The living water of Christ that spans the globe in the oceans,
Breaks in on us (at the right time and place)
and Gives Us Life
For this we give thanks.
Psalm 48:10
Your name, O God, like your praise, reaches to the ends of the earth. Your right hand is filled with victory.
Acts 3:1
One day Peter and John were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, at three o’clock in the afternoon.
Words of Grace For Today
When Jim, George and Helen, Wayne, and Frank went on a canoe trip, they were not fully prepared for what they would encounter. (Pretty normal for most of life for most of us.) Three days out a storm threatened a great deal of rain. They made camp on an island, not as far as they had planned to be that day, with one day before their return.
They set their tents rotating out to kitchen duties, to prepare supper, a pot of hearty soup. Chilled as they were when George and Helen started out they called on their southwestern US residence and added a bit of extra pepper as they fried the meat for the soup, knowing it would take off the chill.
Jim relieved them so they could set up their tent, nicely trenched as they knew it needed to be to provide a dry night’s rest. Chilled as he was from the afternoon paddling in the rain he added a bit of extra pepper to the soup in addition to the vegetables he chopped up and added to the meat.
Wayne, his tent set up and nicely trenched, returned with more firewood and took over from Jim, stoking the fire and warming himself as he went. He stirred the soup, more a stew by now, and added some minute rice, and a little extra pepper to take the chill off the wet evening.
Frank arrived, tent setup but not trenched, since he’d gotten the last available spot and the rocks and roots were not about to be trenched.
He added a bit of pepper to the stew to take the chill off and then as everyone gathered divide out the stew to each person, with only a small bit left in the pot, all covered with dark spots of something.
…
With gusto they all started to dig in, hungry after a long day paddling and a wet afternoon, as the rain continued to fall … having no effect on the heat created in their mouths and stomachs by ‘just a little extra’ pepper in the stew.
…
There is a right time, a right measure, for everything.
You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.
Luke 11:2
He said to them, ‘When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come.’
Words of Grace For Today
How can we live a perfectly righteous life, enjoying everything in creation as we and it was intended to be enjoyed?
The ten commandments are a basic framework of how to live well in community in God’s creation.
The first thing is to get things right about God: to know God, to speak well of God, to speak well to God. God is not just another thing in creation. Nor is God just another being in creation. Nor is God just another special entity beyond creation. God is Creator of us and all that is! God is the only entity beyond creation.
God is not disengaged from us or from creation. God is far more than creation and yet God is always with us in creation. God is intimately involved with every little detail of our lives and every thread of creation’s time.
God is also for us.
God is interested in us getting the best out of life that life has to offer.
In a word more powerful than we will ever be able to know: God love us.
God wants us to know God, and respect God.
God wants us to be for all of creation.
God wants us to respect creation and other people.
In a word more powerful than we will ever be able to know: God wants us to love God, and all of God’s creation, and all of God’s people.
That would make for a perfectly righteous life for us and everyone.
How far we fall from that ideal!
In fact, God does not acquit us on any charge as we live so much of our lives against God, against creation and against each other!
God judges us guilty, deserving of death!
And then God forgives us! Again, and again, and again, and on and on and on all our lives!
How can we respond?
Well we could try not to misuse God’s name, for starters, and thereby teaching ourselves to respect God, which is the beginning of love.
There is so much more that we can do, with marginal success, except one thing we can do nearly perfect all the time. We can pray.
We can pray as Jesus taught us, including that we can pray that God’s name be hallowed and that God’s Rule will come – though it is come near and will come completely one day whether we pray or not. Praying for it to come helps us to remember that we are able to act towards others with love since God’s Rule is already here.
As an aside since it is a huge issue today (again as many times in history): God does not have gender and God has all genders. It is our referring to God solely as having only one gender that skews our ability to see each other with love. It is our refusal to refer to God with any one gender (to say God does not have that gender) that skews our ability to see each other with love.
Historically Christians have referred to God as male, a reflection of a mistaken idea worked out against us all that males are more human, more like God, more powerful than females. Huge mistake.
The efforts to correct this are often as hate-fuelled and therefore so skewed as to make love impossible.
It’s time we prayed that God’s Rule would come now for us on these issues, so that we are freed to address God as mother, as parent, as Abba, and with all other labels of gender, so that we see that all genders are a reflection of God’s goodness and love for us all in creation!
Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
1 Timothy 6:12
Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life, to which you were called and for which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.
