These 40

Years

Thursday, March 9, 2023

Hardly Wilderness,

Always Barren Living,

When We Try To Abandon God

Deuteronomy 2:7

Surely the Lord your God has blessed you in all your undertakings; he knows your going through this great wilderness. These forty years the Lord your God has been with you; you have lacked nothing.’

Luke 22:35

He said to them, ‘When I sent you out without a purse, bag, or sandals, did you lack anything?’ They said, ‘No, not a thing.’

Words of Grace For Today

If we live life in order to have more money and a full purse,

If we live life in order to have the best bag of everything,

If we live life in order to have the best footwear,

… If we live life in order to have things, power, status, …

Then …

Well then we will always not have enough and we will lack for what we think we need.

This is the way of the world, and it brings more destruction, disease, and destorying to others and to oneself, always more, but not goodness, always evil running others and oneself closer and closer to meaningless and death. If you want an eye-full of that watch Succession, the HBO series, or simply open your eyes to see how so many people live in the world around us.

This is not a fun way to live, no matter if people party hard and seem to be enjoying themselves. In truth this kind of living can only be pursued if one hides from one’s self, one’s real self.

God created us not to take from the world and claim it all to be ours. God created us to receive enough and share everything we have with others.

Jesus sends the disciples out with everything they need: kind hearts and a message of God’s love for all people! They lack for nothing.

God leads Moses who leads the people into the freedom of the wilderness, out of slavery, and though they barely have enough to survive, and it’s touch and go more than a few times, they always have enough … as long as they remember that God has led them and accompanied them all their years, even their ‘40’ (which is a symbol for ‘lots and lots – more than enough to count’).

Today we live in circumstances that outwardly do not appear to be wilderness: there are roads, vehicles, cities, barns and houses in farm yards, and industrial sites of many, many kinds. We call it civilization, but no matter what it looks like from the outside, if we do not have hearts ready to share God’s Word of Grace, all this is mere cover and running, running hard in the barbaric wilderness of humans bent on destroying, making ill, and destorying one another.

What will our day be like today, if not another blessed journey with God walking with us? Breathe. Give Thanks. We lack for nothing.

Word

To the Wise and the Perverse

Wednesday, March 8, 2023

Living Simple,

Off-the-grid, The Best Choice Of What’s Left,

Makes Choices Clearer,

Not Easier or More Pure.

Only God’s Presence Saves Us.

Jeremiah 22:29

O land, land, land, hear the word of the Lord!

Matthew 10:27

What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.

Words of Grace For Today

Oh that we might all see, hear, and follow God’s Word.

Recommended by a CBC economics writer I’ve watched 3 seasons of the HBO series “Succession”. It’s horrible. Or more frightening it’s an honest portrayal of capitalism today, in all it’s corruption, denigrations, and perversions at the highest and greediest levels. I would not recommend anyone suffer watching it.

There are better things to occupy one’s time and mind on.

Like Yellowstone, which portrayed an abusive, violent, and corrupt life of cattle ranching and all around it in Montana, Succession uses the wealthiest, selfish, greediest levels of corporate owners as the setting to display murder, perverse sex, alcohol and drug use and addition, and abuse of all kinds. Even the ‘best’ of characters, of course ‘pure’ mid-westerners from Minnesota, play out unbelievable abuse against other people, to no one’s benefit.

At first one can pretend anyway that these things do not really happen. Then the onslaught of repetition wears down one’s defences and one capitulates: this is how people actually live. There is some basis in reality that is used to portray these pathetic ‘hero’ characters, events, and disasters of humanity.

One must think: what has the world come to, anyway?!!

Which makes one remember the same selfishness, greed, and perversions reported about other ‘empires’, like Rome and even King David.

What is it about humans that when we are blessed with privilege, means, and opportunity we use it to destroy other people and any goodness that might be in us?

Remembering this about other times and most about our own, can we hear more clearly the petition: O land, land, land, hear the word of the Lord!

