Perspective – Page 7

No!

Not That At All. Instead

Go and Tell All …

Tuesday, September 26, 2023

Sometimes We Fog Up,

Looking for the Way Out of Our Messy Lives.

God Sends Us Back Into the Mess, to ….

Psalm 31:7-8

I will exult and rejoice in your steadfast love, because you have seen my affliction; you have taken heed of my adversities, and have not delivered me into the hand of the enemy; you have set my feet in a broad place.

Mark 5:19

But Jesus refused, and said to him, ‘Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy he has shown you.’

…

Words of Grace For Today

All too often we ask and even try to demand from God something that we want, something that we are sure is what God would have for us, something that is a sacrifice of all we are and can be, and

God

says

No!

Instead God sends us right back where we’ve tried to escape from, from the grind of daily life, from the hell that daily life is (due to other people, usually), from the past that has dragged us so far into to the pit that we can barely see the horizon.

God sends us back, and tells us to

Tell everyone what God has done for us, rescuing us, healing us, forgiving us, renewing life in us, giving us hope again!

It is that we year and long for everything to be different so that maybe everything will be right in our lives.

Instead, God makes us right with God, so that no matter the circumstances that we live in and under, God can work through us to bring Grace to bear on more and more people.

So it is, this day, we enter our daily lives, looking like nothing has happened to us, and yet

everything has happened,

God has happened,

the Holy Spirit has transformed us poor sinners (actually we are very good sinners, just poorer beyond imagination for it) into saints,

those through whom the Light of Christ shines

through all the brokenness of life

into the heart of the matter, the heart of each person, the heart of God’s Kingdom come near.

Just another day for saints

to be God’s miracles

for others.

The One

Sure Thing

Monday, September 25, 2023

Though Autumn Carpets Abound, Again

Climate Change Teaches Us Now:

Even the Seasons Are Not A Sure Thing!

Psalm 33:4

For the word of the Lord is upright, and all his work is done in faithfulness.

Matthew 24:35

Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

…

Words of Grace For Today

While we yearn and long to make life better, we chase after all sorts of things,

which we hope will make life better,

But

they are dreamed of out of greed and selfishness

and they bring us more misery and hardships than we ever dreamed would be ours to endure.

Only as the Holy Spirit inspires us to yearn and long for God’s Grace and Blessings to be shared with all other people,

do we start to participate in God’s Kingdom,

wherein God’s Word provides us with the one sure thing,

Grace,

simple, unearned, undeserved, unending

awesome

Grace.

As the Spirit moves us God’s Word transforms us so that

our yearning and longing, our drive and and works,

and our hopes

focus on recognizing what we already have received

and

sharing it with those who have so little and need so much

just to live.

More opportunities this day

await us.

Thanks be to God.

Longing and

Yearning

To Make It Right

Sunday, September 24, 2023

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Portland_Pudgy_safety_dinghy,_rowing.JPG

Not All Life In ‘Dinghies’ Involves Life Jackets and Singing Joyfully,

OR Might It Best Be So?

Leviticus 19:18

You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself: I am the Lord.

Luke 10:33-34

But a Samaritan while travelling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

…

Words of Grace For Today

Yearning, Working For Our Dreams …

and hopefully Giving Thanks.

We yearn and long to make life right for ourselves.

If we are at all alert to the reality of life we yearn and long to make life right for others as well.

Covid vaccines are a great example. If just the privileged receive vaccines the virus continues to spread among those who have no vaccines, and it mutates, and it spreads to even those who are vaccinated. We are in the same boat, but not really. Some are in luxury yachts, others in sturdy ocean going vessels, some in small dinghies and so many others hanging on to pieces of flotsam, hoping for rescue! But the virus spreads quickly, efficiently from the flotsam and dinghies to the luxury yachts and sturdy vessels.