Words of Grace For Today
Take hold of eternal life!
Fight the good fight!
Too often we read these words as if we need to succeed in the good fight in order to have eternal life.
God sent Jesus to give us a story that proclaims God does not deal this way with us. First God gives us forgiveness, renewed life, and promises us eternal life, no strings attached.
So equipped with this hope, we are able to fight the good fight.
As John Lewis put it: get into trouble, good trouble. By that he meant trouble that makes a good difference for yourself and others … all others.
Arnold grew up in a model created by the Stasi: anyone and everyone was recruited (that is compromised and blackmailed) to spy on and report on dissidents to the State ideology even though everyone knew it was foolishness, an irreality forced upon the people and even the leaders. For him there was no truth to anything; the Stasi rid him of that early on. The only thing that made one’s life good at all was money, and control of others to keep them from discovering how compromised one’s self was. So he lived. Incapable of loving other people, because they were in the end only more means to keep control, to create a story of himself as a person without weaknesses or faults (for that everyone around him was blamed for his mistakes).
Tina grew up in a missionary family, a medical missionary family, where more than anything else service to God by bringing life to other people was one’s life long project and source of meaning. Everything else, even money was at least secondary.
The enticement Arnold put out to Tina to swallow her into his life to provide care for his children and provide a sexual mate for himself was powerful, well coordinated, persistent and successful … as most everything Arnold put his mind to. When life together demanded Arnold to take a serious look at his abuse of his first wife which lead to her suicide, and his abuse of Tina, the gaslighting and isolation increase to a fever pitch, until Tina tried to kill herself.
When she survived and Arnold was told how terrible it would look if his two wives both committed suicide he covered up her attempt to escape his abuse, and started to tell terrible stories about her. Most were stories about himself, his faults, his abuses, but he told people that it was Tina. The believed him, it was so easy. The police helped by enticing other witnesses to provide false reports about Tina. And the judges swallowed it easily, and added their own material lies in order to send Tina to jail.
Arnold suffers terror jags, like panic attacks that come without warning, sending him into dangerous territories of anger and demands of others to make things right, things that cannot be made right because so much of his life is constructed out of lies about others in order to make himself feel good about himself, and for him to look good to other people … so they will support him no matter the lies he tells.
Tina lives on the edge of survival, desperate financially, and thankful for everyday. Eternal life is already arrived for her, and each day she gives God thanks. She never imagined this is what the ‘good’ fight would look like, or demand of her. Life is precarious at best, and always, always blessed knowing that she has God’s eternal word to share with others, the living Word of God.
In the record setting heat that is sitting across the west, Tina knows how precious living water is, how precious eternal life already now is, and how precious every day is.
There is always someone to encourage, to comfort, and to share God’s promises with. This is the life built on God’s truth.
Arnold lives a life always tumbling into chaos because it is constructed out of piles of lies, like a house built completely out of playing cards. Playing cards are not good construction material for real houses and lives that need withstand storms and high heat waves and winter deep freezes.
The only thing sure enough to build a life from, a life that can withstand well no matter the heat, no matter the storm, no matter the cold. That one sure thing is God’s love that allows us to live in the truth.
The truth today is simple: it’s hot, real hot. It will get hotter tomorrow, the next day, and maybe finally be only warm a few days after that. The truth is winter’s cold will be welcomed, and for now the heat will be celebrated as gift from God enabling us to live even more fully (once it cools down a bit!)
It’s so hot that I put out six eggs, cheese, and spices
by the outside propane stove.
Then I went inside to get the iron skillet for making scrambled eggs
and they were hard boiled before I could crack them
and the cheese was burned to charcoal.
The spices were still good.
We are to be like the hot spices for life!
2 Samuel 14:14
We must all die; we are like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be gathered up. But God will not take away a life; he will devise plans so as not to keep an outcast banished for ever from his presence.
Luke 5:30-31
The Pharisees and their scribes were complaining to his disciples, saying, ‘Why do you eat and drink with tax-collectors and sinners?’ Jesus answered, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick [do]!
Words of Grace For Today
The secret to life really is to recognize how screwed up everyone is, how far from God’s good books we all behave and remove ourselves. We like to cast others out, out of God’s house, out of civilized company, out of our lives. In fact the ones who do the casting out are usually the ones most deserving of being cast out. They not only are so screwed up and so far from behaving justly, lovingly, and with gratitude for God’s gifts; they also deny they are anything but perfect or maybe just slightly flawed.