God’s Word stands in stark contrast: Jesus comes as God most privileged, and sets that all aside to live as one of us, one who sacrifices everything of himself to pay for our unending sins, so that we might be free of them and live as God’s own children. So that we might be blessed to be blessings to others.

Into the pathetic, perverse, and violent state of our dark world God’s Word comes to us. God sends us out to share that Word with all people: What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.

Today, which will we be and do? Our own small versions of selfishness, greed and perversion that is everywhere and in every time so rampant? Or the life-renewing proclaimers of God’s Word of Grace for all?

Wishes

And Curses

Tuesday, March 7, 2023

No Matter

How We Whitewash Our View,

God Remains Our Only Hope.

First Kings 8:57

The Lord our God be with us, as he was with our ancestors; may he not leave us or abandon us,

2 Thessalonians 3:5

May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ.

Words of Grace For Today

“Good Luck,” we say.

To curse another person the Chinese supposedly will say, “May you live in interesting times.”

“Break a Leg,” we say to a person heading out into a performance, superstitiously saying we wish them ill, so that we do not curse their performance with words wishing them well. Now ain’t that more than a little crazy, since everyone knows we are actually wishing them well?

Trying to find our way in the world we have come up with many ‘interesting’ ways of taking steps forward with our words.

God made a step forward with a Word: and creation came into being.

Another Word and God’s Son is born to live as a human among us.

Another Word and we are sent out into the rough and tumble world to share God’s blessings with all people.

Today the excerpts from scripture are words that move us forward into our day: The Lord our God be with us, as he was with our ancestors. Words of blessing for ourselves, and for others: May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ.

These words do not pretend that our time in the world will be anything but ‘interesting’, by which we mean filled with rough and tough challenges that can do us in faster than we can take a breath.

These words assume that the Devil is at play always, and always we need God’s presence and protection to make it through each day, each challenge, each dead-end.

These words are confessions that on our own we cannot make it through even the simplest challenges, and that God has through all time accompanied God’s people, our ancestors, and blessed us to be blessings to other people.

So this is a new day, and the same old, same old is true. Devil always, God everywhere, blessings flowing.

Ahhhh, see, hear and feel the Spirit? Breathe deeply, and then dig in.

What Are We Doing

To God?

Monday, March 6, 2023

Not the Poorest,

Still With Candles For Light,

We Celebrate Being Alive

Zechariah 2:12

The Lord will inherit Judah as his portion in the holy land, and will again choose Jerusalem.

Matthew 25:40

And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”

Words of Grace For Today

As we do to the least of these, you have done it to me!

So God gives notice that God accompanies even the poorest, most ignored, the most denigrated of the people on earth.

And what we do to them, we do to God.

Offer them mercy, kindness, love, and one’s ear, and so it is that we will hear God.

Offer them condemnation, cruelty, hatred, and one’s cold shoulder, and so it is that we turn a cold shoulder to God.

We might hope that God would respond in kind to all those who exercise evil against the poor, and us among them.

Doch, God is merciful and loving towards all people, even the most evil, waiting and hoping they will know God’s presence, grace, and judgment to be everything that makes life worth living.

What will you evil people do this day to God and God’s poor people? Will we be among the evil ones?

Or will we celebrate God’s presence with kindness and mercy towards all people?

Small

Words, Mighty Results

Sunday, March 5, 2023

With A Word God Creates!

With Great Effort and Big Machines (and cruel words)

We Destroy and Destory,

Doch God Saves All Creation

and Us In It

With A Word.

Psalms 33:9

For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm.

Matthew 8:8

The centurion answered, ‘Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; but only speak the word, and my servant will be healed.

Words of Grace For Today

It’s cold again this morning. Not the coldest, but enough that one needs take care before one goes outside, care to dress warm enough, not to leave any skin exposed, even a piece of one’s face that cannot be warmed quickly.

When crises rise up in our path, blocking our way forward, it is perhaps not so heart wrenching as to watch one’s daughter fall ill and no doctor’s efforts can save her. It may be worse, as war or earthquake or rising oceans, or other people rip us out of our lives and leave us with nothing more than the clothes on our bodies, if that.

