Category: Fog

Coming in First

Sunday, March 13, 2022

We spend so much energy trying to find the light of life.

Doch God gives it to us, freely and generously.

Psalm 33:16

A king is not saved by his great army; a warrior is not delivered by his great strength.

Mark 10:31

But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.

Words of Grace For Today

When Solomon raced, he gave it his all. He was naturally fast. It was in his jeans. On the soccer pitch he had that full awareness and predictive vision which allowed him to know where everyone else was, was going, and when they would get there. He was also unnaturally competitive and disciplined, able to push his thin body to produce results that were amazing, on the oval track running, through the woods on cross-country races, and on the soccer pitch.

It was marvellous to watch him run. Everyone threw accolades at him for his winning.

Life, at first, appears to so many to be exactly this kind of event, a competition where the most gifted, wealthy, powerful, and famous people pit their wits against others in order to gain even more. The one with the most wins. Unfortunately, so many people live and die believing this, whether they are the ‘winners’ or the ‘losers’ in this frantic take on life.

God intends something entirely different for us. Ever since creation right through to the morning sunrise today, bright and brilliant that gave way to clouds and snow (again …) God intends for us a completely different measure of who wins and who loses, what it takes to win, and precisely what the ‘game’ or ‘competition’ actually is.

Not only are the first (according to the human ‘game’) actually last, and the last first, the ‘game’ is not to see who can get, have, and keep the most. God’s intention for us is to see how many people can actually live, live well, and living well be God’s instruments for bringing life, life abundant, to other people.

A king is not saved by his great army; a warrior is not delivered by his great strength.

We, each and every one of us, is saved only by God’s grace, by God’s free gifts that forgive us, renew us, and send us out equipped to be God’s grace for others … not through ‘winning’ but actually through ‘losing’, through self-sacrifice, always pointing to truth, love, and hope.

I, too, was proud of Solomon, but not as much for winning as for competing as he did, knowing how much he gave of himself to run as fast as he did, how hard he worked and pushed himself, and how little he received where it really counted for him.

The discipline of competing that we learn from life God uses (when we surrender to God’s Will) as a self-discipline to not be deterred, no matter the costs, from speaking the truth, loving the undeserving, and hoping for the hopeless.

Breath

Saturday, March 12, 2022

All Things Living

Breathe

As God Breathes in and through Them

Psalm 33:6

By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth.

Acts 17:25

Nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.

Words of Grace For Today

Poor Delilah. A middle child and ignored by her parents before and after her mother drover her father to kill himself, she came to worse and worse experiences, though she could barely measure them.

Her step-father, honest and kind, was her refuge for a few short years before everything began to fall apart around her.

Manipulated by her older sister and mother, she was driven to report the sexual contact her mother had with her. But she lied. She told teachers, friends, and eventually police that it was her step-father. When the police pursued him, recruiting and creating more and more lies about her step-father she was lost, so lost. When her older sister and mother paid more and more attention to her, when the school councillors spent more and more time with her to help her through her abuse, and when the prosecutor against her step-father paid more and more attention to her, she finally felt she was someone, someone important enough to be noticed and cared about. It did not compute for her as she watched the courts send her loving step-father to jail for crimes he did not commit, based on the lies told by her mother and herself. She had trouble sleeping. The counsellor at school, and the therapist paid for by her mother spent more time with her. Her mother, with her millions, rewarded her with a brand new iPhone, and then a new MacBook, and new clothes and all the cosmetics she wanted.

Yet the breath she had spent to lie could not be taken back, could not be inhaled, could not ever be denied in her heart of hearts. And her breath became short, her mind frazzled out on her more often than not, and her body grew as she tried to fill the emptiness at her core with food.

Breath, once wasted on lies, especially lies that destroy other people, never is found again, until God forgives, one accepts the forgiveness and confesses one’s terrible sins.

God, the one who spoke a word to create the universe, whose breath created all living things, who needs nothing of service from humans … though God craves people to love, to love one another, and to love God … this God does not leave any of us without forgiveness, unconditional love and God’s full attention. God offered this to Delilah, as God offers this to each of us.

