which makes one remember the same selfishness, greed, and perversions reported about other ‘empires’, like Rome and even King David.

What is it about humans that when we are blessed with privilege, means, and opportunity we use it to destroy other people and any goodness that might be in us?

Remembering this about other times and most about our own, can we hear more clearly the petition: O land, land, land, hear the word of the Lord!

God’s Word stands in stark contrast: Jesus comes as God most privileged, and sets that all aside to live as one of us, one who sacrifices everything of himself to pay for our unending sins, so that we might be free of them and live as God’s own children. So that we might be blessed to be blessings to others.

Into the pathetic, perverse, and violent state of our dark world God’s Word comes to us. God sends us out to share that Word with all people: What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.

Today, which will we be and do? Our own small versions of selfishness, greed and perversion that is everywhere and in every time so rampant? Or the life-renewing proclaimers of God’s Word of Grace for all?

Wishes

And Curses

Tuesday, March 7, 2023

No Matter

How We Whitewash Our View,

God Remains Our Only Hope.

First Kings 8:57

The Lord our God be with us, as he was with our ancestors; may he not leave us or abandon us,

2 Thessalonians 3:5

May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ.

Words of Grace For Today

“Good Luck,” we say.

To curse another person the Chinese supposedly will say, “May you live in interesting times.”

“Break a Leg,” we say to a person heading out into a performance, superstitiously saying we wish them ill, so that we do not curse their performance with words wishing them well. Now ain’t that more than a little crazy, since everyone knows we are actually wishing them well?

Trying to find our way in the world we have come up with many ‘interesting’ ways of taking steps forward with our words.

God made a step forward with a Word: and creation came into being.

Another Word and God’s Son is born to live as a human among us.

Another Word and we are sent out into the rough and tumble world to share God’s blessings with all people.

Today the excerpts from scripture are words that move us forward into our day: The Lord our God be with us, as he was with our ancestors. Words of blessing for ourselves, and for others: May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ.

These words do not pretend that our time in the world will be anything but ‘interesting’, by which we mean filled with rough and tough challenges that can do us in faster than we can take a breath.

These words assume that the Devil is at play always, and always we need God’s presence and protection to make it through each day, each challenge, each dead-end.

These words are confessions that on our own we cannot make it through even the simplest challenges, and that God has through all time accompanied God’s people, our ancestors, and blessed us to be blessings to other people.

So this is a new day, and the same old, same old is true. Devil always, God everywhere, blessings flowing.

Ahhhh, see, hear and feel the Spirit? Breathe deeply, and then dig in.

What Are We Doing

To God?

Monday, March 6, 2023

Not the Poorest,

Still With Candles For Light,

We Celebrate Being Alive

Zechariah 2:12

The Lord will inherit Judah as his portion in the holy land, and will again choose Jerusalem.

Matthew 25:40

And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”

Words of Grace For Today

As we do to the least of these, you have done it to me!

So God gives notice that God accompanies even the poorest, most ignored, the most denigrated of the people on earth.

And what we do to them, we do to God.

Offer them mercy, kindness, love, and one’s ear, and so it is that we will hear God.

Offer them condemnation, cruelty, hatred, and one’s cold shoulder, and so it is that we turn a cold shoulder to God.

We might hope that God would respond in kind to all those who exercise evil against the poor, and us among them.

Doch, God is merciful and loving towards all people, even the most evil, waiting and hoping they will know God’s presence, grace, and judgment to be everything that makes life worth living.

What will you evil people do this day to God and God’s poor people? Will we be among the evil ones?

Or will we celebrate God’s presence with kindness and mercy towards all people?

Small

Words, Mighty Results

Sunday, March 5, 2023

With A Word God Creates!

With Great Effort and Big Machines (and cruel words)

We Destroy and Destory,

Doch God Saves All Creation

and Us In It

With A Word.

Psalms 33:9

For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm.

Matthew 8:8

The centurion answered, ‘Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; but only speak the word, and my servant will be healed.

Words of Grace For Today

It’s cold again this morning. Not the coldest, but enough that one needs take care before one goes outside, care to dress warm enough, not to leave any skin exposed, even a piece of one’s face that cannot be warmed quickly.

When crises rise up in our path, blocking our way forward, it is perhaps not so heart wrenching as to watch one’s daughter fall ill and no doctor’s efforts can save her. It may be worse, as war or earthquake or rising oceans, or other people rip us out of our lives and leave us with nothing more than the clothes on our bodies, if that.

Baptized in water and word, born of the Spirit from above, we can find our way to God’s promises, for when God speaks it is so.

So God created the world.

So Jesus cures us of our every ill.

So it is.

But when we cannot find our way back to God’s promises, and we flounder in waters too deep, cold, and wild for us to survive in, then what?

Then God accompanies us into the deep, cold, and wild, and finds us with a Word holy and simple: I love you!

And that is more than anything else in all the universe.

For no matter what happens to us, God welcomes us home … with a Word.

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.