For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
John 10:3
The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.
Words of Grace For Today
When we give up trying to come in first in the ‘game’ of life, and we allow God to come in first, then we find life is full of celebrations, little ones each day as God wins (bringing grace to bear on our lives) and big celebrations less often as God wins again (bringing grace to bear on our enemies’ lives).
Whether we live or whether we die is not so important. What is important is how we live and who we follow.
When Jesus calls, we like even stupid sheep, know how to follow Jesus’ voice, for Jesus calls us by name and leads us out …
out into a world that cannot accept Jesus’ way, God’s forgiveness (for that requires admitting one needs forgiveness!), and the wonderful life we have as the Spirit guides us each year, day and moment, to be less for ourselves and more for God.
We do not celebrate alone, for the saints in light who have gone before us, are over joyed at our following their footsteps as they followed Christ. Even the hills and mountains, the clouds and the birds, the fish and the whales, the planets and stars, sing and rejoice with us, for we are a small part of the universe,
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.
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.
For the Lord will vindicate his people, and have compassion on his servants.
Matthew 5:6
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Words of Grace For Today
Today there is little to say other than prayer on prayer for the good people of the Ukraine, who have lost so much, and now so much more is taken from them … and for all the people for generations to come who will loose again and again because of this occupation and stealing of land by Russia.
So we pray that the Lord will vindicate his people and have compassion on his servants, and that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be filled.
He will swallow up death for ever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken.
Luke 1:73-74
This is the oath that God swore to our ancestor Abraham, to grant us that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, might serve him without fear.
Words of Grace For Today
If you have ever served God in the midst of being attacked by your enemies, who have your death planned for you, then you know fear …
fear that drips with acrid sweat and foul tastes and smells …
and knowing fear you know there is a temperature to it, a temperature that you’d just as soon not be able to measure ever again.
Yet, always curious in our desperate drive to make order out of the chaos of life, we still try to put that temperature in the records, maybe so that we can ignore it or try to avoid it for the rest of our lives. The first challenge is to find the correct scale on which to measure this temperature. Maybe Fahrenheit, used in the US, the enemy of so many people, even it’s own people, and an enemy that creates so much fear around the world, sometimes without doing anything at all. History does the job for it.
How did Fahrenheit come to be?
Celsius uses the points for freezing (0⁰) and boiling of water (100⁰) … water being so basic and an ubiquitous substance needed for life.
But Fahrenheit uses 32⁰ for water freezing and 212⁰ for water boiling. That’s nuts.
It seems that Fahrenheit, in order to set the first standardized scale for temperatures, uses fickle human feelings, conglomerations of past experiences skewed by complex and unpredictable chemical and electric storage mediums (brains), filtering and skewing present experiences which are easily skewed by raw emotions, false and destructive beliefs, and diseases that disturb the uptake of reality.
So on the Fahrenheit scale it turns out that:
It feels real cold at zero degrees and it feels real hot at 100⁰!
Wikipedia puts it out there that Mr. Fahrenheit’s (who created the F scale) “original paper suggests the lower defining point, 0 °F, was established as the freezing temperature of a solution of brine made from a mixture of water, ice, and ammonium chloride (a salt). The other limit established was his best estimate of the average human body temperature, originally set at 90 °F, then 96 °F.”
Wikipedia goes on to put it right. Today temperature “is now formally defined using the Kelvin scale and hence ultimately by the Boltzmann constant, the Planck constant, and the unperturbed ground state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium 133 atom.”
I can read the words … and not much more, and I still know the temperature of fear has little to do with F, C, K, Boltzmann, Planck or caesium 133. It has to do with the drive to stay alive, and not succumb to one’s enemies that would have one dead, lately by leaving a brake job unfinished when I had a 4 hour trip ahead of me … and charging me 1/3 of my annual income for the privilege of being forced to learn to drive without brakes in an automatic transmission vehicle. (Another plus for manual transmissions.)
God never leaves us in the lurch … that our enemies (sometimes we are our own worst enemies) try to put us into.
God promises that God will swallow up death.