With a word, a word of truth, God renewed Delilah, and Delilah set the record straight, though too late for her step-father, who died in poverty, it set the record straight and exposed the police, the lawyers, and the courts who used her lies and so many other people’s lies to destroy people, almost as a past-time. For the amount of destruction Putin barely registers in comparision.

So God breathes … for each of us, for each of the Ukrainians and Russians, and all the others met by Putin’s unjust, cruel invasions, and for each person destroyed by a word that is a lie, breathed which spreads and corrupts the basis of life.

So God breathes … and so we live, as a gift, undeserved and abundantly blessed.

So we breathe so that others may live, making our words count.

Power, Manipulation, and Spans of Life

Friday, March 11, 2022

We Dominate Much, Fracking for Oil, Destroying Fresh Water

Never Can We Change the Light of Christ

That Gives People Life, Blessed Life

Ecclesiastes 8:8

No one has power over the wind to restrain the wind, or power over the day of death; there is no discharge from the battle, nor does wickedness deliver those who practise it.

Matthew 6:27

Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?

Words of Grace For Today

As a young girl, Garcia quickly learned (brilliant as she was) that her world was populated by those who got whatever they wanted, and those who had very little. More significantly she learned that she could manipulate almost anyone into giving her what she wanted. She just had to make them think they could get from her what they wanted.

Her parents worked long hours. Her father as a pastor, her mother as a nurse. They were seldom at home with their five children, so she would get her siblings to fight among themselves and she would somehow always walk away with what she wanted, a bigger portion of breakfast, the best part of the fish for supper, two oranges at Christmas time (a treat that was so rare they only had oranges five times while she was growing up.)

As a teenager, when her parents could not provide her money to buy the special things she knew she deserved, she sought out the men who could make almost anything happen for her. All she had to do was report what her parents and their friends said in quiet whispers about the national socialist government … and they had plenty to whisper about as friends and other church leaders were arrested and jailed … or simply disappeared. The church was the only place anyone dared protest against the government, yet the leaders were throttled and threatened without mercy.

When her brother ended up in the hospital with a broken arm, cracked ribs and a broken collar bone after a fight with her, she visited him often because she was fascinated with everything at the hospital. She decided she wanted to work there. She asked her ‘friends’, to whom she reported on her parents and siblings, and everyone else she could, what she had to do to become a doctor. They, knowing full well how bright she was, said it would not be a problem. They would make sure she would get into the program at the University after her Abitur.

True to God’s promises, though, wickedness deliver those who practise it and she graduated a half year after those ‘friends’ were no longer anyone, since their government had fallen into ashes. Everyone in that government or aiding it ran for cover, hiding from their past realities, the better to benefit from the new reality, a democratic government. No one was concerned for Garcia’s future. When she applied for medical school, they knew she had been an informer and they denied her application without hesitation. She applied to be a nurse. They denied her application. She asked what she could train for to be able to work in a hospital and she was offered training as a nurses aide. Later she would falsify her resume and claim to be a registered nurse, take an exam in her new country of opportunity, and with almost no actual training start working in a hospital in an operating room. Being brilliant had it’s benefits as did her ability to manipulate almost anyone she met.

No one has power over the wind to restrain the wind, or power over the day of death.

Jesus asks, ‘Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?’

Garcia had no idea about adding hours to her own life, but she knew from her experience that she could manipulate other people to subtracting every future hour from their lives. When she saw no advantage to her husband, except his two life insurance policies, she got what she wanted.

He was not the first, nor the last. Garcia lived a life of wealth and privilege and comfort … though she did not know it. She always wanted more, more, more. She worried and fretted about others who had more. She lived in terror that her life would fall apart as she had helped so many other’s lives fall apart, in her home country and in her adopted country.

God patiently waited for her to ‘wake up and smell the roses’ of God’s great blessings and grace. She came close a few times but walked right back into her well worn habits of destroying others to make her way in life.

When she died it was poetic justice; she gave up all her future hours during one of the increasingly debilitating terror episodes that haunted her.

No matter what power we think we have, the winds of God’s Holy Spirit, along with the ferocious winds of climate change, blow in ways we cannot predict. For all of us there is no discharge from the battle, nor does wickedness deliver those who practise it.

