Sends the Unseen
Saturday, May 27, 2023
What Are We To Do
When The Morning Sun Hides
It’s Warmth and
Life-Giving Rays?
Deuteronomy 32:4
The Rock, his work is perfect, and all his ways are just. A faithful God, without deceit, just and upright is he;
1 John 3:24
All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit that he has given us.
Words of Grace For Today
As Julius and his community worked and waited and struggled to survive in their hunting camp, overfilled by themselves and their many guest, not only the New Iblers, Julius opened Sotorous’ journal and found this passage, an old passage that Sotorus had copied from the time when the earth held nearly 8 billion people and wars and climate change started to displace people:
While our worlds turn upside down on us, through wildfires, smoke, floods, droughts, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, melting polar ice and permafrost, or through conflicts (personal and geopolitical), or through loss of health, homes, security and peace, or death, how are to know that all is well with us and the world.
We lose all and any sense of orientation that there is an order and rhythm to life that we can rely on, waking in the morning, and sleeping in the evening.
The creation story that begins in Genesis 1 has a rhythm to it, as it lays out the rhyme and reason that God creates the universe, our world and all that is in it: God calls it good.
What are we to do when we no longer sense or can find that rhyme and reason, that rhythm of each day and night, and God’s presence and purpose to create a universe and life in it that is good?
We are helpless on our own.
God planned for this, too.
God let it be written again and again that God is not a God filled with deceit and scheming against us. If only we could hear those words and trust them. But even that kind of trust is gone.
What are we to do?
There is nothing we can do. It not only appears that way, it really is that way.
And we do not need to do anything.
God sends the Holy Spirit to dwell in us. It is the work of the Spirit that allows us at any time in our lives, to sense God’s rhyme and reason, God’s rhythm and order, God’s Grace and Love.
When all sense of any order is gone from our lives, it is not up to us to make it right. God will do that.
God will do that.
God wills that God’s Spirit will do that in us.
So we live each day, that we have a sense of God’s rhyme and reason, filled with thanks and praise.
So when that order is gone, we wait and hope beyond hope that God’s purpose and order for our lives will be given to us again.
So we pray in our chaos: help us God!
Trusting that all will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well.
Julius read this to the gathered community on their day of rest.
Led by the New Iblers and God’s Spirit the community responded in a cacophony of voices: “Help us God! Help us God! Help us God!”
Julius ended with: “This the Spirit shows us: All will be well! All will be well! All manner of things will be well. – Let us give God’s Thanks.”