And
God has long since granted to us that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, might serve him without fear.
Temperature for fear on a scale is no longer needed.
O that my ways may be steadfast in keeping your statutes! Then I shall not be put to shame, having my eyes fixed on all your commandments.
John 4:34
Jesus said to them, ‘My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work.’
Words of Grace For Today
Most humans have never thought to listen at all to God. Their loss, literally, as they plow through life, destroying more than they could imagine.
Most humans who have thought to listen to God, have learned just enough in such a way to make God’s Will into their own will, and they blithely continue on plowing through life, destroying more than they can imagine.
Those who strive to listen to God … well …
It’s really no different for us either: we continue to plow through life, destroying more than we can imagine.
So we, we who would live life in order to give life to others … so we pray constantly that we would be able to hear God’s will for us and follow God’s will with our thoughts, words, and deeds.
Yet without the Holy Spirit it is hopeless for us and our prayers.
Jesus was a different kind of person, one who knew and followed God’s will, not his own will made to appear to be God’s will. Rather Jesus knew, followed, and received nourishment by following.
Sometimes it is not hard to think that we are more like Hansel and Gretel trying to find the bread crumbs of Jesus, and receiving mere snippets of nourishment for the little treasures we find, sometimes most unexpectedly on what we thought was certainly not a path Jesus ever trod or sent us out on to tread one step at a time.
The most precious gift we receive from the Holy Spirit is to see, hear, and touch the presence of Jesus in our lives each day, in the most unexpected manners.
To see, we look …
To hear, we listen …
To touch, we reach out ….
Another day, this day, and we pray nourish us Jesus, with your bread of life and the gifts of the Holy Spirit most precious.
Hear, O kings; give ear, O princes; to the Lord I will sing, I will make melody to the Lord, the God of Israel.
Philippians 4:5
Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near.
Words of Grace For Today
It doesn’t take much to be gentle, …
not really.
It just takes everything we can possibly give to …
to respond to …
well …
to respond with Grace …
with gentle Grace to …
to respond with gentle Grace to all the evil that other people throw at us, on top of us, and under us so that we can do no other than slip and slide to our demise.
Yet … first God responds to us and all our sins with gentle Grace,
gentle Grace …
ah gentle Grace meets our sins though we do not deserve anything of it at all,
not at all, and then
because God so responds to us we have hope …
we have some hope of responding with gentle Grace.
It takes more from us than we can possibly give, and only have some hope of responding gently as the Holy Spirit holds, guides and enlivens us with what we simply cannot find for ourselves,
unconditional love.
Ahh, as the sun rises and sets we simply cannot find unconditional love except as God gives it to us and as others, by God’s Grace, extend it to us and for us.
So gently it comes to us.
And so gently God gives us all that is needed to give gentle Grace to others.
Out of his anguish he shall see light; he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge. The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.
Colossians 2:10
You have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority.
Words of Grace For Today
Headstrong as we all are, we need some rigorous interruption to our daily routine, to the expected, to the unrighteousness of our lives that we’ve come to rely on in order to make our way forward.
That’s what the suffering servant, and many who have followed who have sacrificed themselves to give others life, and what God in the life of Jesus has done for all: they have interrupted the usual and expected flow of selfishness with their own sacrifice that gives others life. Their sacrifice is simple to describe. They put themselves in the way of corrupt people and powers who seek a scapegoat for their own corruption, lies, and destruction of others … and all manner of sins that clog up the flow of life with their own shtako. These corrupt people easily lie about an innocent person in order to gain some catharsis for the strain the overflow and damming (and damning) their own sins spew across their own lives.
Then as the innocent person is destroyed, the strain of the shtako in their own lives seems to be relieved. Yet it is not at all, not at all. In fact it deepens the clogged up piles that impede life, honest life, blessed life as God created us to live it. … until another innocent scapegoat is slammed into jail or poverty or derision and eventually death.
This seems to be the regular rhythm and rhyme of life … over and over again … and no one seems to care or notice that the innocent are some of the best people alive … until they are no longer.
