Month: April 2023

The Kingdom

For the Fools

Thursday, April 20, 2023

Without the Light of Christ,

We Get Lost In the Fog of Lies

That Are Spewed So Freely.

Second Kings 19:34

For I will defend this city to save it, for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David.

Luke 12:32

Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.

Words of Grace For Today

A city or a kingdom. We could dream of having one or the other, someday. In today’s world where fear is fuelled with lies, fuelling hate and rage, and denunciations of others that are senseless.

One of many lately is the ‘charge’ against the Trudeaus for taking a warm, post-Christmas vacation to a luxurious location in Jamaica – owned by a friend – at their own expense, while the government paid for what is required for the prime ministers’ security. The trip was pre-cleared to be free of conflict of interest. There were no Covid restrictions or other kinds of restrictions in place that were ignored. The only ‘charge’ is that Trudeau is out of touch with the financial struggles of ordinary Canadians.

The people making and repeating those charges all have it luxuriously good. In the context of all human history they all enjoy a standard of living better than 99% of the people who ever lived! And the ones creating and feeding such bogus charges probably went on similar vacations to warm climates or somewhat luxurious locations. And I can guarantee you that 100% of those people making such charges enjoy a standard of living better than I do. Vacation!? Trips!? – As one who can barely afford one trip each week to town to get food, water, and supplies the people throwing out such accusations are simply off their rockers.

The problem is these are not isolated or innocent ‘charges’. Yes, they have become part and parcel of politics. And that is exactly how dire and dangerous such ‘charges’ are! Out of such lies thrown about to create fear, so that from fear grows hate, and from that hate grows rage, and from that rage stem all sorts of violent actions are undertaken and justified (like occupying the streets of Ottawa and the borders here in Alberta to the US), and from that chaos … well chaos is a smoke screen for greater and greater evils, and we stand on the precipice of a fascist ruler rising out of the chaos … and then the ‘freedom’ that so many rage-filled suckers claim they pursue will be totally lost for all … well all except those favoured by the despot ruler. There are all too many examples of how that is done and what people suffer because of it.

Even people favoured by the ruler suffer, for their comfort is bought at the price of living a lie, and turning a blind eye to those unjustly exploited, jailed, and killed to feed the rulers’ whims.

And there goes the neighbourhood, to hell in a hand basket.

There is a reason the people were warned against seeking and elevating a king to lead them. Corruption always follows. The question is of what kind and how much.

Well, perhaps we then can already begin to dream of a city or a kingdom that we can share with other righteous people, capable of compassion, listening, and dialogue.

Yet God provides the ‘kingdom’ and ‘the city’ already to us, baptized saints.

We may not live in any city at all.

We may not live in any kingdom, but rather a federation of provinces and territories.

But we live blessed,

fools for Christ, and

members of God’s city and God’s kingdom, which is all creation.

Strong

Competence

Wednesday, April 19, 2023

Running for One’s Life

Between the Wood Piles;

Life can be like that

way too often!

Zechariah 8:13

Just as you have been a cursing among the nations, O house of Judah and house of Israel, so I will save you and you shall be a blessing. Do not be afraid, but let your hands be strong.

2 Corinthians 3:5

Not that we are competent of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our competence is from God …

Words of Grace For Today

Like a rabbit running, twisting and turning between the trees, the firewood piles, and around the campers, to find freedom from the pursuing lynx, so Brett found himself dodging the taunts and slurs thrown at him, along with spit balls, as he exited from school for his walk home.

Lately this once enjoyable walk home had become a nightmare, a horror not knowing from where the next insult, slur, or physical challenge would come. Today he vowed to himself, would be different.

It was, just not anything like he had hoped.

Three bullies from Grade 9 showed up along with the usual five Grade 6 bullies. What started as a few taunts, slurs, and tossed spitballs, soon became physical rocks meeting the mark on Brett’s thin back and legs. Then came the punches to his head and back, even as he ran, felling him in a tangle to the hard pavement. The sack over his head nearly made him choke and puke. It stank and ran with dog feces.

One more punch to his head and Brett was relieved of consciousness.

The next thing he knew he woke, tied tight, unable to move more than an inch, the bag still in place. It was dark, and lonely, and painful everywhere on his body. The minutes crept by until he passed out again. For hours he wavered between unconsciousness and half-awake throbbing pain. It became light again and dark again, and light again …. Brett lost track of how many times before he stopped waking up.

When he woke again, the pain had not stopped, but the stink was gone, the sack was gone. He was not tied up, but lay in a clean soft bed. He’d been cleaned up and he lay in soft pajamas.

