Category: Breathe

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.

What

Or Who

Have We Lost?

Sunday, July 16, 2023

Is This The Path To Laughing, Loving, and Living?

How Can We Know?

Isaiah 25:8

… he will swallow up death for ever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken.

John 16:20

Jesus said: Very truly, I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will have pain, but your pain will turn into joy.

Words of Grace For Today

In the movie Collateral Beauty, the father cannot face the pain of having lost his daughter, so he goes into withdrawal from life, a living death.

He cannot say anything about his daughter, not even her name, the disease that killed her or her age at her death. Nothing. For anything is already too much to bear.

Death is that thing that robs us of …

of everything,

everything that holds life together.

It is, therefore, quite the promise that God will swallow up death forever, that our tears of grief will be wiped away, and our pain will be turned into joy.

When death has taken life and breathing itself right out of us, these are promises we cannot trust, not at all, not at all.

And then God does something, not centre stage,

but off in the wings,

off some place we have to look to see

or we will miss it.

That’s the collateral beauty that God sends our way, not to rob us of our grief and the healing that can come, and the strength from healing,

but rather to start us on our healing path,

a path that takes

forever.

And then

finally

we are home

and

we

get

to

see

beauty

and

breathe in

joy.

In the end the father comes to see his daughter’s face dancing with him and say his daughter’s name, Olivia, GBM (a rare form of cancer) and that she was six.

Those things are not life, but facing death’s reality, …

well that allows us to begin to live ever so slightly

so

that

love can reach our hearts again,

and we can laugh

once more.

If ever so little

and softly.

Seeing

The Light

Friday, July 14, 2023

Looking To The Stars …

Deuteronomy 14:2

For you are a people holy to the Lord your God; it is you the Lord has chosen out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession.

1 Thessalonians 5:5

… for you are all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness.

Words of Grace For Today

The James Webb Space Telescope looks into the universe, back in time, displaying light of many kinds captured, processed, and presented to us in our visible spectrum of light and colour, in our time.

It’s images have changed our view of the universe around us, all around us, and in that we have come to know ourselves differently.

Yet, we are the same.

We are the same God chosen, blessed people.

We are the same God chosen, people of the Light and Colour.

(See https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/james-webb-telescope-marks-1-year-of-peering-into-far-corners-of-the-universe-1.6904609 for details of each photo, including credits, a series that summarizes the first year’s photos from the JWST.)

You Call THIS

Being Saved?!

Thursday, July 13, 2023

The Path Ahead May Not Seem Inviting,

But God Walks With Us

So Nothing

Can Take God’s Blessings

From Us.

Genesis 37:22

Reuben said to his bothers, ‘Shed no blood; throw him (Joseph) into this pit here in the wilderness, but lay no hand on him’—that Reuben might rescue Joseph out of their hand and restore him to his father.

1 Thessalonians 5:15

See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all.

Words of Grace For Today

Bad things happen.

Bad things happen every day.

Bad thing happen every day to all kinds of people.

Bad things happen every day to all kinds of people who do not deserve any of it.

Bad things happen every day to all kinds of people who do not deserve any of it, not at all, not at all.

God rarely saves us from the trials of life, even the bad things that happen to us that we do not deserve, not at all, not at all.

God often saves us from the trials of life (even the bad things that happen to us that we do not deserve, not at all, not at all) just not in the ways we expect.

God often saves us from the trials of life and sends us down paths that we will have a hard time recognizing as ‘paths of being saved’.

Joseph’s brothers gang up on him. He’s done enough arrogant things, belittling them, gaining (undeservedly) their father’s favour (at the apparent cost to his brothers), and living an easier life than his older brothers … Joseph has done enough to earn his brothers’ ire. They are about to kill him.

Why not? The world is rough and violent, with many vicious animals that could easily have killed their runt brother. They can get away with it.

But Reuben is not quite on board with the killing or the ganging up. He counsels throwing Joseph into a pit and leaving him to die. That way Reuben can return, save him, his brothers will not know, and all will be well.

Then along comes a caravan of traders on camels, and Joseph is sold into slavery.

God saves Joseph.

Not quite the saving we would imagine, though, this slavery bit.

The rest of the story unfolds. We know it as history.

How many times does God save us, but looking into our futures we do not see it as saving at all!

Yet, God’s story unfolds. We are the characters.

Can we learn to be honest, faithful, and wise slaves to Christ?

All in a day, in the life of God’s saints, the people God saves,

Again and again and again.

Two Things

To Start With

Monday, July 10, 2023

You Don’t Have To Be A Jedi

To Know

The Day Starts And Ends

With

Two Things.

Psalm 95:6

O come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!

1 Timothy 1:17

To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honour and glory for ever and ever. Amen.

