Category: Sunset

Soon And Very Soon

Sunday, September 5, 2021

As Surely As The Winter Cold Will Come

Removing Wasps and Bugs From

Disrupting Good Living

Jeremiah 31:16

Thus says the Lord: Keep your voice from weeping, and your eyes from tears; for there is a reward for your work, says the Lord: they shall come back from the land of the enemy.

Luke 18:7

Will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them?

Words of Grace For Today

Words of hope fill scriptures: God will come to the aid of those downtrodden, those driven into poverty, those dealt injustice and abuse, and those ostracized with lies and gaslighting.

These are not events that happen elsewhere or at other times. These evil things done to good people take place in this place and time. Corrupt individuals (some known as the wealthiest community leaders) are recruited by corrupt police to file false reports about situations they create in order to lie and denigrate good people. Corrupt police lie about what they have reported to them in order to make good people look guilty. Corrupt pastors cooperate in creating false reports about honest, innocent and good people in order to gain favour with corrupt church and community leaders. Corrupt lawyers pretend to defend the innocent, though they do just enough to make it look like a plausible defence while leaving room for false convictions of their innocent clients, from whom they take tens of thousands of dollars in fees – all to ‘throw them under the bus’, the financial ruin part and parcel of the means used to ruin innocent, honest people.

Even though the evidence does not make out the charges, corrupt judges abound in the courts, and testimony that exonerates the accused is removed from the transcripts (as judges are allowed to edit the court transcripts), and even then testimony is falsified in their judgments at crucial points in order to make convictions possible.

In a word, barbarism rules! Here and now barbarism rules!

Because the courts command armed police and sheriffs and the entire penal system, which is staffed for the most part by bullies and more than a few totally corrupt guards and staff, most people either are naively and intentionally unaware of the injustices done to so many innocent people. Or people who are fully aware of the injustice, keep quiet so as not to attract attention to themselves, hoping not to be the next victim of the barbarism.

…

God’s chosen people have no such choice.

And God does not abandon God’s chosen people. God comes to our rescue soon and very soon. God brings us out of the land of this barbarism and establishes justice here and now for all people, by the work of God’s chosen, the many good, honest, and outspoken people who dedicate their lives to bringing justice and truth to bear on this barbarism that corrupts not just individuals, but the very foundation of civilization.

Soon and very soon.

Yes, soon and very soon, those who are so corrupt, who habitually undermine true justice, our enemies will be exposed and removed, so that God’s will may be done among us, through us.

Soon and very soon.

Free?

Tuesday, August 31, 2021

Can We Choose

To Move to the Far Shores

And Posses the Land There?

Is it Fate, or God’s Will?

Or Greedy Human Ambition That Will Only Destroy Us?

Jeremiah 32:42

For thus says the Lord: Just as I have brought all this great disaster upon this people, so I will bring upon them all the good fortune that I now promise them.

1 John 3:2

Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.

Words of Grace For Today

Today we exercise our human capacities to accomplish work that we endeavour to complete. It is often work that puts us one step closer to a goal, towards a future that we see possible for ourselves or for other people. Some goals are little more than our survival, or others’ survival. Most often even those are some variation of survival plus a better life. It is honourable to wish others to have more than the bare minimum to survive, to enjoy life abundant as God promises us all people can have. It is honourable to strive to have life abundant ourselves, to have a measure of security against those things that endanger our survival. These are the blessings of God for us that we can give them to others.

We create real evil for ourselves and many other people when we try to create securities that protect us from what we cannot protect ourselves, for then there is no end to what we take out of life for ourselves, and we inevitably take it from others at others’ expense (sometimes even their lives) and we find ourselves incapable of giving to others that which we’ve taken from others. We hoard it for ourselves.

This is all about freewill. God gave humans freewill, and we certainly exercise it, both in the beauty of love for others and all of creation … BUT also in the ugly greed and avarice that robs others and all creation of life itself.

