Category: Shore

Working

The Other Way

By Peace

Friday, May 19, 2023

We Learn Best to Live By the Example of the Best of Days:

at Peace.

First Samuel 17:47

… and that all this assembly may know that the Lord does not save by sword and spear; for the battle is the Lord’s and he will give you into our hand.

Luke 10:5

Whatever house you enter, first say, “Peace to this house!”

Words of Grace For Today

When Julius had calmed the community enough to put things into action, and sent their own runners up river to survey what was what with the ‘flood surge’ coming their way, every able bodied person worked to create a berm that could hold back some water. Then they moved their livestock to the highest ground away from the river. After that was done in a few hours, they all packed everything they needed and could take with them and retreated to their hunting camp. It was the first time many of them had been there. Not everyone hunted or needed to, since most of their food they grew and produced themselves. Those new to the camp were amazed how rustic yet functional it was, though it hardly could house them all. They set about expanding it, at least on a temporary basis so there was protection for everyone, protection from the weather and from the wild animals that lived here. It was after all a hunting camp.

Someone suggested that they should hunt down the animals nearby, to make it safer for them. Wiser people explained they needed the animals to live on, even here. So they implemented a better plan where they could live in peace with the wild animals and with each other. The latter soon proved to be the more difficult plan to achieve as disagreements rose and flared between people as they started to realize how short the resources here would be.

Julius worked harder than ever in his life to treat the ill and calm the nerves of those caught in the conflicts. He was glad that years before he learned to enter every house and conversation blessing people with peace.

Oh, he thought, that more people would orient themselves so, each morning, noon, and night.

Bronze

… and Better

Saturday, May 13, 2023

Better Than Green Forests

Against Raging Wildfires,

God Provides Protection

Against All Enemies

and

All Their Weapons

Jeremiah 15:20

And I will make you to this people a fortified wall of bronze; they will fight against you, but they shall not prevail over you, for I am with you to save you and deliver you, says the Lord.

Hebrews 4:16

Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

Words of Grace For Today

Times of need abound for all of us except a few misfortunate too-rich people who never have a need at all. That’s got to be a dull and boring life, to say the least … unless they use that luxury to meet others’ needs, maybe?

It is in our times of need that we learn how desperately we need God, and perhaps we know enough to turn to God and ask for help, for mercy, and for grace that we may live.

Then, though we may seem to be a people made of clay from the feet up, God makes us like impenetrable walls. At one time that may have been solid bronze walls, but with nuclear bombs and chemical/biological weapons bronze is not enough. Still God makes us impervious to all our enemies and all their weapons they would use against us, most of all the psychological weapons that would manipulate our apprehension of reality so that we are afraid.

When God is for us, no one can destroy us, nor destory us.

This is the beginning of each new day: God walks with us and protects us. We have nothing to fear and everything to give to those in need.

Moving into this day with a small jig of joy, a graceful gift from God.

Looking

For Jesus

Monday, April 3, 2023

We Build Houses,

Even For Fishing With Jesus For People.

God Has Other Plans

For Us.

Psalms 16:8

I keep the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.

Hebrews 12:2

looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.

Words of Grace For Today

For us all, all too often we see God as our right hand power that enables us to succeed in the world. Our enemies should lay down and worship, if not God, then us, for the power we wield.

Except life is not like that, and God’s Word for us is not either.

Instead God deals with the reality of life … which ends in death for us all.

God frees us from our sins, and our ultimate fears of death,so that we can live.

On Easter we will say: Christ is Risen! Christ is Risen Indeed! As enthusiastic as we may have learned to proclaim this wondrous news, the power of that news is clear only when we know deep in our bones and hearts what has come before: Jesus has died. Jesus has died a terrible, torturous, unjust death.

That’s what Holy Week is all about. It reminds us of the reality that Jesus addresses with his death and resurrection.

Make no mistake there have been plenty of deaths recently. Among them:

Five siblings, their spouses and children and friends gather to bury the siblings’ parents killed in an accident. An earthquake rocks the mountain overlooking the cemetery and buries them all. A tank runs over an orphan soldier crushing the breath out of him forever. An addict dies alone and helpless poisoned by xylazine cut into his drugs. An old man dies forgotten in his soiled bed. Two women are stoned to death by a crowd of self-righteous zealots.

And then this Friday we remember also that Jesus was falsely accused as many before and since, was strung up and left to die on a cross.

Anyone who is paying even a little bit of attention knows the searing sadness, and profound sorrow of death. That’s life on earth. We get used to such news.

God planned for that, too.

God lets us dive into the familiar of death, and then jars us out of our comfort zones with Jesus’ resurrection,

Turning our worlds all topsy-turvy, back upright,

Where only God is in control, and we live and breathe only as God gives us these gifts … to share.

Whatever

Cup we are given

Thursday, March 30, 2023

No Matter the Beauty,

or Ugly Evil,

God Is With Us

In Every Season.

