Wednesday, October 4, 2023
The Good Land?
Deuteronomy 8:7
For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills,
Acts of the Apostles 14:17
… yet he has not left himself without a witness in doing good—giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, and filling you with food and your hearts with joy.’
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Words of Grace For Today
Perhaps if we develop ‘warp drive’ (space flight faster than light) we can anticipate that God will bring us into a good land, flowing with water and all goodness, but until then
we’ve ruined the earth so much that it is hard to imagine a ‘good land’ somewhere under these skies.
The water flows alright, as the glaciers and ice caps and land mass ice melt, and it collects in the oceans and they rise, and what used to be ocean front property is underwater.
Or the water does not flow and the rains do not fall and the crops do not grow.
Or … you name it, the climate of earth has gotten mean.
What did we expect?
Okay, it’s not really all all that bad.
There are blessed places where the water flows, the rain falls in good amounts, the sun shines, and the crops grow.
And if one has lived in an area that was marginal to good before climate change, conflicts and disasters, but it has become uninhabitable or unsafe then coming to a land where crops grow and people live in relative safety, then one can count that as a blessing.
Typical is, though, that if we’ve always lived where the crops grow reasonably well year after year, then we easily forget how blessed it is that God has brought us to this good land.
It is easy to forget how others yearn for such a land to call home.
It is easy to think we deserve it … and others do not.
When life is hard, survival in question each day, then each breath is precious, and with each breath we can say, thanks for such wondrous blessings. These are the blessings that make life possible.