Category: Grace

Fear

To Love?

Wednesday, July 26, 2023

The Whole Universe,

Determined By

God’s Judgments

OR

God’s Love?

Genesis 3:8

They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

1 John 4:18

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.

Words of Grace For Today

Love ought to preclude fear, but all I know from life is that love has taught me to fear greatly, especially that the love claimed is not really love at all, but rather sick manipulation that will kill if it can, and otherwise ruin anyone who trusts it faster than you can blink an eye.

Or Maybe:

Love ought to preclude fear, or maybe just drive out fear. The difference being love exists along with fear, but love moves fear out of the driver’s seat of one’s life and heart and mind and spirit. Fear is still there, love just negates it into being irrelevant. But all I know from life is that love has taught me to not worry, for love claimed may or may not be love, but love from God is sure and in that love I allow myself to be defined. That is the love that has taught me what love really is.

Adam and Eve hide from God for fear, for they know Good and Evil and they have disobeyed God. They have tried to reach beyond their own selves and have tried to be God, knowing Good and Evil. So they think they know Good and Evil, and in a small way they do. They have caught a glimpse of it. Same as I have caught an eyeful of love claimed that is really manipulation. What they have not yet learned is that God’s love is greater than all Good and Evil.

But they will.

And we will.

And in that we need not worry for tomorrow

for God loves us, even as we are caught in Evil and in Love.

…

God’s love defines not only us, but the universe through and through.

Sing?

Sing When

It All Is NOT Going Well?

Tuesday, July 25, 2023

Like A Camper Left To Rot In the Field, When Junk Is All We Are, Also Then … ?

Psalm 35:18

Then I will thank you in the great congregation; in the mighty throng I will praise you.

Ephesians 5:19

… as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts,

Words of Grace For Today

“Then I will thank you …” When will we give God thanks?

Do we do this when, finally, in one of those rare moments, everything seems to be in order in the universe (or at least the small part we are aware of)?

Well, those moments are worthy of giving God thanks and praise, worthy of singing among ourselves and in our hearts.

But those moments are rare, maybe coming once a week, or even once a month or once a year. For some it seems they come once in a lifetime.

What about all the other times? The real shtako times, when the universe is dumping all the rot of garbage in our laps, all over our lives, in every path we try to walk forward on until we slip and slide, collapse and can at best cry for help? What about all the other mediocre times when nothing is good and nothing is really bad, except we just don’t really have a good reason to struggle again to try to make things better, since we’ve tried so many times in the past and nothing changes? What about all the times when we are just about to celebrate a tiny step towards better and someone stomps all over the possibility like someone stomping out a troublesome ant?

Can we really sing among ourselves and to ourselves, filled with thanks and praise for God?

Nope.

Not on our own.

Not at all, Not at all.

But …

…

but by the power of the Spirit in us, given to us by God, even in the slippery, gooey times of shtako, dumped on us by the universe, we can and do give God thanks and praise

for breath

for faith

for love

for hope

that sustains us through it all.

So also today, we sing our thanks and praise to God from our hearts.

Sheepish?

Truth Makes Us Sheepish.

Monday, July 24, 2023

Can We Admit

The Dark Would Have Us,

And

That We Want To Live In The Light?

Psalm 23:3

… he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.

John 10:14

I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me,

Words of Grace For Today

There’s not much good about being compared to sheep. Oh, the lambs are cute. Getting up every 2 hours through the nights during the months of lambing season is not at all cute. Stubborn rams and ewes are not anywhere near cute. Helpless and dumb flocks are frustratingly exactly not cute.

So with the 23rd Psalm we start today and any good day with an admission that we are pretty dumb when it comes to living in God’s creation. We go on to admit that we need help and protection from the Evil One. While we are at being humble (always a good start) we can confess our sins and total dependence on God for life itself, for every breath.

Sheep-like we are then. Humble we must be.

God, though, does not see us as useless or dumb or helpless. God leads us in the right paths, not so much for our sake, but for God’s. God wants creation to work (whenever and whatever that will be) as God intends it to work.

At the centre of each of our lives is a ‘soul’, the being of being human, conscious and aware of being alive, of value, of time and future and possibility, of love, hope and faith. Too often our souls rot right out from inside us, dripping on the floor like apples gone bad for way too long, stinky, buggy goo all over our lives.

Then God restores our souls, so that we can also be aware of God’s steadfast love, forgiveness, and renewal of life … life that intends us to live to benefit others.

It’s living to benefit only ourselves that rots our souls out of us.

When we are down and out of soul, in the gutters of creation, far from where God would have us live, we may well cry to God for help.

Always God hears our cries. God knows our voices. And God rescues us, yet again, so that we can know God’s voice: Jesus calling us … calling us to come home, and sending us again to go out into the world to give God’s benefits of life to others. Not simply a sending, but a sendoing.