Ecclesiastes 3:1

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.

Luke 18:31

Then he took the twelve aside and said to them, ‘See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished.’

Words of Grace For Today

Have a great day!

So we wish others, and wish for ourselves.

But

the world does not always comply with our wishes.

Some days are not great.

In fact some days are some of the worst in our lives, even the worst days in history!

While we may wish for easy, comfortable, luxurious even, days that we can slide through without any great challenges, life is not that way.

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.

And that means, come what may, it is all going to eventually come our way, too, the good and the evil.

How can we prepare?

For the greatest evil there simply is no preparation that would be sufficient.

We can at best lean on God to accompany us, whatever comes our way.

To take even the bitterest cup with sure hands, knowing that even death cannot conquer us, for Christ is for us, is with us, and will always welcome us home, even in death.

Today may be a normal day, or a great day, or a day that astounds us with amazing things. Or it may be the flip of that, and astound us with the amazing destructive power of evil.

May it be, that we are led to trust God’s presence with us, whatever it may be.

Can We

See or Control God?

Sunday, March 26, 2023

It May Seem We See

Only As If Through Fog,

But God Is Here

To Be Seen Clearly.

First Kings 8:27

But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain God, much less this house that I have built!

John 1:18

No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

Words of Grace For Today

Finding the meaning of life is an unending challenge every day of every life, unless …

unless one fools oneself.

That usually ends badly for that person and many around them, sometimes nations and continents and even the whole world.

Now if we could only meet God, talk with God, and have God tells us what our lives are supposed to be like, to what end God created us, and what the purpose of our lives actually is, then …

Then life would be peachy, right?

Not really.

God did send the Law, the Prophets, and then Jesus to teach us all that and more about God and what God intends for us.

But we so easily hijack and pervert to our own ends all God’s efforts to communicate with us. That’s corrupt human nature. It leaves many puking out any idea that God actually exists, or talking at all about God is helpful. Perverse ideas about God are more destructive than almost anything else people can come up with, after all!

So many people have tried to contain God inside their own buildings, their own ideas of God subjugating others to their own whims.

God planned for all that, and in each generation God sends us saints, saints who see and hear the saints from previous generations, and who share with us God’s purpose for us.

The purpose of life is not that hard to see and know and live by: to love one another as oneself, and even to love one’s enemies, and to give God all praise and credit for the goodness and beauty that permeates all of life.

Living that out each day is the challenge of each day. Light work, it is, also for this day.

Holy

Rock

Sunday, March 19, 2023

Rocky Shores,

Rocky Lives,

Rock of Salvation

First Samuel 2:2

There is no Holy One like the Lord, no one besides you; there is no Rock like our God.

1 Peter 1:15

Instead, as he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct;

Words of Grace For Today

It was just a four day outing into the Boundary Water Canoe Area. The first day the sun shone bright and warm, the winds were light and mostly at their backs. Camp that first night was everything they’d dreamed of for their honeymoon. What neither could know was that it would all dramatically change soon enough.

Brent and Nellie had this planned since they were seniors in High School. During University they’d continued to date, except for those few months when they’d fought and broken up and tried to imagine life without each other.

It was the last thing each had wanted, but in their chemistry class the professor had assigned them to work together on a lab and demonstration to teach the complex events of nuclear fission compared to nuclear fusion. It had nearly cost them their sanity as they tried to work on the project without being anywhere near each other. It was that fusion part that had, ironically, brought them together to film their presentation to a class of High School students and their parents.

After they got over their awkwardness and moved into the presentation everything started to flow, like it had for them before. Then the slide presentation simply quit. The computer died. So without missing a beat they started to really click and work together, one talking while the other drew on the presentation paper they had for ready to record questions on, then switching roles as each led with their strengths. That paper and their voices were their only presentation medium. Like a dance couple they had pulled it off with grace, and in fact their impromptu final demonstration of fusion, a completely unplanned kiss, drew applause … and their chem prof used the video of their presentation as a demonstration for their class and for years afterwards of what an A+ presentation looked like!

That kiss rocked their worlds, providing balm for so many hurts.

Within days they both knew from their own experience so much more about God, their Rock and Salvation, than ever before … most of it was about mercy and forgiveness.

That’s God’s holiness in motion, even for us today.

So what will we do with it, again this day?

Barren

Wild (-erness) Love

Thursday, March 16, 2023

Sometimes

Christ’ Light Draws Us

To The Far Shores

…

of Our Imaginations

to See and Be

God’s Love for All People

Deuteronomy 32:10

He sustained him in a desert land, in a howling wilderness waste; he shielded him, cared for him, guarded him as the apple of his eye.

Or perhaps better pro-nouned:

God sustained the people in a desert land, in a howling wilderness waste; God shielded them, cared for them, guarded them as the apple of her eye.

1 John 4:16

So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.

Words of Grace For Today

Led out of slavery, across the land of a hostile despot, pursued by well trained, deadly soldiers, saved by a miracle crossing the Red Sea into the wilderness, and then?