GUFFAW
The other part of the secret to life is to recognize that nothing can help us, especially not ourselves, and not even chocolate or coffee or scotch (or any variation on those themes.) Nothing can help us except God. Knowing God, fearing and loving God, frees us to recognize that God WANTS us! God works all kinds of miracles to convince us that God actually forgives us! God freely and generously gives us forgiven, redeemed, and renewed life, again and again and again and … without end.
God wants us to know God walks with us always.
God does not banish us. Other people pretend they can, but God remains by our side. When we get tossed onto the garbage heap of life and even tossed out into the darkness of hell itself, God walks with us, and keeps us walking right out of that darkness back into life abundant.
Jesus came not to care for those who thought they were healthy. Jesus came to show us that we were all sick, and that Jesus was ever ready to heal us of our every illness.
Death will come to us all. That will end the injustice done by many. Still God does not abandon us, nor give us our enemies’ deaths as the only hope for a better life. Already today God gathers us into Paradise with all the saints in light, if we will only see and recognize all that God does for us! At our deaths God keeps walking by our sides and gathers us still into Paradise with all the saints in light, who have accompanied us on our sojourn each day, hoping for us, hoping that we will also be the saints who share Jesus’ wonderful healing presence and promise with those the world casts out, and those who cast others out.
God continually devises plans so as not to keep an outcast banished for ever; God sends Jesus the physician of the universe to all who are sick; God sends us to heal the sick in heart, spirit, and body with Jesus’ Word and Jesus’ story.
They shall be mine, says the Lord of hosts, my special possession on the day when I act, and I will spare them as parents spare their children who serve them.
Ephesians 1:5
He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will.
Words of Grace For Today
To be a child, not an orphan, means one belongs to those who are very alive, a parent or more parents.
If one’s parent(s) are good parent(s) the future is always filled with promise and hope.
When God adopts us as children our parent is the best parent, and our futures are filled with more promise and hope than we will ever realize.
Each day, no matter the challenges beyond comparison or even joys that seem to free us from any need for God or darkness for which we cannot find words nor coherent thoughts … each day because God claims us as children, we need not fear anything, not anything at all. We can be assured that in all things God walks with us. God claims us as special children, children that God spares from the destruction of the Evil One.
This is God’s good pleasure, that we can live free from the destruction to which the Evil One would subject us.
Great is our Lord, and abundant in power; his understanding is beyond measure.
Mark 10:27
Jesus looked at them and said, ‘For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.’
Words of Grace For Today
Tina stood outside her camper, breathing in the sunset air with light pounding against the still lake waters. How had it come to this? Such beauty, wonders, and peace after a decade of Gaslighting?
She had not earned it, nor felt any claim to it, though her attachment to the land and waters ran through her bones deeper than it had a right to.
For mortals this would be impossible to imagine; but even this is not impossible for God.
For years what troubled her is that people could do what they had done: lied, gaslit, scapegoated, made false reports to the police, blatantly lie in court (even police officers), and then the lies the judges told in order to convict her, send her to prison. How could people choose to do such things? How could people think they would get away with it, and then it seemed they got away with it.
She had always known she had not committed the crimes, or done the terrible things reported and rumoured about her around town. The impact of being declared a criminal though ran deep and she questioned what she had done wrong to ‘earn’ this kind of treatment, even if people were so evil, corrupt and cruel to do to her and say about her the things they had.
It took years of loneliness, despair, prayer, hope, and many repeat acts of people lying about her, pushing her back down as she tried to gain a voice. That was it for the first few years, silenced about the false police reports and false charges. Then silenced about the lies told to the courts. Silenced by unjust and cruel judges. Everyone was so afraid of the truth, now that the ‘game was afoot’ to scapegoat her for evil they had previously, otherwise done, and which they still continued to do.
It took years of coming to understand that the evil done to her had very little if anything to do with her at all. All those years of confusion, pain, loneliness, silence, and lost hopes. Slowly, ever so slowly she came to understand how very little it had to do with her and how terrible the things were that she had learned about, the lies and games that people played creating the lies, the horrendous perversions that people participated in and covered up, with influence, money, and raw force.