Good hearty soul time it is then, living for other’s benefit, especially for those who do not deserve it at all … which is who we are every time God comes to rescue us, often with the voice, heart, and hands of other people of God.

Lots of people need what God gives. How can we give some of it today? Each day?

Can we humbly accept that we need others to give it to us, as well, on behalf of God?

Special?

Special Favours

For the Righteous, Really?

Sunday, July 23, 2023

We May See the Obstacles.

God Shows Us the Light

that Gives Life Abundant to All.

Psalm 5:12

For you bless the righteous, O Lord; you cover them with favour as with a shield.

1 John 5:18

We know that those who are born of God do not sin, but the one who was born of God protects them, and the evil one does not touch them.

Words of Grace For Today

Sometimes it just ain’t so, as Scripture seems to tell us.

The righteous are not blessed with special favours. In fact there are few if any really righteous people.

And all people seem to get the same challenges and shafts, enough to send us to the grave happy to escape this mess.

Except the wealthy, powerful, and privileged seem to get away with ‘blessings’ that are really not theirs to have, stealing the necessities of life from others so that they can live in comfort and privilege they certainly do not deserve, unless evil rewards them so!

Except …

Yes, this is the first EXCEPT:

We do not make ourselves righteous. Only God can do that, and God did do that, in our baptisms, as promised through the life, teaching, healing, death and resurrection of God’s son, Jesus, the Christ.

So the righteous do get special favours, not that we’ve earned them, but that God has chosen us and chosen to favour us, even though we do not deserve anything but death.

As for the evil one touching us … well, we remain sinners and therein the evil one gets us each day, also.

So we live blessed and captured by the evil one, both at the same time, all the time, fully so both.

No wonder life never seems simple, except

except when God has us see clearly, God’s grace, God’s love, God’s mercy, and God’s will for us … to share all the blessings we have with others.

Sharing all we have with others is the foremost special favour God shows us.

Simple.

Simply Wonderful.

Simply Beautiful.

On That Day

But Not This Day?

Saturday, July 22, 2023

Amid the Smoke and Fog, Beyond the Weeds One Sees Two Loons,

and

By Faith

One Can Trust That Their Chick Is With Them,

Safe,

Growing,

Beautiful.

Isaiah 25:9

It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.

Hebrews 11:1

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

Words of Grace For Today

Waiting.

Waiting for.

Waiting for something important, or something scheduled, or something freeing.

Waiting is something we all do, if not by sitting still, breathing slowly, anticipating but not moving, then by moving to something else that will take us time, but in the back of our mind we wait for ….

What is it?

The next pay-cheque, so we can pay our bills, or buy something so that something that has broken can be fixed or replaced, or

The crops to grow, so they can be harvested, or

Other people to complete their work, so that we can start or resume ours, or

The neighbour’s music to stop, so that we can get back to sleep, or

The tyranny (by whomever of whatever kind among the so many different kinds that are worked against people) will end, or

The impossible: that real guilt will go away, or grief will turn to joy, or loss into gain, or that we will see again or hear again or move again, or that we will love again, or that we can forgive again, or that we can breathe again, or that we can remember again, or dream again, or sleep at all again, or

That the devil (attacking us in so many ways, also through our enemies who would do us in) will leave us and we will be free to live, laugh, and love, again.

And

That God will save us.

For that day we wait.

Wait.

Wait,

but not so patiently sometimes, many times.

Only faith interrupts our waiting; for by faith we know not only that God will save us, but that God has saved us already,

and we can breathe, and live, and laugh, and love

also this day.

Beautiful.

Sometimes.

Sometimes God!

Sometimes God Simply Astounds Us.

Friday, July 21, 2023

The World’s Wonders Are Visible In Just A Drop

…

Of Love.

Second Chronicles 5:13-14

… it was the duty of the trumpeters and singers to make themselves heard in unison in praise and thanksgiving to the Lord, and when the song was raised, with trumpets and cymbals and other musical instruments, in praise to the Lord, ‘For he is good, for his steadfast love endures for ever’, the house, the house of the Lord, was filled with a cloud, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house of God.

Revelation 21:2-23

And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb.

Words of Grace For Today

The dull-drums of ho-hum life are never more persistent then when problems overwhelm us and we see no progress towards improvement. We have no hope, so we struggle to make ourselves get out of bed. We struggle to get on with any task at all. Getting to work is necessary but we barely make it. Getting home is an insurmountable chore, day after day. Especially if we have no home! Finding a reason to sleep is beyond us.

Not every life is this way. Not every day is this way for most of us.

And then God

Then God shows up in awesome splendour!

Then God shows up in awesome splendour and astounds us!

The trumpets and cymbals may play, but God out plays them all, with stars dancing, winds singing, and creatures humming along.

And the light show prickles our skins and pierces our hearts with colours we’d forgotten if ever we’d seen them.