Words of Grace For Today

Two things to get straight at the beginning of …

well at the beginning of every day

and the beginning of anything:

First thing is that God is due worship and praise. (I’m not sure about ‘on bended knee’ now that mine are old and do not like to be bent, yet alone knelt on. Kneepads help, but just a bit. – I trust that God knows about that, too.)

Second thing is that we are miserable sinners, or actually we are tremendously good at sinning, and telling ourselves that we have not sinned, not terribly anyway. So confessing our sins puts us right with our reality.

God is Great; we are great at being terrible.

Humble pie and songs of thanks: makes a blessed start … to anything.

Coming Up Short

Again!

Thursday, July 6, 2023

The Light!

Look,

See,

‘Find’ Jesus,

Standing Beside Us,

The Whole Time!

Psalm 25:1-2

Of David. To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul. O my God, in you I trust; do not let me be put to shame; do not let my enemies exult over me.

Luke 19:3

Zacchaeus was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature.

Words of Grace For Today

With all of our expectations of others, of how we should be able to progress through a day, a week, a year, a life, it is too common that we come up short. Of course we come up short when others measure us or we measure ourselves compared to others. (That’s how we pretend that we are better than others, others who are ‘shorter’ at life than us.) The real challenge is when we come up short according to our own measure.

That can bring on our old friend the blues very quickly, and that trusty friend can settle in for an extended stay, even sleeping on our bed because we cannot sleep well at all.

We all try to compensate, somehow or another. Some pretend to be real intelligent, some very wealthy, some very privileged, some very powerful, some from real old blood –

which reminds me of the guy who showed up to camp. Everything he tried turned out poorly. He couldn’t get a place to rent. Landlords kept renting out any room he showed interest in before he could come up with the first months’ rent. He had a truck. On the truck he had a camper, given to him, laden with black mould that he started to rip apart to get at the mould and get rid of it. Before he got very far the police came and told him he was camping illegally and he had to move somewhere else. But, and this came in a conversation after he told me of all his failings, he asked me how long I had lived here. I said five years, meaning this camp place. He proudly said he was bred and born in Cold Lake.

It didn’t matter that we were standing 25 kilometres from Cold Lake, but this he had done better at than me. That made him worth something! I was a ‘newbie’ and he belonged here … until the police told him to move. –

It really doesn’t matter how we try to pretend to be better at life and in life than we really are, making such claims always makes us look just a tad foolish (well under it all we are through and through fools.)

Like David we may fear being put to shame by our enemies, but like David we often put ourselves in shame faster and more thoroughly than any enemy could. So we cry with David, O my God, in you I trust; do not let me be put to shame; do not let my enemies exult over me …

to which we add: save us, most of all, from ourselves.

Like Zacchaeus we may have tried to gather as much money and power as we can (at other’s expense) but we know there is more to life than these empty things we fill our lives with.

We want to see Jesus, the healer, the teacher, the one they say is the Son of God.

We don’t have to climb any trees.

Jesus walks here.

At least Jesus walks here with me wherever I go, even when it’s into a hell of a mess. And Jesus walks with me, guiding me and sometimes carrying me out the other side back into the light.

We may come up short, but we are never too short to see Jesus walking with us. Sometimes we need a saint or two or thousands to show us, but there Jesus is, pulling us out of our self made shame again, back into life where we can breathe and laugh and sing and dance … and share God’s blessings with others. Our only real ‘claim to fame’ is that we were born and bred here, we belong here …

with Jesus in God’s Kingdom. (But that’s not our doing. God chooses that for us!)

Razing

Hell-Raisers?

Friday, June 30, 2023

Solitude,

Morning Fishing,

Until the Hell-Raising SkiDoos

Blow It To Bits

Jeremiah 20:11

But the Lord is with me like a dread warrior; therefore my persecutors will stumble, and they will not prevail. They will be greatly shamed, for they will not succeed. Their eternal dishonour will never be forgotten.

Luke 17:5

The apostles said to the Lord, ‘Increase our faith!’

Words of Grace For Today

As a departing word a couple I’d just met wished me health and well-being. I thanked them wholeheartedly. They were kind people. There’s not enough of that kind of folk.

I know too many people who would rather be wished wealth and hell-being, and more and more of it, since they orient their lives towards all the wealth they can get, legally or illegally or blatantly criminally. They want the wealth so that they can continue to raise as much hell as possible, taking all the pleasure from every day that they can steal, usually from others, but also from their own health and well-being.

Being anywhere near those kind of people is dangerous. Even if they do not target you, you are going to fall victim for their greedy progress through life, leaving a ‘scorched earth’ behind them, all too often with lots of people getting burned. These kind of people are persecutors of so many people, many more unintended victims of the wide swatch of destruction they leave in their wake.