So we hope we will work not for vengeance, but for love of neighbours all, even offering what we cannot easily give, as the Samaritan does the man robbed and left to die. One can ask, is it this Samaritan, a relative, or a friend, who contracts leprosy and then is healed by Jesus?

Life is hard.

The only way to keep yearning and longing for things to be better for others is to recognize how much one already has to give –

to give to others in need,

and

to give thanks for.

Staring with

that we

breathe,

also this day.

Closing Time

The Last Dance Is Done and …?

Friday, September 22, 2023

The Day Is Coming To A Close.

Now What?

Isaiah 55:5

See, you shall call nations that you do not know, and nations that do not know you shall run to you, because of the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you.

Ephesians 3:14-15

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name.

…

Words of Grace For Today

When we wake up to the reality of what we have done with our lives, as the carouser wakes from the ‘Johnny Walker wisdom’ run out, leaving us with no more than a dark hangover,

the question is what can we do, now that the ‘party is over’, the last dance danced, and it’s long since been closing time, in so many ways?

Time to return to the Lord, the Maker of Heaven and Earth.

It’s not a jump into an alternate reality or timeline.

It’s not a huge jump across the ‘pond’ to another continent.

It’s not a huge trip into the Hinterländer.

For God has walked with is into every hell-hole party, through every good and bad dance, and through every closing time.

God is right there with us, in us, around us; we are not alone, and it’s never closing time for God’s Grace for us.

That is the one thing of goodness and life that never closes down on us.

Thanks be to God.

Shake!

When the Foundations of Earth Shake

What are we to do?

Sunday, September 17, 2023

When the Foundations Dissolve Beneath Us,

May We Have Loved Ones,

Made Solid With God’s Love.

Isaiah 33:24

And no inhabitant will say, ‘I am sick’; the people who live there will be forgiven their iniquity.

Revelation 1:17-18

When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he placed his right hand on me, saying, ‘Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive for ever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hades.

…

Words of Grace For Today

Earthquakes take most everything we take for granted and undo it. Gravity rapidly oscillates, solid ground becomes liquid, protection over our heads become threats to our survival, …

What are we to do?!

In life, there are more things like earthquakes than we wish to admit. More things change the very foundation of life for us. Evil has free run at the foundations of life we create for ourselves, even those who we love can turn against us without warning.

What are we to do?!

Like Isaiah we turn to God, when the world under us seems to flow away, and we pray: We must be sick! Save us.

Only God can reach out to us, and assure us that life is solidly grounded in Jesus’ love for us, love that is not selfish or guile or facile. Even death cannot shake God’s love for us.

Here is our solid foundation, upon which our love, hope, and breath rely.

May it be so also today for us.

Walk!

Walk it off?

Not a chance.

Saturday, September 16, 2023

https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2021/covid-19-and-fungi-a-nightmare-in-the-making

John Hopkins: Fungi Nightmare in the Making

Lamentations 3:58

You have taken up my cause, O Lord, you have redeemed my life.

1 Peter 2:21-23

For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps. ‘He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.’ When he was abused, he did not return abuse; when he suffered, he did not threaten; but he entrusted himself to the one who judges justly.

…

Words of Grace For Today

CBC health newsletter reported how a man came home for a long weekend, walking up his drive he vomited blood on his driveway, ended up needed a new liver (cause of cirrhosis unknown), four years later went in for a liver transplant, and spent more than a month on IVs with multiple superbug infections (infections resistant to antibiotics).

And this is more and more common. Surgery is getting to be dangerous, because of the killer infections that come with it. Covid should have woken us up to the huge risk we are at, across the world, to unstoppable infections. Instead people want Covid to be over so they say it is over and behave as if it’s over, but it’s not. We will suffer greater death and losses of health because of it. People don’t want that to happen, so they live as if it is not already happening. Wanting it to be, does not make is so.

A walk up one’s drive, after a long, hard work week is supposed to be the beginning of a kind of rest and recuperation. The walk is the beginning of ‘walking it all off’, so that one is ready to be with one’s family, and then ready to return to a productive work-week.