Jeremiah expresses an ancient view of freewill. We may think we have freewill, but God at least partially intervenes and brings woe as punishment for sin and blessings as reward for righteousness to God’s people.

The Vikings TV show portrays the exploits of Ragnar Lothbrok and his contemporaries (dramatized beyond what we know of that time from the available historical accounts.) The Norse gods and the Christian God play a large part in the lives of all the people, from the leaders driven to conquer and rule more territory, to the warrior and soldiers who fight for leaders, sometimes this one, other times that one, and the peasants and farmers who provide for their leaders generously and sometimes enough for their own families. The interplay provides one overriding truth (chosen by the writers and creators), which is that the gods and God are used to further the aspirations of the most ambitious, to ameliorate those who receive no advantage, and to explain everything as ‘the will of the gods’ or as it is ordained by God.

Fate. These statements undercut human freewill and responsibility.

The most ambitious and destructive individuals see all this and use this ‘religious’ excuse in every way possible to further their own ambitions … which inevitably costs many other people their lives! The freewill of these people is to use the mass acceptance of Fate as an explanation for the course of life to hide their own sins so freely done.

It is a horrible and accurate portrayal of what the human heart is capable of. Let no one today be so foolish to think this does not continue, and will continue as long as humans survive. So how are we to respond to the pervasive sin and evil wrought so freely by humans?

We cannot declare with any honesty that we are entirely free of such sin and evil. There is no one that qualifies for that purity, no one except Jesus, the Christ … who was God.

The Way of life that Jesus lead his followers to pursue, to endeavor to accomplish each day in their lives (and we in our lives) is to accept first one’s own sinfulness from which one cannot be free, to then trust God’s promise to love and forgive us even though we cannot deserve such love, to accept and trust that while we remain yet sinners God also makes us into saints who are capable of doing God’s work on earth. We remain able to choose to love God, all people, and all creation, even though we cannot help ourselves from choosing to turn from loving God, all people and all creation.

What this makes of our lives is not pre-determined by God. Our eternal end is offered to us by God, which is that we are God’s own children and God will bring us home, even as God will accompany us each day, each moment of our lives. As Christ is more and more revealed to us in our short lives and through all of history, so we will be more and more like him, for he has claimed us for God to be adopted as God’s own children.

What difference does this make for us and our endeavours each day?

We can trust that we can choose to bring life abundant to others with all God has provided us. This is the simple purpose of our lives. This is how our freewill can be directed by fearing and loving God above all else, loving all other people as (well as) ourselves, and even our enemies.

True Freedom

Monday, August 30, 2021

Everything

Even All We Think Is Hidden From the Light

Is Known by God

And Will Be Known By All!

Isaiah 29:15

Ha! You who hide a plan too deep for the Lord, whose deeds are in the dark, and who say, ‘Who sees us? Who knows us?’ You turn things upside down! Shall the potter be regarded as the clay?

Ephesians 5:13

Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness … Everything exposed by the light becomes visible

Words of Grace For Today

The evil that fills the world comes from the hearts of humans.

As the heart chooses to turn from God, so the heart thinks it can hide such a choice from God, which multiples the sins and the evil that is wrought.

Always, sinful humans think they can hide from God, even though God has made them. They can hide nothing from God. No one can.

The light of Christ will shine always into every dark corner that we think we can hide in.

God sees everything that is us, that is a part of our lives: everything we think, everything we say and write, and everything we do.

This is the promise that undoes all evil and sets us free, for God knows us completely, good and evil that we are. Yet God loves us, all of us, and rescues us from sin, forgives us, and renews life in us.

God Writes

Friday, August 27, 2021

Whether Written in Letters and Words on a Page

or

in the Clouds Each Day

The Light of Christ Shines Through the Darkness

and Transforms Our Hearts, Minds, and Souls

To God’s Good Purposes.

Psalm 19:8

The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is clear, enlightening the eyes.

2 Timothy 3:16

All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.