What good is it to be freed from slavery only to end up in the wilderness to die of thirst, or hunger, or empty hearts and souls unable to imagine God’s grace?

So God sustains, shields, cares for, and guards the people in the barren howling wasteland. God sustains, shields, cares for, and guards the people with love, for there is nothing so powerful.

Seeking to establish a democracy leaders of the country (politician, banker, and publisher) arrive at the White House for a week of consultations. The brilliant writer leads them to craft a wonderful constitution. The President ‘interferes’ by bringing two of the greatest minds into the room with them. The greatest minds are from opposite parties and from opposite ends of the spectrum of thought, especially about how a democracy should function … except for one basic foundation.

Stymied by the constant arguing that prevents any consensus about what should and should not be included in the new constitution, the writer finally seeks out the President to silence the arguing. They only have one day left to finalize their document!

The President advises the writer that the goal is not a constitution, written and sealed for adoption. The goal is to teach by example, and in that example reach into the leaders’ hearts, minds, and souls to show them that the foundation of democracy is not any written document or anything else, except for the willingness to listen with respect to one’s opponents. If this small group of leaders learn to respect that one foundational principle, not in writing, but in their hearts, minds and souls, then they will teach others by example back home. With that principle they will be able, not easily, but successfully, to write and adopt … and the hardest part … and to follow the constitution with respect for all opinions honestly presented for consideration. (From West Wing)

Our foundational principle for life is not merely for the worst of all forms of government, (except all the others). Our principle for life is what God gives us, love. Living that love, trusting that love, listening to each other with that love, these are the things that Jesus does for us setting an example, so that we may live, trust, listen with love for others, so that they may learn to live, trust, and listen with love. With this miracle, for it can only happen by miracle transforming our hearts in spite of ourselves, God brings us through every barren wilderness to the Promised Land.

Today we get to live out the love that God has for us.

That’s Light work, spreading God’s miracles with abandon across the landscapes of all creation. Ready or not God already has sent us.

Curses

From not obeying?

Sunday, March 12, 2023

Think The Brambles and Branches

Of Our Sins Are Too Many

For Us Weak Sinners

To Find God?

Think Again!

God Is Always With Us!

Deuteronomy 30:9

and the Lord your God will make you abundantly prosperous in all your undertakings, in the fruit of your body, in the fruit of your livestock, and in the fruit of your soil. For the Lord will again take delight in prospering you, just as he delighted in prospering your ancestors,

Philippians 2:13

for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

Words of Grace For Today

Roxy, not unlike the character in that fancy, up-beat, perverse show Chicago, did everything she could to get some pleasure for herself out of life. And she ruined every relationship she had in the process, and as the cost of her high living came to roost in her late 30’s she lost control to her alcohol and drug consumption. Life was no fun at all any more. One morning she woke with her face in her own vomit, her clothes dirty from weeks without washing, and a splitting body ache that felt like she was on the rack.

If she had ever heard of Moses’ blessings and curses, and Jesus’ abiding in God’s love, she would have known that she suffered outside God’s love and dead centre in Moses’ curse, and pretty much every other curse ever spoken or dreamed up.

But God planned for all that, too.

Roxy crawled all of three feet towards the cheap wine bottle before she passed out from the pain. It was more than luck that a person passing the construction shack she’d passed out in noticed her, called an ambulance which got her to the hospital. She woke up in the ICU unable to move or speak. She found herself wondering what great miracle had landed on her that she was still alive, and sober for the first time in longer than she could remember. She knew she was sober because she ached all over, her mouth was dry, her head pounded, but she could see straight for the few moments she could endure the pain of keeping her eyes open. That all slowly subsided over the whole 7 days it took before she was finally able to speak her first word, and ask what had happened to her.

Each moment she realized she was still alive, she gave God thanks. The awareness of God as a merciful, gracious God welled up in her from her childhood at St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church.

So much for dis-obeying God’s commandments and reaping only curses!

God planned for that, too.

For us? Yes, for us, too!

Our days, whether we obey or disobey God, whether we humbly repent or remain stubborn and proud, will be determined by what God chooses for us. And God chooses that we will be so blessed without rhyme or reasons.

Will we notice?

That’s the challenge of each day.

Peaches and Cream

It Ain’t

Friday, March 10, 2023

How to Get To Our Goals?

Yep! Lots of Reasons to Fret!

Yet,

Worry

Won’t Help A Bit!

Psalms 121:4

He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.

1 Peter 5:7

Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you.

Words of Grace For Today

Each day has challenges, worries, and failures waiting to overwhelm us, if we care to take note.

God sends us into the world, knowing that we will succumb to the evil One if we go it on our own. So God walks with us.

And keeps watch over us, without pause.

And listens to us, giving us an ear to hear our anxieties, fears, and trepidations.

We need not bear the weight of life on our own.

Not this day.

Not any day.

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.