Sin is worse. We cannot just ‘walk it off.’ We can pretend it does not exist, which only deepens the sin’s ravaging in our lives, like superbugs denied and thus let loose to run havoc more freely in our midst.

Only God’s forgiveness can save us from sin.

Also from the sin of denying Covid, and the dangers of super bugs: bacteria, viruses, fungi.

Without God’s forgiveness, redemption, and renewal of us, we cannot engage to help one another survive come what may.

So we celebrate each morning, noon, and night (and also this day) with the writer of Lamentations: ‘You have taken up my cause, O Lord, you have redeemed my life.’ And we pray that we may be delivered from diseases that cannot be cured, again today.

Forever Judgment

And Doom, OR?

Friday, September 15, 2023

God’s Hammer of Judgment Looms Over Us

—

OR?

Hosea 11:8-9

How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I treat you like Zeboiim? My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.

John 12:47

I do not judge anyone who hears my words and does not keep them, for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.

…

Words of Grace For Today

Through all the generations the fear of God is fomented in and among us by threatening us with God’s judgment. “In the end everyone will be judged according to what they have done, said, and thought! Therefore be good lest you end up in hell – suffering – forever!” And so go the similar admonishments and threats.

It just about scares the living daylights and joy and hope right out of each one of us. For the result is not a great effort to be good. Rather it drives us to deny our own sins, and create great facades of being good enough.

All that drives us, individually and as a community, further and further from the goodness that God created us to be for each other and all people.

Then we read these passages: God is in our midst and does not come in wrath to judge and condemn. And Jesus comes into the world not to judge it and all in it, but to save the world.

Which will this day be for us?

A day wherein we strive to be good or rather to create the illusion that we are at least good enough to avoid God’s wrath?

A day wherein we rest assured of God’s saving efforts to forgive us our own sins, and set us free to extend God’s grace to others?

…

If our record is any indication then more the former than the latter.

…

If we accept God’s record as determinative then God’s forgiveness will bring us out of the former into the latter

and

life will be a miracle of goodness,

also this day.

Children

Get hammered by Evil,

And rescued by the miracles of Goodness.

Thursday, September 14, 2023

Do we pick up the hammer of evil and hand it to our children?

Psalm 103:13

As a father has compassion for his children, so the Lord has compassion for those who fear him.

Matthew 7:11

If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

…

Words of Grace For Today

Giving good gifts to one’s children does not mean giving them everything they ask for, not at all. It takes some great courage, wisdom, and empathy to understand what a child finds interesting, challenging, and overwhelming, and then to give what helps the child find her/his way the next step in life.

Living aware of one’s children’s interests, challenges, and roadblocks takes time and focused attention … and kindness, in order that one has compassion for them.

All children have goodness in them, as well as evil. Always one works to reward and develop the goodness. Every generation on earth needs all the goodness it can muster. There are severe challenges to goodness, always something evil tries to hammer goodness back into the ground as dust. It’s a miracle any goodness survives among us at all. It is a miracle we depend on, many times each day.

When the evil in children starts to take over and wipe out the goodness, it breaks one’s heart, especially as the children’s parent. The best a parent can do then is offer the best support, opportunities, and resets — in the form of forgiveness, second chances, or sometimes as developing ignorance of the evil, and sometimes as harsh punishment of the evil, but most often letting the evil run it’s course so the children experience natural consequences for their choices. With the proviso that a parent does try to protect a child from permanent damage or death.

So God deals with us, we pray also this day.

The Answer is

(NOT always)

Love!

Wednesday, September 13, 2023

https://entertainmentmesh.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/deep-red-rose.j

Roses Are Red

And Violets are Blue

But

Love

Can Make You

Dead, Through and Through.

Or make you wish you were.

Psalm 22:23

You who fear the Lord, praise him! All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him; stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel!