Today we pray for all the men who now spend time in jail for crimes they certainly did not come close to committing, as all the Garcia-s out there who manipulate reality, getting eager police to join in with false reports and judges who relish their power to cruelly ‘punish’ men for being good, honest, law abiding, and gracious people.

No one has power over the wind to restrain the wind, or power over the day of death.

God does have the power to give us, not everything we want, but everything we need in this life to live blessed to be a blessing for others.

Nothing Else

Thursday, March 10, 2022

The Dark Powers Of Deception and The Devil’s Minions

Cannot Conquer or Stop the Light Of Christ In Creation

and

In Us

Isaiah 51:16

I have put my words in your mouth, and hidden you in the shadow of my hand, stretching out the heavens and laying the foundations of the earth, and saying to Zion, ‘You are my people.’

Revelation 3:8

I know your works. Look, I have set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut. I know that you have but little power, and yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.

Words of Grace For Today

God creates all people. In us all God sees that we have little real power in creation (despite our great efforts to take dominion over it all, which lead to our own ruin.)

Yet in us God gives us God’s own words in our mouths, minds and hearts, hides us in the shadow of God’s own hand, and claims us as God’s own people.

We, with great hubris, have claimed that our powers are without limit, or nearly so; that we have wisdom like none other in the universe, unless we at times imagine a more ‘advanced’ alien species; that we protect ourselves from all dangers, until the danger takes us down and then we blame others or God or whatever we can imagine; and that we are special, better, more ‘advanced’ among all people since God claims us as God’s own people, until others use this argument for ethnic cleansing and genocide like the Nazis and so many others, so that we have to tone down our claims to be more worthwhile as a peculiar race, colour, creed, etc. of humans.

More destructive than anything else to life for ourselves and those around us, around the world, and for those generations to come is our claim that we are own ‘god’, godlets of dubious power, potential and knowledge (yet alone wisdom, grace, and love.)

All that we can actually claim is that we … well, we can claim next to nothing on our own. We receive forgiveness by God’s unconditional love, forgiveness and grace. We receive renewed life, though we deserve anything but. We receive a mission – not to conquer or dominate or power our way forward through time but – to be the vessels of God’s unconditional love, forgiveness and grace for other people. This is the open door that God sets before us, a door that no one can close, not even the Devil.

In this mission to which God sends us out into our daily lives, we remain hidden in the shadow of God’s hand, God’s loving hand, God’s hand of Grace, God’s unconditional loving hand.

So we live, by grace alone … and need nothing else. Our enemies are in for surprise after surprise at the power of God’s unconditional love, forgiveness and grace given to us.

So we live, by grace alone … and need nothing else.

Nothing else indeed.

The Gardener and Helpers

Saturday, March 5, 2022

Plants

and

People

Need

Water

and

Light

Living Water, and the Light of the World

Psalm 65:9

You visit the earth and water it, you greatly enrich it; the river of God is full of water; you provide the people with grain, for so you have prepared it.

Luke 8:1

Soon afterwards he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. The twelve were with him.

Words of Grace For Today

God visits the earth and waters it.

I see the gardener (not me for sure) with her water can in hand, sprinkling water on the vegetables and flowers planted and weeded and left out in the sun to grow, for when the rains are not regular, as they seldom are, the plants still need water to grow healthily to produce nutritious foods and splendid flowers.

There are many times in our lives when there is hardly enough rain, and we dry up, parched deep inside, thirsting for a good word to revive our souls.

There are many times in our lives when there is hardly enough light, and we shrivel up like whitened plants so promising just days before at the bounty of their produce, the beauty of their blossoms, and then the plants hang nearly dead, beaten by the lack of sun and blown by the winds.

We thirst for water, living water. We stumble, fall and shrivel up in the dark when we have no sunlight, no Son light, the light of the living world, of the living word for the world.

So Christ comes even today, borne up by the many successors to the 12 who accompanied Jesus as he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God.

Perhaps you are one of these, who is gifted, able to bring words that inspire many to walk wet (baptized) every day as those who receive the living water (even in times of the worst droughts) and who see the light that shines in every darkness.