When God sacrificed life in the death of God-Jesus, God sent a clear message: NO FURTHER SCAPEGOATS ARE REQUIRED for life to flow onward, for the goodness of life to be lived, for the overwhelming, clogging and damning sins of so many to be forgiven.
God dies.
God dies to interrupt our usual.
God dies to interrupt our usual scapegoating to save us from our sins, and to save all those we would scapegoat.
And yet so many people simply cannot bear the thought that God knows their sins, so they keep scapegoating innocent people, and innocent people are jailed, slammed into poverty and derision, and eventually killed … all for nothing more than a temporary cathartic relief of actual, overwhelming, damning and destructive guilt.
Woe to those who continue to scapegoat the innocent!
But for those who have ears, for those who have eyes, for those who have hearts …
ears to hear God’s Word,
eyes to see Christ’s Light,
hearts to receive and live out God’s unconditional love for us all …
For those who the Holy Spirit has given ears, eyes and hearts to receive God, God blesses us with God’s presence each day, each moment … no matter the false convictions, poverty, derisions, or death wishes aimed at us …
and we live lives as God intended us to live them: honest, grateful, generous, forgiving, and steadfast … and as required, self-sacrificial.
We are blessed to be blessings for generations to come
Reflecting God’s Promises of Grace for All
One Day At A Time.
Genesis 26:4
I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven, and will give to your offspring all these lands; and all the nations of the earth shall gain blessing for themselves through your offspring.
Galatians 4:28
Now you, my friends, are children of the promise, like Isaac.
Words of Grace For Today
When the earth was inhabited by very few people the promise of offspring was a tremendous promise. Abraham and Sarah receive this promise from God, along with the promise of the land, land flowing with milk and honey.
Isaac is their son, the beginning of the offspring who will be as numerous as the stars of heaven.
For each of us, the promise that Jesus brings to us at our baptisms is that we not only receive the promise given to Abraham and Sarah, but that we are the offspring just as Isaac was. In us God begins the blessing for and of generations.
Not only are we blessed, but we are made to be blessings for every other person alive and for all generations to come.
Not that we need worry about the burden of carrying all the hope of future generations. The Holy Spirit is with us and working to bring us to each task, each person, each hope that we need bring to others. It’s a huge job, and it’s a wonderfully completed task, completed by God through us.
‘But’, he said, ‘you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.’
1 John 4:9
God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.
Words of Grace For Today
There is the complication of communication between such different kinds of beings.
Science fiction has dealt with this in many ways: humanoids that have varying degrees of bodily appearances: facial hair, skull protrusions, different finger counts, different leg articulations, antennae, and on go the differences imagined. Then there are the other humanoids who require different atmospheres and must use equipment to provide their atmosphere when present with humans in theirs. And then there are the greater differences: the aquatic and air based life forms, and then the energy life forms, and more and more. Always there is, if not at first, some way for communication between the life forms.
What kind of communication can there be between the being whose power exudes greater than the sun, the creator of the universe? How can we imagine, even in science fiction terms, that we could stand inside the sun, or close to the sun, close enough to talk to the sun? What would the sun use to communicate to us, when a small burp would wipe out us and everything within millions of kilometres?
The creator of the universe did not leave us creatures clueless about our creator. Creation teems with evidence of God’s creative powers and God’s beauty and God’s Grace. Patterns are everywhere. Order is there to be recognized and understood and applied to improve our lives. Science and technology are possible because God created the universe so that we could understand and apply our knowledge in many and various ways. God also sent the Law, the Prophets, and the Son.
Whereas the sun will incinerate us long before we can approach it, the Son is a human just like us, and yet is still completely God. Those living at the same time as Jesus interacted with him just as with any other human, even though this human was different in how he lived, healed, loved, sacrificed himself, and rose to life again. Jesus’ life lived among us created a story. That story provides us the keys to understanding the universe and God’s Will for us in it: the Son’s power is unconditional love that forgives, generosity that heals and gives life abundant, and self-sacrificial love renews life and provides an example of how to respond to God’s call to live, live well, and to live fully in this universe.