Baptized in water and word, born of the Spirit from above, we can find our way to God’s promises, for when God speaks it is so.

So God created the world.

So Jesus cures us of our every ill.

So it is.

But when we cannot find our way back to God’s promises, and we flounder in waters too deep, cold, and wild for us to survive in, then what?

Then God accompanies us into the deep, cold, and wild, and finds us with a Word holy and simple: I love you!

And that is more than anything else in all the universe.

For no matter what happens to us, God welcomes us home … with a Word.

Wake Up!

See The Poor

Saturday, March 4, 2023

How Wide Is Your Sky That You Wake To?

What Joy Do You Know

and Share?

Psalms 12:7

You, O Lord, will protect us; you will guard us from this generation for ever.

John 6:63

It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.

Words of Grace For Today

The world is in trouble. Grave trouble. Dark trouble.

We are all going to die.

That’s just how it is.

Knowing that God walks with us and protects us gives us the spirit to move into all that trouble, bringing blessings, peace, and joy.

Harmon wakes cold in the winter and too warm in the summer. His insulated tarp tent is a collection of 2 years of collecting other people’s junk. His greatest boon was when a foreman at a construction site let him pick through the scraps before it was shovelled into the dumpster for disposal. He landed 5 insulated tarps in rough shape, and he came back later to get the few metal 2×4’s and five 2×6’s the foreman let him put to the side because he could barely carry the tarps. Even then he couldn’t manage the 2×6’s so the foreman tossed it all in the back of his pickup truck and had a young worker deliver it and Harmon back to his campsite in the river valley or as near as they could drive. The young man helped carry it all in, he said under orders from the foreman.

It was a tough life, Harmon knew. But it was so much better than living with his uncle up north. There he woke to getting hit before breakfast for he never knew what. His uncle served the same for lunch, supper, and before bedtime. It was better than what his friends managed in the tent city downtown, where the only thing between them and the elements and thieves was a thin piece of tent and their sleeping bags. Though they had ready access to water, showers, supplies and clothes. Twice a week Harmon hiked up the river a mile or so and then across and up into downtown for a shower and supplies, and food, sometimes even a hot meal. Otherwise he was content to collect scrap wood for a fire, read books he got from a helpful woman at the library (they were going to be tossed out anyway), write and draw. It wasn’t much, but along with helping serve meals on Sundays at ‘his’ church, he kept his spirits up.

We are all going to die. That’s 100% death rate for us. But before then there is life. Best to keep it in perspective.

Paul writes that the body is nothing, but Harmon knew that you needed to care for the body or the mind and soul had no chance at all. And you needed to care for your mind and soul or your body had no chance at all either.

What do you wake to each morning? How many running feet of floor or square feet of space is yours to roam? How many hours does it take to provide all that for yourself? Do you provide for others? Do you find time to volunteer? Do you see, hear, know, or remember the homeless, the poor, the ones Jesus came to live among?

Be

To Me, That I May Be

Friday, March 3, 2023

God Gives Us Wide Horizons,

And Paths To Follow the Saints,

to the Light

Psalms 31:9

Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress; my eye wastes away from grief, my soul and body also.

Ephesians 1:18

so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints,

Words of Grace For Today

The greatest distress that any human can face (since it covers for so many lesser distresses as well) is to not be,

to not be seen,

to not be heard,

to not be known,

to not be remembered,

to not be loved,

to not be anything at all.

…

God promises to protect us from the evil that would make this be for us.

God sees us.

God hears us.

God knows us.

God remembers us.

God loves us.

And God makes sure we are something to God, and

that many other people

see, hear, know, remember, and love us.

And God sends us out to see, hear, know, remember, and love all people,

so not one person need cry

Lord, see me, hear me, know me, remember me, love me.

Makes for a full day every day, and a full life lived,

when we work so that all people are seen, heard, known, remembered, and …

most of all …

loved.

