Month: March 2023

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.