Arnold had invited, begged, persistently courted and pursued her. In court he’d said she was the one who had pursued him, for his money, for his children, for his home. All of that was lies. He had pursued her for the good company she was, for her great way with children, and, after he’d seduced her, for the sex. He made out that he was charmed, needy, and fulfilled by her. But he really knew nothing about love at all. He begged her to marry him and not just have an affair. She agreed and he promised they would marry when she was divorced. And when she was divorced he said they didn’t need to get married, that it would be just like they were married.
On it went, a marvellous, unbelievable six months of being in love, with the isolation from friends, the constant critique of little things mostly of things he did and blamed her for, the silence about her past, and all the stories about how perfect his first wife was. All that even after he confided to her that he had driven her to kill herself when her two life insurance policies overlapped and both paid out handsomely making him a multimillionaire in months. She was perfect in every way, and when she made a wrong decision he made sure she changed her mind and made the right one, especially the last decision to end her life.
He went to work on Tina right away, and got her on a drug that caused her to be suicidal, and he drove her hard, hard, hard until one day with half a bottle of sleeping pills and a bottle of alcohol Tina was ready to find her freedom from Arnold’s abuse.
How had it come to this?
How had that come to sitting by a lake breathing in the sunset with light pounding against the still lake waters. Such beauty, wonders, and peace after a decade of abuse, Gaslighting, and one suicide that failed only because the cream in the Irish Cream slowed the absorption of the sleeping medication – that took three days to work it’s way out of her system?
How had it come to this after that?
Great is our Lord, and abundant in power; God’s understanding is beyond measure.
So many times Tina had resigned her to God’s care and understanding of what was being done to her, for it made no sense at all, not at all, at all!
It took years but it had come to this, by the lake.
Tina still did not understand, though she agreed, For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.
…
Where are you today? How did you get there?
What unbelievable challenges blocked your path so many times in so many ways?
How has God shown you, that for God all things are possible?
Shout aloud and sing for joy, O royal Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.
Luke 19:37-38
As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, saying, ‘Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!’
Words of Grace For Today
July 1, 2021 approaches and the end of all (almost all) health orders providing restrictions because of Covid 19 will come with it, in Alberta. Unless or until the Delta or some other variant changes everything, again.
Still people are hungry for release, for freedom, for the lack of order that can be filled with their chaos, for ‘life like it used to be’ but really never was – which is always a stupid person’s excuse to want things so simple that dictators can easily take over. There will be a party of all parties, with instances duplicated all over the province, in kitchens, around dining room tables, in halls and in door conference spaces, in tourist destinations and next to the lakes, and in the bush … well that party has already started here, down the way, with fireworks and drinking, smoking and loud music and screaming into all hours of the night. Why not!?! It’s freedom, Right!?
Everyone loves a good excuse to have a party, well almost everyone, or truth be told everyone does except for the introverts (which is estimated to be somewhere between 15% and 50% of everyone).
Jesus enters Jerusalem. He is known to speak with authority and that the authorities are threatened by him. He is the common people’s hope for change. Even though he rides on a foal of a donkey, people shout and throw palms and lay down their garments for his path into the city. Which is a great excuse for a party … and for the authorities it is a great excuse to be rid of him once and for all.
God enters our days, usually quite quietly, walking with us, inspiring us to be the saints forgiven by God that God has made us to be. We make no fanfare.
Jesus is heralded as King with great fanfare, noise, and pomp. Yet he is not the people’s king to free them from foreign dictators. He is King of the universe, and King of our hearts, minds and breath … and of out lives if we continually accept that we need forgiveness, Christ forgives us, and we can live free from sin and the free from the power of the Evil One.
Each morning we have more reason to celebrate, to shout for joy, to bring on a party, than even when Jesus enters Jerusalem.
Yet it is quiet. The sun shines bright and hot on the cool of the morning, so warm already even the song birds are done until evening. The shadows are long from the northeast, the shade provides a momentary cool. God has been here even before it became light and we are quiet, the meadows and woods and lake are quiet. The partiers from last night are now quieted.
There is no need to make loud noises, for this is common, everyday, every place: God is long since been with us.
We pray that God will be with us on 1 July and for months beyond, for Covid 19 is here to stay with us so we pray that the vaccines will stay effective, that the whole world will be vaccination soon, and that we will learn to be the opposite of covidiots – covid-smarts, and all-life-smarts, knowing and trusting God’s Grace as our sole breath and life.
He said, ‘If now I have found favour in your sight, O Lord, I pray, let the Lord go with us. Although this is a stiff-necked people, pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for your inheritance.’