Words of Grace For Today

The Words recorded in scripture are long since recognized as instructive, inspired by God (though not written by anyone other than humans interpreting what God inspires), and providing health for the body, mind, and soul.

There is an idea that we can train ourselves in righteousness reflected in the words from the letter to Timothy.

Ah, yes, the age old turn of grace into something we must accomplish ourselves, even if it is only possible after God saves us.

What good does it do for us to think that after baptism we are more capable of being ‘trained’ to be righteous and do righteousness.

Paul’s comments on this (as opposed to pseudo-Paul, or letters written after Paul’s style), and Martin Luther’s are instructive: on our own we cannot do anything to make ourselves righteous before God, only God can bring us to righteousness. No matter how much we discipline ourselves, instruct ourselves, strive to change ourselves … there simply is no hope in or good result from such efforts. In fact they serve to blind us to the reality of who we are and who God is to us and who God makes us. We are, and always remain, sinners. Any effort to pretend it is otherwise only detracts from our faith, our trust in God, our hope in God’s Grace for us.

Grace.

Grace alone.

Then are we to simply allow ourselves to be as depraved and debauched as we can or would wont to be? Are we to focus on all that is sin and attempt to multiply our sins without end?

There is no good end to that, of course, as we destroy people and creation around us, and even ourselves.

As we acknowledge that we are sinners and will always remain sinners, and that only by Grace can God make us to be anything else, and in fact God makes us saints, holy people who reflect God’s Grace, Truth, and Love … THEN

Then we can choose to put aside sin (as best we can), and allow God’s Grace to flow through us, infusing our thoughts, words, and deeds with God’s free and unconditional love for all people.

Then we may just be the reflectors of God’s righteousness. BUT we fall into the Devil’s snare if and when we try to claim that we, made to reflect God’s Grace by God’s Grace alone working in us, have somehow accomplished this sainthood on our own merits (or even in part on our own merits.)

Scripture inspires us as God-made saints to reflect God’s Grace, and to confess daily or more often that we sin and cannot free ourselves … or even do anything good … except by God’s Grace working in and through us.

Scripture inspires us. That is it creates in us an awareness of God’s presence in, with, and through us. Scripture does not make us more or other than we are. Neither does scripture reflect God’s own thoughts. Scripture remains the result of sinful humans, interpreting and reflecting God’s presence in their imperfect lives.

Not perfect: neither us humans, nor the scriptures we produce by God’s inspiration. But they are the best it gets, kind of like us. We are the best it gets, until God works through us, and then we still are the best it gets.

Which as God’s Grace works in us can be awfully awesome and wondrous … which can also be the scariest and the most comforting experience we will ever have. The scariest it is because it exposes with great clarity the raw sin and evil in us that we otherwise would hide from and deny. The most comforting it is because that raw sin and evil (so horrid as it is) is dealt with by God and it needs no further effort on our part to be set to rest in our pasts.

What a life!

By Strength in Battle or by Grace

Friday, August 20, 2021

Our Ways

Always Lands Us in the Darkness of the Wilderness.

Even there Christ’s Light Shines

Beckoning Us to Follow

Christ’s Way As

Saints

2 Chronicles 25:8

Rather, go by yourself and act; be strong in battle, or God will fling you down before the enemy; for God has power to help or to overthrow.’

Romans 8:34

Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us.

Words of Grace For Today

The way of humans:

Strive, train and become strong to fight, kill one’s enemies and competitors so that all will fear you, get other people to do your will so that you prosper and can enjoy the good things of life and so that your future is secure, trusting that God will reward you for your strength, power, and goodness.

The way of gods since the beginning of time, including those of our ancestors:

(See above for the way of humans.)