John 17:22

The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one,

…

Words of Grace For Today

When we are young (ish) and we search for a mate for life, some of us come up with some real doosies!

No names of course, for that would embarrass us all.

The man who marries a young woman and then, despite conversation and promises to be faithfully monogamous, insists that it is his right to have sex with other woman.

The woman who in her 60’s continues to hoard canned food. Already more than 100 lbs overweight she remains fearful that, impoverished as they are for his having served as a pastor, … that they will run out of food. Her hoard fills all their living space, living room, dining room, extra bedroom and even their own bedroom. It takes an extra moving van to move the cans.

The female synodical bishop who aspires to be the bishop of the national church and uses every means to run off or ruin any pastor or congregation who challenges her autocratic, unjust, and even illegal actions to secure her ‘power’.

The woman, to compensate for her insecurities, who cannot accept responsibility for anything she does wrong always blaming it on someone else (as ludicrous as her reasoning often is), who latches on to a fat man who is ‘going places’, and then ridicules him to his literal death, to avoid a divorce and the loss of half their accumulated wealth (more than a little of it legally gained.)

The senator’s wife (a senator who serves on the committee for space exploration) who all her money and tries to send his to a scam artist, who sends news every month of the ‘little green men’ in their midst and his negotiations with them to keep them from overthrowing the government.

The obscenely rich land developer whose wife never runs out of energy or appetites for other people, without their clothes, who has to be sent to one of their other homes to interrupt her appetites run amok.

…

For some people the blessing that we may be one as Jesus is one with the Father, is not such a blessing.

The words of wisdom certainly apply, no matter for what else you marry someone, marry someone kind.

At least then, no matter how crazy they (or you) turn out to be, at least they will not try to bring about your death.

Best to be humble before God, confident only in God’s grace, for in many awesome ways God demonstrates God’s saving grace for us, not only for the Hebrew slaves escaping across the Red Sea into the wilderness, but for all of us, from our slavery to whatever oppression or sin, into the wilderness where we can learn to serve others God’s own grace, instead of our confidence in things that will always fail us.

Confident

Humility

Tuesday, September 12, 2023

A newly discovered cache of internal documents reveals that the sugar industry downplayed the risks of sugar in the 1960s. https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2016/09/13/sugar_wide-c334d683622a1f40a8f97f8acc8199a44f233e68-s1200.jp

Mounds of Sugar,

Taste Great?

Deadly?

Exodus 19:4

You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.

Hebrews 10:35

Do not, therefore, abandon that confidence of yours; it brings a great reward.

…

Words of Grace For Today

Confidence.

Confidence brings rewards.

Yes, confidence brings rewards, but

are those

good rewards

or the rewards

of the foolhardy.

As far as having seen what God did to the Egyptians and how God bore us up on eagles’ wings,

that is a piece of history now, one we have not seen ourselves, and the record shows that the people were not so easily convinced that being brought out into the wilderness with no water or food was such a great thing.

In fact they were abundantly confident that Moses had made a huge mistake, bringing them out in to the wilderness to die of thirst or starvation, and then of boredom with no meat to eat and then always the same old same old to eat, morning, noon, and night. God did not provide them with Kellogg’s, General Mills, Malt-O-Meal, Nestlé, Quaker Oats and Post Foods to produce a great variety of breakfast cereals that will eventually kill anyone from sugar poisoning. But at least the sugar addicts do not complain as they eat themselves to death!

So how are we to be confident,

yet not too confident,

and confident in the correct things that make for life,

instead of in things, like sugar, that provide for our slow deaths after miserable lives?

I think best is to be quiet humble, not so confident at all, but fully dependent on God’s good grace.

Or one can fall in love, which seems to ‘fix’ life quite well.

And then one wants more and more of that sweetness, which may or may not ‘fix’ life at all. The potential is there for great blessings and great curses, just like all else that is sweet as sugar.