Just a bit

of God

dancing

for us

to break the dull-drums

off of us

and get us back to thankful living.

Perfect oR

Perfectly Terrible?

Thursday, July 20, 2023

(top is earlier efforts, bottom later)

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.

Remember Us??

God Never Forgot!

Wednesday, July 19, 2023

Even on the Coldest, Toughest Winter Days,

God Remembers Us!

(See the Light.)

Do We God?

Psalm 74:2

Remember your congregation, which you acquired long ago, which you redeemed to be the tribe of your heritage. Remember Mount Zion, where you came to dwell.

Matthew 18:20

Jesus said, For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.

Words of Grace For Today

We often pray to God to do something for us, to remember us, when things are ‘going straight to hell in a hand basket’ and we find ourselves ‘up a creek without a paddle.’

Most often there are things we ought to be doing to help our own situation and the situation of the other 8 billion people on earth, or a good number of them that we can make a difference for.

Instead we do little to nothing and pray. Not that prayer is a bad thing; rather it is a quite good thing indeed! But prayer without action is just laziness of heart, mind, and hand.

Praying to God when we feel abandoned is exceptionally good. Praying that God remember us misses the point all together. God never forgets us. We forget God. I suppose it’s terrifying to realize that in the worst situations we get ourselves into (or put others in or others put us in) God certainly is remembering us, and letting all that is bad happen to us, to smarten us up, or to (and I think this is the best explanation) allow us freewill: free to choose to love God, Creation and all Creatures; AND free to not love God, Creation and all Creatures, especially those 2 legged humans that seem so hard to deal with … and then suffer the consequences of our choosing to not-love what God has given us.

It’s easier to fool ourselves into thinking that God has abandoned us.

But God has not. God is here all the time, remembering us and all other people always.

God always offers us mercy, steadfast love, and hope.

So let’s hope we come up with some good ideas on how to FIX the MESS before the earth eliminates us as the fix.

A small start to another day, eh?

It’s BROKEN!

Got Any Ideas for the Fix?

Tuesday, July 18, 2023

Long Ago Our Fore-bearers’ Species

Crawled Out of the Soup of Water and Breathed

… Breathed the Air God Gave Them,

Gives Us,

Unless We Burn the World Down.

Psalm 150:2

Praise him for his mighty deeds; praise him according to his surpassing greatness!

Romans 1:20

Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse ….

Words of Grace For Today

We’ve taxed the whole earth to support us greedy 8 billion people, and in many and various ways the earth is fighting back to reduce us back to …

back to whatever it takes.

While climate change fills the air with smoke from wildfires, many times more fires and acres burned than ever before in a year, and while we find it hard to breathe,

Covid came and we wrestled it to the mat but it’s not pinned and gone yet and never will be, they tell us,

the economy went into turmoil, because we stayed home, money stopped changing hands as fast, government subsidies helped many, and then with the lockdowns ended, money changed hands at a rate to make up for the lockdown-slowdowns and inflation climbed like a rocket (but not like the 80’s of 20% and more, just 8%) so the central banks increased interest rates to slow things down.

Now the pain of increased interest rates bites hard and many face more than difficulties, even bankruptcies, and many ask what are we doing????!!!!

Other than the central banks increasing interest rates, which will put more people out of their homes, and rents have skyrocketed so renters are not immune, what have we done?

Some experts say there is much we could do.

The best line I’ve heard quotes the Simpson show: “We’ve done nothing and we are out of ideas.”

But, like the visible evidence of God’s works all around us, there is plenty of evidence there are things, bad things, done, and there are things, good things, to be done.

It starts remembering our place: we are sinful creatures of our Creator God. So confession and repentance start every day (and every thing). Then in thanks for all that is, and for all that we have and are, and for all that will be: we can give God thanks and praise.

I’m not sure if that gives a good start to what can be done to counter inflation with more intelligent efforts than leaving it all up to the central banks and interest rates increases, but

It is always a good start …

a good start to this day,

a good start to every day,

a good start to every thing.

…

It’s a good start also because whatever ideas we then come up with will be ideas to deal with reality: we are sinful creatures and God is our Creator, and Creator of all that is. And God don’t make no junk.

Just A Bit

Probably Not More

To Start

Monday, July 17, 2023

It Will Never Be Big,

But It Will Be a Tiny, Red, Beautiful, and Tasty Strawberry.

What Will We Be?

Hosea 8:12

Though I write for him the multitude of my instructions, they are regarded as a strange thing.

Matthew 7:24

Jesus said: Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock.

Words of Grace For Today

If only one had the words

the words to make it right

the words to make what is broken heal

the words to bring life back where it is no more.

…

Without these words

one is lost.

…

Then Jesus speaks

and we find our way home

at last

as the colour returns to earth

and light shines in our darkness

for our home is built on the rock

of our salvation

and

just a bit

we smile at the universe.