No matter who you are, God calls for you also to be one who carries the Good News, to be a servant of God serving as of a great throng of angels who save others from dry droughts and hard darkness.

Do Not Leave Me Defenceless

Friday, March 4, 2022

It is one thing to have the time of age lean in on one, as death looms.

It is an entirely other thing to have other people work to advance the arrival of one’s death.

God save us from such people.

Psalm 141:8

My eyes are turned towards you, O God, my Lord; in you I seek refuge; do not leave me defenceless.

John 14:19

In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.

Words of Grace For Today

Lots of people are dying from ‘natural’ causes, some of the ‘natural’ causes are induced by other people, so the causes are not that natural, rather homicidal. Lots of other people are trying to kill even more people, forget about inducing natural causes, these efforts run the gamut from open violence to secretive schemes, and all of them are the work of the Devil and people cooperating with the Devil. Lots of people will die because others are trying to kill them. Lots of people die because of the Devil and his followers.

That’s the way with humans. It’s terrible. It’s worse if you are one of the people induced or openly or secretively sought to be killed by others, the Devil’s sacrifices in an attempt to supplant God’s rule over all creation and all beyond the universe we know or imagine.

So we, the people who others seek to kill … we pray: My eyes are turned towards you, O God, my Lord; in you I seek refuge; do not leave me defenceless.

We trust, no matter whether we live or whether we die, whether by natural or very not natural causes, we live and we die with Christ at our side.

As Jesus lives, even though Rome crucified him at the behest of his own religions leaders, so also we, no matter who seeks our deaths or how, we too shall live, and not just another day or week or year, but for all eternity.

The truths that guided our living will live into eternity.

The lies told by those that seek to kill us, will be remembered as lies for all of eternity.

We are not defenceless, though we die. For our God is our rock and our shield, a mighty fortress against all the works of the Devil.

So we sing: In Him there is no darkness at all, The night and the day are both alike.

And

Von guten Mächten wunderbar geborgen, erwarten wir getrost, was kommen mag.
Gott ist bei uns am Abend und am Morgen und ganz gewiß an jedem neuen Tag.

(Sheltered wonderfully by God’s loving powers We look forward confidently to what may come.
God is with us in the evening and in the morning and surely on every new day.)

Among the Lions

Thursday, March 3, 2022

Deeper Than the Extreme Snows of Winter

(which will be next year’s normal)

God’s Blessings Pour Down Over

Us God-Made Saints

and even over God’s and our enemies alike.

God’s Gift to Us is That We Notice

and Share Blessings with All.

Psalm 57:4

I lie down among lions that greedily devour human prey; their teeth are spears and arrows, their tongues sharp swords.

Acts 14:17

God has not left Godself without a witness in doing good—giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, and filling you with food and your hearts with joy.

Words of Grace For Today

There are signs everywhere, signs of God’s good blessings pouring over us,

if we only open our eyes and

ears and

hearts

to see, hear and know.

Even as our enemies drive us into the wilderness where we must sleep among all that is there and we must lie down among lions that greedily devour human prey; their teeth are spears and arrows, their tongues sharp swords …

even then the goodness of God surrounds us, for there are many witnesses of God’s people, accompanied by God, who have been fed to the lions, and

…

the lions became docile, uninterested in devouring God along with God’s people.

Such works of God’s great works are not just the stories of our ancestors,

these stories are our stories, for

again and again God has delivered us from our enemies so

that we have lived yet another day, and

another week, and

another year,

…

while God’s blessings pour down over us.

Thanks be to God.

Blessings That Overtake and Overwhelm Us

Wednesday, March 2, 2022

Road Blocks

Or

Heat

For Cold

Winter Days

and Nights?

Deuteronomy 28:2-3

All these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the Lord your God: Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the field.

Luke 11:28

A woman in the crowd raised her voice and said to Jesus, ‘Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!’ But he said, ‘Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it!’

Words of Grace For Today

Blessings shall come upon you and overtake you. Wonderful, or scary?

Blessed by the the mother or blessed be the one who hears and obeys?

As if obeying got us anywhere, since we always fail at doing what we ought, in some manner or another at each step through life.