John 8:31-32
Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, ‘If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.’
Words of Grace For Today
Finding favour in God’s sight, and continuing in Jesus’ word; there is nothing better in life, for though we are a stiff necked people, God has pardoned our sins, and given us the promise that we are God’s children, inheritors of all that God has to give.
While the world goes nuts with fake news, deception, and gaslighting of whoever can be had, Jesus gives us the truth and makes us free, free from the all our sins, and free from the losses from others’ sins, and most of all free from all the sheer craziness of life formed from lies, from the foundation on up to the latest addition of the day.
For that we can rest at night and dream of things unreal at night, because during the day all is tied clearly to reality.
So we ask:
Can
A
Canoe
Sit in the dark
And stand against the wind
Alone?
Or does it need company,
Security cameras,
Or chains
To hold it down.
‘Fly baby fly’
Might not
Be the mantra?
Rather the words
that give one heart
are ‘Come, let us see the loons,’
by which we mean the birds on the lake
not the two legged nutters
that waste life from sunrise to sunset.
‘Rest, baby rest,’
in Jesus’ hands
all is well, all is well, all manner of things are well.
My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast, and my mouth praises you with joyful lips.
Colossians 1:11-12
May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light.
Words of Grace For Today
Life is tough, even cruel, and overpoweringly challenging to one’s own sanity, soul, and spirit.
What God gives us, freely, more than overcomes all that, easily, if we but recognize reality as it is.
These days it is a bit more than normal, after a Trump presidency more noticeably than otherwise, to make up whatever one wants to, to spin reality inside out and upside down, or just make a clean departure from it, all the while claiming to speak only the truth.
Wonderful way to live, making it up as you go, in whatever way you think will be most beneficial to you; to hell with all the people that you hurt or destroy along the way.
Feasting on God’s reality is much easier. One gets to admit everything about life and how it is, the good and the bad … and the very bad. After all God forgives it all and gives us new life each day.
Which gives us an unending source of strength to face how cruel and tough and overpoweringly challenging life is to our sanity, soul, and spirit. The promise that pulls us through it all, keeps us moving forward in Grace is that God sees us as another inheritor as God’s own children with all the saints in light.
The company is made up of great sinners all, and great God-made saints. No need to make up falsehoods to get through anything. We get to feast each day on the bread of life and drink the living water. Nothing compares.
Meanwhile our enemies live in fear that the truth will catch up with them, that their lies will be exposed, and that they will be found out to be fakes. The truth causes them real terror. Which is a horrible way to live.
We, meanwhile, are able, no matter what happens around us, to sing God’s praises in thanks for the grace upon grace that God pours over our lives without end all day long, every day! We have strength that comes from God’s glorious power, making us prepared to endure everything with patience. Life does not get better!
With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.
Matthew 11:28
Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.
Words of Grace For Today
Like no other words these are so welcome …
now after 15 months plus of Covid 19 restrictions and unknowns,
when my enemies pile on more lies and destruction, take more money I will never have piling debt on debt, and when it seems there are too few people who know who I a really am. Because I certainly am not the person reported to and by the RCMP, or testified about in the courts, or convicted and labelled a vexatious litigant by judges who care not for the actual truth,
when illness and disabling arthritis and injury combine to keep me from doing what I had planned to do to keep healthy, busy, and keep the mosquitoes at bay: mow, mow, and again mow,
when the death of a loved one rips the foundation of life out from underneath us,
when the darkness of the Evil One convinces us that the world is always going to be dark, even when the sun shines longer today than any other day in a year, and that evil will always win the day,
…
What we thirst for at those times, and now, is a place to rest in safety and
Jesus calls to us:
Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.
Once again God works to convince us, to reassure us with hope beyond hope, that
With joy we will today draw water from the wells of salvation.
There are no better words that these:
Come you who are weary and I will give you rest, so that with joy you will draw living water from the wells of salvation!
When we have rested, and washed ourselves and souls once again clean, when we have drunk our fill, then Christ calls us to share these words, these opportunities to rest and be renewed, and this living water. Christ calls us because there are so many people weary, carrying heavy burdens, who lose themselves as if they were separated from the love of God.
These words, these offers, this living water is all we have, it’s all we need to be able to share, it is all that anyone needs from life.
What joy comes when God calls us out of our weariness, and we share it all with others!