Trust

Because God is Faithful

Thursday, March 2, 2023

No Matter the Way Ahead,

Dark or Steep,

God Walks With Us

Genesis 28:15

Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.

1 Thessalonians 5:24

The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this.

Words of Grace For Today

As people born of this world and living in the world we are the problem. That was Lucy’s wisdom for Charlie Brown, and for us. Lucy did not have a solution.

A museum near Niagara Falls holds displays about Blondin. He was a tight-rope walker, who set up his high wire over Niagara Falls. On the day of his show a huge crowd gathered. He began by crossing over and back, carrying his balancing pole above the deadly waters. The crowd cheered loudly. Next, he set a table and chair at mid-wire, and perched there, drinking a cup of tea, with death far beneath him. Again, the crowd went wild.

After several progressively more difficult tricks, Blondin filled a wheelbarrow with water. Amazingly he piloted it over and back and not a drop spilled. He then asked the crowd, how many of you believe that I can carry a person across in this wheelbarrow? As one the crowd raised their hands crying “I do!”

“All right,” he said. “Who’s first?” … The crowd went stark quiet.

That’s the difference between belief and trust.

God sends Abram, Sarai, and us into the unknown. Do we trust God enough to go? Do we trust God enough that we are born from above? Disciplining ourselves into a spiritual life will never be enough, though.

The problem remains that we are us. Neither our self-chosen belief nor our self-built trust saves us, especially when God sends us out into the unknown.

God planned for that, too. Jesus tells us, as he did Nicodemus that God gives birth to us again, this time it is a ‘birth from above’. God solves the problem of us being us. God gives us a new origin, new honour, a new ending, and a new way to live. Actually none of it’s new. This is how God created us to be. God doesn’t want us to be different than ourselves. God wants us to be who we really are, God’s own people. Trusting God always.

We trust God because God is faithful. We trust God because God is always with us, and when God promises to bring us home, it will be so, even if we have no home here on earth.

So on with this day, this blessed day, with opportunities to be blessings to others, as God created us to be.

Just Coffee?

Or Mysteries Requiring A Seer’s Interpretation?

Wednesday, March 1, 2023

Can You Smell That?

That Oil Processing Plant?

That’s Progress, We Used to Say!

Really!

Daniel 2:47

The king said to Daniel, ‘Truly, your God is God of gods and Lord of kings and a revealer of mysteries, for you have been able to reveal this mystery!’

Acts of the Apostles 26:27-28

‘King Agrippa, do you believe the prophets? I know that you believe.’ Agrippa said to Paul, ‘Are you so quickly persuading me to become a Christian?’

Words of Grace For Today

King Agrippa had a question for Paul. Mine is not that important but I’ve asked and not even gotten to the meat of the question yet: what is it about that skunk smell everywhere, anyway? It’s not really a question or a mystery that needs a seer to explain it is it? Not like Daniel revealing the mystery of God’s power to save him from the lions, … or?

There was only one other time I had to deal with such a strong smell as that day when the skunk decided stepping into the squirrel trap would be it’s last step.

That was when I was building a house for our family of four to live in and a skunk decided to come for a visit. It had encountered a porcupine. I’m not sure what the porcupine suffered in the exchange, but this poor skunk had a snoot and chest full of quills. It was not doing well. It fell into the trench I was laying water lines, in to bring the well water from the old house up 200 yards to the new house. For hours as dusk approached this stinking thing wandered up and down the trench with the pipes already laid into it. That meant I could not shoot or attack the skunk while it was down there. I had to keep working. So while it wandered up and down that trench I’d work in the trench where it was not, getting the final things in place for the pipe including finishing a junction. So it wandered. I worked. Finally I was ready to fill the trench with the backhoe, and wonderfully it wandered out by itself. As it continued up the hill our youngest son followed it, feeling sorry for it. Finally our son came back. All was good. The trench was half filled in. And then the skunk came back following our son, and it wandered right back into the trench down to the end near the old homestead house with it’s leaky roof, mice galore, and barely any insulation which kept the old oil furnace working hard in the winter and the fans futilely spinning in the summer to keep it cool enough to live in.