We can understand then when Jeremiah celebrates that God will put those who persecute him to shame, letting them stumble and fall into dishonour. Life would be so much better, we could easily think, if God would take all those hell-being-ers and give them a quick exit of shame out of this world.

Yet God doesn’t do this for us. Instead God calls us to forgive these destroyers of life. God wants to be able to rejoice at their repentance. Even when we cannot imagine they even see their sins yet alone consider repenting, God continues to give them breath and hopes. When God hopes, surprising things happen.

But for us to tolerate these hell-being-ers and suffer their destruction that seems to know no bounds?! How can we do this.

Once again we cry with the disciples: “LORD, INCREASE OUR FAITH!”

The End

To Everything Will Come

Sunday, June 25, 2023

Don’t Be Foolishly Fooled;

Even the Sun

and It’s Setting

Will Come to an End.

Habakkuk 2:3

For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay.

1 Peter 4:7-8

The end of all things is near; therefore be serious and discipline yourselves for the sake of your prayers. Above all, maintain constant love for one another, for love covers a multitude of sins.

Words of Grace For Today

Knowing that ‘this too will pass’, can often be a comforting bit of wisdom to remember.

This grief

– after the death of a loved one,

– after a loss of a relationship,

– after the loss of health and abilities,

– after the loss of dreams and hope itself,

(all kinds of grief) will also pass.

The excitement of celebrations, tainted

– by family and/or friends who are not at all kind,

– the reminder of loved ones not present,

– the burdens, past and future, such celebration puts on daily life and/or daily survival,

– one’s own inability to actually eat or dance or talk with others,

(all kinds of celebrations, tainted or not) will also pass.

This life, too often aptly described as hard, brutish, and short, will also pass.

Knowing that everything will pass, eventually, even breath itself, helps keep us focused on what really matters,

… well sometimes it does.

Sometimes we just focus on trying to ‘beat’ time and ‘cheat’ death and ‘get more out of life’.

When we realize that God walks with us through everything that will pass then it is easier (as the Holy Spirit guides and enables us) to see how precious it all is,

even that person who is not at all kind,

even the grief from a loss, that gives witness to how precious who/what was lost really was,

even the celebration that we cannot fully participate in, is precious, and worth participating in as we can.

Each day, each hour, each minute there are so many things that are precious, and

if / when we realize this,

we can take the good and the bad

as precious gifts from God

which gives our hearts, minds and strength the most precious things of all, faith, hope and love:

faith that God created us and walks with us,

hope that the future will be precious as well as each minute now is,

and love for God, God’s people, and all of God’s creatures and creation.

And that can make for some interesting, challenging and rewarding time,

like today.

Awe

An Awesome Thing

Friday, June 23, 2023

Like Sunshine Reflected

Precious, Golden

Off The Ice-glazed Snow,

So God’s Great Works

Reflect Off Our Hearts and Minds

To All Around Us.

Exodus 34:10

He said: I hereby make a covenant. Before all your people I will perform marvels, such as have not been performed in all the earth or in any nation; and all the people among whom you live shall see the work of the Lord; for it is an awesome thing that I will do with you.

Matthew 4:23

Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.

Words of Grace For Today

There is much in life that can surprise us, but nothing blows us away like the works that God does among us.

Take …

Well take any old day, of any random person, such as yourself.

Look closely.

Perhaps it is filled with unpleasant or downright terrible things.

Look past all that.

Look at how, in spite of it all, you still breathe.

With breath in and out, you can smile.

And with a smile in the face of all the terribleness of any old day of any random person like one’s self,

one can know that God has worked yet another awesome thing.

Awe is the reality of seeing God at work,

Smiling with gentle steadfast love for us, for us all.

Bus u. Bet Tag

Begging Day

Monday, June 12, 2023

With the Heat Above 30⁰ Now For Days

Remembering -38⁰ Doesn’t Help.

Begging God for Deliverance Does.

(It motivates us to chill. A little heat is nothing compared to the heat, smoke, drought, floods, storms, and disasters of all kinds, which others suffer already, and we may well suffer soon enough.)

Psalm 25:18

Consider my affliction and my trouble, and forgive all my sins.

Luke 15:7

Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance.

Words of Grace For Today

Hah!

I’d like to meet even one of those 99 people who do not need repentance!

…

Of course I’d like more to see one of those 99 in the mirror each morning, noon, and night.

But it just ain’t so for me.

Nor for any other living human being, or for any now dead, when they were still alive (since after we die, it’s too late for repentance.)

What is wonderful is that there is great joy in heaven when we do repent.

So today, call it Buss und Bet Tag, (day of repentance and prayer)

In our prayers and repentance we can beg God for mercy, for Christ promises us God will be gracious with us

again

and again

and again

always.