Perfectly Terrible?
Thursday, July 20, 2023
It Ain’t Pretty Welding,
But For Day One, It’s Not All Bad.
How’s Life Going For Us?
All Bad?
All Good?
Or Blessed Even If A Mess.
Psalm 62:8
Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us. Selah
Luke 8:48
Jesus said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.’
Words of Grace For Today
This from the bottom of CBC’s Morning Brief: https://subscriptions.cbc.ca/newsletter_static/messages/morningbrief/2023-07-18/
“Today in history: July 18
1976: Performing on the uneven bars at the Summer Olympics in Montreal, 14-year-old Romanian Nadia Comaneci scores the first perfect 10 in Olympic gymnastics history.”
Well, that begs the question for us, or at least for me:
Who am I?
After all I am perfect at nothing!
I am not even perfect at being a terribly good sinner.
Sometimes I even do something good, by mistake.
What is life all about anyway, if I (and I would guess most of us are the same even if we don’t admit it) am less than perfect in every way.
I mean it’s one thing to be a master of a trade. And another thing to be master of none and jack of all. It’s yet another thing to be perfectly bad at everything.
It is no wonder then that humans in droves head off into the bizarre and unimaginable to be someone of note.
This also from CBC’s Morning Brief Newsletter, the ‘good news’ on 18 July:
“Of the more than 40,000 achievements in the Guinness World Record database, some are obvious — tallest woman, fastest marathon or most pull-ups. Others, like the one Bobby Dubeau says he’s accomplished, are less so. While he’s still awaiting the official certification, Dubeau says he’s become the fastest person to catch a game at every Canadian Football League stadium. The Delta, B.C., man says he saw a game at all nine home fields in 15 days.”
That effort to be unique and noticed is at least not destructive. So many humans strive toward something that requires they take something from others: wealth, power, fame, just to name a few of the things we greedy humans stick it to others in order to have more than our fair share.
The same CBC newsletter the lead story reports once again: minimum wage will not pay the rent in most any city in Canada. The government of Canada got out of the business of providing affordable housing to the most vulnerable in society back in the 1980s and 1990s. The cost was too much (but the rich kept getting richer and the poor poorer.) Now the cost of providing the basics for a homeless person are greater than providing housing and supports for them to stay in the housing. But the poor still are left on the brink of becoming homeless, and that’s a lot of children going to school without and parents who are stressed beyond reason. Still the homeless cannot be provided for, the costs are too great?! But interest rates keep rising, making housing costs climb and climb and climb beyond reach for more and more people.
We are not perfect at providing housing for people, at providing a livable society for a huge swath of our citizens, residents, and guest workers.
Perhaps the one thing we are perfect at is taking the most we can from the poorest.
Yet, with a good number of people working to help others, to find housing, to find food for each day, to find work, to find community and connection, I guess we are not even perfect at screwing the poor.
Thanks be to God, who is our refuge and our salvation. May our faith make us well, as a society, for right now, as always, we are quite sick.
But we are not perfectly sick, and that’s only thanks to God’s work through many hearts, minds, and hands of the sinner-saints … like us, like me.