I finally stoned the poor creature. Not with pot, but with two large rocks, carefully dropped so as not to damage the plastic pipes I’d so carefully laid. The pipes and the skunk got buried as I finished filling in the trench with the backhoe. A respectable burial as any for a stinking skunk. And then, on went the work on the new house.

That strong, terrible, debilitating skunk smell hung around outside our kitchen and bedroom windows in the old house and the construction site for more than a week. And for a month there remained a hint of it that we only noticed when we came back from being away in town or flying pipeline patrol, which was my income back then.

So when I opened the Starbucks coffee and more than a hint of that same smell wafted at me, it made me stop and wonder:

What is it with this skunk smell anyway?

Is it a deterrent as the skunks use it? Maybe a good warning for those smoking pot? Maybe for us all around the world who drink coffee, all those 2.5 billion cups each day!?

Or is it a stimulant, great in coffee in tiny doses, but nearly lethal in large doses like in some pot or in skunks’ defence systems?

What is it with this skunk smell anyway?

Can’t be all that good, can it?

Yet, I’m having a cup or two of that coffee this morning.

And I count it as a good start to any day, as do billions the earth over, not that that makes it right, eh?

What will we do with it otherwise anyway, the coffee and more importantly, each day that is a gift from God? That seems a bit of a mystery each morning, that gets answered by the time we fortunately lay down to sleep at night.

God Save Us

Tuesday 28 February 2023

Start with me: save me from skunks, anyway.

I can cry all I want in the woods by the lake.

God will have mercy on me anyway!

Psalms 130:1-2

A Song of Ascents. Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!

Luke 18:38-39

Then he shouted, ‘Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me! ’ Those who were in front sternly ordered him to be quiet; but he shouted even more loudly, ‘Son of David, have mercy on me!’

Words of Grace For Today

Now where was I? Oh, yes, back to that coffee and skunk smell that started all this.

When I opened that bag of Starbucks it reminded me of last summer. Well that started a few years earlier actually when they legalized marijuana. Everywhere you could smell it. At first I just thought that we’d been invaded by skunks everywhere. But no, this was not that good Texada Gold from Powell River that people had drying on their porches, that wafted sweet and poignant from more than a few houses. This was more like the skunk weed itself that grew along the Sunshine Coast Trail as it wound it’s way from the Powell River at the Townsite and up to Wildwood. It was an unwelcomed interruption in the run I made for years up that path. Almost took my breath away, and I learned to pause for a good breath before turning the corner where it grew the most, holding my breath for a good ten paces and then let my breath heave away as I walked a bit before I could run. It was that strong and unpleasant, well that’s a polite way to say it.

After a few years of that same smell around Cold Lake and out at the random camping area on Hilda Lake, where it seems people come to get drunk and or stoned more than anything else, I was a little more than peeved when that smell started to invade my camp, a half kilometre away. First it was once a week or so, then it was almost every morning. I admit I cursed the potheads for smoking so often and close to my camp.

Then I went out to check my squirrel trap one morning. They’d nested in and stole a not insignificant amount of insulation from my insulated tarps, so the squirrels had to go and that was the nicest way to help them on their way. But that morning instead of a brown-red squirrel’s fur I saw a cat, black and stripped white, not a cat!! It was a skunk caught in the trap!

Between not covering it and taking it down to the water in pants, boots and a jacket that had to hang out for months before they were usable again, and the unpleasant remainder, and the strong downwind smell off the beach where it met it’s demise, I was pretty sick of that smell.

I have to say there are things of greater importance to cry to God for mercy, but this one brought me to a special prayer as well:

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice! Son of David, have mercy on me!

That is a prayer that is good to pray everyday, about every challenge to living abundantly, graciously, and generously. After all there’s always enough to share with others, though the skunk smell ought not be a thing we share, eh? Not today?