Celia came in. He could barely believe it. This was the girl he adored and had never had the courage to say or do anything to indicate his feelings. She carried a cup of hot milk and a bowl of oatmeal. She fed him and told him:

She had found him, called her father and together they had untangled him from the sack and ropes, cleaned him up, taken him to their home, showered him, and lay him in bed, waiting for a doctor to come.

Along the way, the bullies had shown up and challenged them, but she had told them in no uncertain terms that if they did not leave she would lay them flat on the ground. The biggest had challenged her, and she had done just that, knocking his legs out from under him. With that the other had run.

Her father had come then, and picked up the boy Celia had knocked down, and told him that he was fortunate because Brett was still alive, and Celia had done nothing more than knock him down. She had a black belt in taekwondo and found her strength not in her own small frame, but in her belief that God walked with her. She otherwise probably would have too easily killed him or left him permanently unable to walk.

Now he should drink and eat just a bit more and then the doctor would be there. He would be fine though. She’d made the bully promise that they would now protect Brett.

…

So God provides what we need to be safe, and if/when we die God welcomes us home, safe and sound for all time.

Boldy Go

Where Many Have Gone Before

Tuesday, April 18, 2023

We May See Only A Faint Track,

But Many Saints

Have Gone Before Us.

Zephaniah 3:15

The Lord has taken away the judgments against you, he has turned away your enemies. The king of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst; you shall fear disaster no more.

2 Timothy 1:7

for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.

Words of Grace For Today

When God takes God’s judgments away from us, turning away our enemies that ‘howl at the door’ for our demise, and

God walks with us each day, no matter the challenges we face, nor the taunts from our enemies,

Not only then do we need not fear disaster, we are free to imagine and work each day towards the day when we and our neighbours will live lives abundant with blessings.

Of course, we’ve been living lives blessed by God all along. It’s just under attack by our enemies and so close to death as we have been forced to walk for years, it is nearly impossible to always remember God’s blessings, and to be those who put cowardice behind us. Even so, for years we’ve not forgotten that God walks with us, for God makes God’s self visible and tangible in so many and various ways.

So that our spirits have never faltered from the power of weakness in love and self-discipline.

Now as the rains begin to fall, bringing life from the earth once again, after a long, cold, snowy winter, we see new opportunities for the months ahead, opportunities to bring life abundant to more and more people

with a word of grace.

As the day begins, what direction will you take, towards God’s blessings for yourself, or from God’s blessings towards others’ in need?

Enjoy and trust the freedom God’s presence in your midst provides. Be bold to go where so many saints have gone before.

At Home

Looking To God’s Glory

Giving God ‘Omage

Monday, April 17, 2023

All Creation Turns Towards …

Jeremiah 51:50

You survivors of the sword, go, do not linger! Remember the Lord in a distant land, `and let Jerusalem come into your mind.

Ephesians 2:19

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God,

Words of Grace For Today

There are more times in human history for more people than not, who have been robbed of their homes and sent out looking for … a life.

Yet, no matter how many times we lose our homes, and even our sense of home, though we may still have sticks and stones, plastics and metal, fibres and wires around us constituting some kind of shelter against the elements and the danger of intruders into our lives, God does not lose track of us.

God calls to us, not to lose track of God’s home for us, that provides shelter from the greatest dangers of all, the evils of fear, hate, and revenge. For God has not only promised and continually demonstrated that God keeps this promise (to be with us always), God also transformed us from the heart and soul to the outer cells of our skins. God has transformed us from sinners into sinner-saints, the ones who carry God’s Word of Grace to all the creation.

Now how are we going to do that today, anyway?

Same old, same old,

or

are we ready always to step out on the new path God sets before us?

The sun rises.

All creation turns it’s face to God’s glory.

And we sinner-saints are turned as well,

to bask in God’s Grace, in the homes God gives us (some with, some without a structure on this earth.)

Looking

Through Sun Rays and Time

Sunday, April 16, 2023

Looking Through Smoke and Mirrors,

to the Divine.

Psalm 99:5

Extol the Lord our God; worship at his footstool. Holy is he!

Acts of the Apostles 4:31

When they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God with boldness.

Words of Grace For Today

It’s a marvellous contraption, prayer is. Not that many see it that way, yet in the beginning there was no prayer, and for many millennia humans had forgotten about this contraption. The rediscovery of it has changed lives and the way the world works. God knows we need it as we face a fourth world war.

Sotorus

That from Sotorus’ paper journal, discovered with 11 others in the year 4391.

But back to the beginning.

In the beginning was the Word.