The image that amazes is of being overtaken, overwhelmed, drowned in blessings.

Blessings indeed pour over us, so that we have plenty to share with others … if we only really knew, if we only would realize how blessed we are … and how much others need the blessings that we have and can share with them!

So God walks with us, eh? Not really that big a deal, right!?

Well, really, God walking with us, blessing us with God’s presence in all we do and every step and turn we make, that is so wondrous it is on the edge of being comprehensible, almost beyond imagination … except

except it is our daily lives, seen, heard, and believed to be as God guides us to be ….

Thanks to God is the beginning of an appropriate response … thanks that is active with words and deeds of sharing with others what God has given us, blessed us with, overwhelmed us with.

There’s always more than enough to go around, so help it go around.

Sun rises. Sun sets. Another blessed day.

Receiving Generous Gifts

Tuesday, March 01, 2022

Creation Gives God Thanks for Us,

Even If We Forget

To Thank God

for Everything

Psalm 40:17

As for me, I am poor and needy, but the Lord takes thought for me. You are my help and my deliverer; do not delay, O my God.

Acts 2:46-47

Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

Words of Grace For Today

That the Lord takes thought of any of us is … well it is no less than incomprehensible. More so when we consider all that God provides to us. These are not what we call ‘success’ or ‘accomplishments’ in life. The wonders that God does for us are simple: God gives us life, breath, minds that think, and hearts that can love (or hate if we choose to waste life.)

There is not a single one of us humans who can do anything before we are born to deserve such gifts. Nor can we do anything to deserve these gifts after we are born.

…

And then we screw up the ‘paradise of Eden’ with our selfish greed, deceptions, and lusts so badly that we put life on the skids for ourselves and so many people around us.

What is God to do with us then?

We, for sure, each in our own way, perhaps not so reverently or faithfully, pray that God will come and save us from ourselves. We pray do not delay, for we understand the accumulative destructiveness of our sins for those around us and for ourselves … and we know we cannot survive our own mess indefinitely.

Yet …

…

Yet …

God forgives us, gives us renewed life, breath, minds that can think and hearts that can love unconditionally again.

What are we to do other than eat the bread God provides for us with glad and generous hearts?

Wonders of wonders, God is with us, yet again … and then we sin and screw it all up and …

God forgives us, gives us renewed life, breath, minds that can think and hearts that can love unconditionally again.

And we screw it up again and …

God always walks with us and after each sin God forgives us, gives us renewed life, breath, minds that can think and hearts that can love unconditionally again.

In Him There Is No Darkness At All

Monday, February 28, 2022

Awesome In Splendour

…

Everyday

Exodus 15:11

Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in splendour, doing wonders?

1 John 1:2

We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us— we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.
This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.

Words of Grace For Today

To see what God reveals as the Light of the World, to look into God’s eyes to see all creation reflected with beauty, to touch God’s hand and feel the power of self-sacrificial love overwhelming the universe, to hear God speaking and understand the Word of Life …

to know that there is no other god, except God, Three in One, Parent, Son, Holy Spirit, all and each Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier …

to be re-created, redeemed, and sanctified … and sent out into the world to share all we have received …

This is to have our joy complete,

and to know

in him there is no darkness at all.

So we sing the words Kathleen Thomerson wrote for us:

I want to walk as a child of the light
I want to follow Jesus
God sent the stars to give light to the world
The star of my life is Jesus

In Him there is no darkness at all
The night and the day are both alike
The Lamb is the light of the city of God
Shine in my heart, Lord Jesus

I want to see the brightness of God
I want to look at Jesus
Clear sun of righteousness, shine on my path
And show me the way to the Father

In Him there is no darkness at all
The night and the day are both alike
The Lamb is the light of the city of God
Shine in my heart, Lord Jesus

I’m looking for the coming of Christ
I want to be with Jesus
When we have run with patience the race
We shall know the joy of Jesus

In Him there is no darkness at all
The night and the day are both alike
The Lamb is the light of the city of God
Shine in my heart, Lord Jesus

…

Who Else could possibly move us to know you, God, so well?

Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in splendour, doing wonders?

…. To sing along Concordia College Choir, Moorhead MN