God spoke and the universe was created.

Humans spoke. Sometimes they spoke to God and they called it prayer. A contraption that allowed mortal beings to speak directly to the immortal creator of the universe. But most often when humans spoke all sorts of chaos ensued, tainted as every good intention was with intentions to make their own lives better, the cost to others be damned. And the humans damned the whole universe with their words and by their actions until in the year 2302 the earth ceased to support the 12 plus billion humans on it. Viruses wiped out 7/8ths of all people and half of what was left of other animals, birds and fish. In that same year earthquakes ripped every continent in pieces and violent ‘climate-changed-vicious’ storms wiped out what was left of every city within 50 miles of the new coastlines.

There wasn’t a city left with any building more than two stories high. No services existed anywhere.

Life became brutal for everyone …

Until groups of people gathered to live and work together. One group collected in an old warehouse area next to some of the only remaining arable land next to one of the new lakes fed by the new rivers the earthquakes created. They called themselves the Iblers.

This was not the only group who gathered. There were hundreds of them across the earth as it was the only way to survive against the wild storms and the few vicious animals left alive who survived by preying on the dead and the living, somehow not contracting any of the deadly viruses, or at least not suffering from them.

The Iblers had an old book in an old language that only one person could read. She taught others. In it they read of a thing called prayer, talking to God the creator of the universe. They practised it three times each day, twice alone at waking and sleeping, and once in the noon light gathered together. Slowly this practise changed the people, almost imperceptibly. Their transformation was slow and steady so that years later they were a content, hardworking, and thriving community, with children everywhere, with struggles galore, conflict still, but always great effort to sustain hope through love and grace. The book’s torn cover identified it as an IBLE.

Now in the year 5402 we give thanks for the Iblers and their rediscovery of the contraption called prayer, for with it we sustain hope, and love, and grace, and …

life itself

morning

noon

and

night.

Editor’s Note: Maybe I got the dates all wrong; the records are quite smudged and the air is smokey more often than not leaving a permanent haze in my eyesight, yet it is clear that contraption prayer is powerful and to be used daily, with thanks.

Resistance

Is Futile (but not stopped)

Saturday, April 15, 2023

We May Ignore The Signs,

And Head Straight for the Moon,

But The Road Turns.

God Planned for That, Too

…

And Picks Up The Pieces.

Job 9:4

He is wise in heart, and mighty in strength; who has resisted him, and succeeded?

Romans 9:20

But who indeed are you, a human being, to argue with God? Will what is moulded say to the one who moulds it, ‘Why have you made me like this?’

Words of Grace For Today

Why would we argue with God?

Well, let me count the reasons! For there is so much that does not proceed in harmony among creatures and within all of creation.

The harmonies at times are wondrous to behold, but they are rare, or so they seem.

So why would we not protest to God and ask for an explanation!

In fact, to whom else would we bring such protestations and inquiries?

But resisting God, now that is another matter, and even more common than bringing protests to God to vent our frustrations with how creation works and does not work.

Resisting God is to take all that God has created and to deny that God ought to be given thanks for it all. It is to attempt to strike out on one’s own into … well where we think we are headed away from God is always a delusion, and we end up creating chaos in God’s good creation.

Resisting God is to refuse to accept the gifts God so freely and generously bestows on us.

Resisting God is futile, except God does let us turn away. God remains though, inviting us to return to accept all God’s good gifts … and to share them with others, so that there is harmony in creation, if only in small pockets for short spurts of time.

When the end of the day comes, will we recognize God’s gifts given this day and the end of the day that God gives to us as a precious gift? Or will we remain lost in the chaos we help to create, that warps our visions of God’s goodness, mercy, and compassion for us all?

Did You Find

Your Way To A New Day?

Friday, April 14, 2023

Late to the Day’s Beginning,

As the Light is Already Bright and White,

But Still A Good Beginning.

Jeremiah 23:5

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.

Hebrews 2:14-15

Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.

Words of Grace For Today

The dream of justice for the people, justice based on truth and righteousness, is as old as the hills.

And in these days it surely has not been accomplished, as tyrants and despots rule in many lands across the earth, and even in democracies, which give the appearance of some sort of justice, special interests (and international corporations with profits greater than many governments) corrupt the processes that are designed to be (or at least look to be) just.

Money gets its way, so to speak, and everyone suffers.

That hope for a just government is not what Jesus came to provide, as much as we hope that some day it yet will be accomplished.

Jesus came to free us from fear of death. That fear is what lies underneath almost all injustices, but to be free we have to allow God to work that freedom for us and in us. It is not something we simply choose, or can accomplish on our own. It is a gift. It is only a gift.

What we get to do with that gift is find the beginning of each day and the end of each day as God intends us to find them: free from fear of death, free from fear of guilt, and free from fear of God’s judgment (since God works with mercy for us.)

Did you find the beginning of this day?

Living

By Another

Thursday, April 13, 2023

Don’t Go Bananas.

Go YoYo

Back Into

God’s Gracious Hand.

Nehemiah 9:31

Nevertheless, in your great mercies you did not make an end of them or forsake them, for you are a gracious and merciful God.

John 14:19

In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.

Words of Grace For Today

There are so many of us people on earth that it is a wonder that it does not just wobble out of round and tumble into the sun, ending all the injustice and evil and destruction and lies with which we weight our ways.

But God, as in times too many to count in the past, does not extinguish us, end us, or forsake us, though creation might be much better off without us!

So why?

Why does God tolerate all the evil we generate each day, weighting down the timeline around the earth so that it reaches the sun with enough force to wobble it out of it’s orbit in the Milky Way. (Maybe that’s why the Milky Way is wobbling to the path of Andromeda Galaxy!?)

We seem to be dead-set on creating more and more wobble with our days, wobbling everything back into the chaos of pre-creation so fast it’s hard to tell what was that is now no more.

Thankfully God sent Jesus to model for us how to live, without all the wobble … and since we find that impossible to mimic, Jesus also sets us free from the guilt of our wobbles.

We get to live again, like a yo yo brought back from spinning on the end of the string, back into the hand of God. We live, active and capable of love, compassion and mercy, not because we are so good, but because Jesus gives us life (life lived as he lived it … inside the realm of God’s good earth.)

Sleeper beepers, what are we going to do today, as God pulls us back into the ‘game’ of life?

Creation

Melting Away

Wednesday, April 12, 2023

Spring Melt is A’coming.

Will we melt away,

or melt greed and violence away

with kindness?

Isaiah 45:12

I made the earth, and created humankind upon it; it was my hands that stretched out the heavens, and I commanded all their host.

James 1:17

Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.

Words of Grace For Today

While God made earth in six days and rested on the seventh (as the song goes), and God in that time created all life on earth including us humans, it’s taken us about 200 years to run the earth from sustainable into the ground so that the future looks bleak indeed, bleak indeed.

The only thing to do, since we cannot take on the ‘repair job’ needed by ourselves if in any way at all, is to be kind, even kinder, merciful and compassionate, so that others become that as well.

Life without kindness, mercy, and compassion is always a competition to get more, a greed race to the bottom of hell. While we can hardly engender enough kindness, mercy, and compassion to change how humanity as a whole engages in life now or in the next 200 years (if we have that much time left), we can create small pockets of kindness, mercy, and compassion with our families and friends, and if we are lucky to move about in society, we may also create a wake of kindness, mercy, and compassion wherever we go.

For that God created the earth and us humans on it.

These acts are not of our own doing. We can rise to the occasion day after day only when God works through us, spreading light into us and through us to the earth and life on it around us.

Shine … Shine this day … Shine this day with kindness, mercy, and compassion.

(Why not? It’s a whole lot more rewarding than greed’s death race!)

Walking

With

Tuesday, April 11, 2023

Walking, Running, Crawling: God is Right There With Us.

Psalms 91:9-10

Because you have made the Lord your refuge, the Most High your dwelling-place, no evil shall befall you, no scourge come near your tent.

2 Corinthians 1:5

For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ.

Words of Grace For Today

It is a very, very tempting take on the world: If we do the right things for God, like make God our refuge, then nothing bad will happen to us, like scourge in our tents and evil falling on our heads.

But God does not work that way, nor did God create to make it so. All that because – therefore agency-consequence is taken from the daily doings of providing for our survival. If you do not hunt, kill, and eat, well you will go hungry. Unless of course you’re a vegetarian at least for a while. Trouble is we take that because therefore thinking into our relationships and come up with If I do this, then you must do that! And we call that love. Which is nothing like love at all. It is coercion, plain and simple coercion that demotes the other from being a full person in order to elevate one’s self to something more. Which is pure bull and foolishness.

God protects us from evil by walking with us right into it … and back out again.

So we suffer, rarely as much as Jesus, but we suffer greatly, God with us, too. The strength we have is what God provides. And the consolation is as powerful as any love can be, for it is divine love for us poor creatures.

That’s the kind of love we can aspire to give to others on this good planet: walking with, suffering with, consoling with love so powerful it ‘moves mountains.’