The Way of Jesus Christ:

God gives up everything, sacrifices God’s self, and in apparently being defeated by God’s enemies of evil and by death itself God triumphs by coming back to life. The story of Jesus instructs us, that it is not our power that wins anything worth winning. The story of Jesus demonstrates that God wins no matter what, that we need not become strong to fight, kill one’s enemies and competitors so that all will fear you, get other people to do your will so that you prosper and can enjoy the good things of life and so that your future is secure!

Indeed, God uses human weakness and sin, even evil and death itself, to demonstrate that God pours out grace upon all humans, regardless of their goodness; that is God offers forgiveness and renewed life to all people of all time, without respect to any merit. God gives this forgiveness and renewed life without cost or price or as a reward for anything we are or anything we can do. We cannot earn God’s forgiveness and renewed life; we can only humbly accept it … or arrogantly reject it.

There is no battle that we need to train for or enter into or enemies that we need to kill. God simply transforms us wretched sinners into God-made saints (even as we simultaneously remain sinners all our lives) so that we can be the vessels, the conduits, the agents on earth who bring God’s love and grace, forgiveness and renewed life, and fulfilled promises and hope to all people.

There is no battle that we need to train for or anything else that is our human way of ‘getting ahead’ in life, because with Christ as our protector and interceding for us so that God is always for us, we need not strive to make our own ways in life. Our way is Christ’s way, the way of the saints.

There is no glory in this way of life for us, but there is the fullness and abundance of life that cannot be enjoyed in any other way.

God help us if … no, to put it correctly: God help us when we try to find our own ways through life.

All by Grace …

Monday, August 16, 2021

No Matter

How Grand Our Accomplishments Appear to Us

They are Only Like Weeds

That Blossom When Watered and Given Sun

By God’s Good Grace

Psalm 115:1

Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory, for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness.

Romans 12:3

For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.

Words of Grace For Today

I woke to mow back the weeds and grass to keep down the mosquitoes and give fewer places for wasps to hide and surprise me when I’m out walking and working.

Do I get credit for putting in the sweat time, going back and forth across and up and down the hill? Why not? After all I was the one up before 6 am to be out before the hot sun heated the meadow and hillside to over 30⁰C when mowing risks heat stroke, swarming by black flies and an unwanted encounter with wasps.

George lived his whole live long working hard ‘in the trenches’, sometimes literally, for the city. He started out as a labourer and ended up a labourer who knew more about the infrastructure of the small city he lived in (especially what was where underground) than any other person alive. Others could access the plans and records. George had been there to install, upgrade or repair almost every bit of what lay underground. Even in his 70’s George was exceptionally strong, stronger than four or five men his size and he was not short at 5’11”.

Does George (like other hard manual labourers in the world) get the credit for a life of good, honest, hard work providing services to people who knew little of his work or how it provided them water, sewer, electricity and gas into their homes and business?

Sue raised two sons and two daughters in some of the roughest conditions possible, moving from the wilderness of northern Minnesota, to the heat of Arizona, to the wild temperate climate of a very rural part of Alaska sort of near Anchorage. Her children all married, became productive contributors to society, and had their own children. Sue travelled back to Minnesota to care for her elderly and aging mother, to her children spread across the west, and provided a home for her husband, most often with a gentle and firm honest kindness. Does Sue like so many mothers and fathers actively raising children get the credit for the goodness in her children and the kindness she provides to so many people?

The world would answer these questions of credit and say of course! Each person gets the credit for the good they do … and the bad they don’t do. And likewise those who do evil things get the discredit for their deeds. It is simple to measure a person’s goodness or evil by what they have accomplished.

This measure is not God’s, and God’s answer to who gets the credit for all these good things done over different lifetimes is not the person who lived the life. The credit goes to God and God alone for creating, forgiving, sanctifying (making holy, into saints), and renewing life in these people so that they would not be caught as prisoners of their own sins, instead they are freed to do good things in God’s creation.

For by the grace given to us we know that it is not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory, for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness.

Giving God an Earful, and Then …

Sunday, August 15, 2021

In God’s Creation

God’s Glory Is Always Grand

And

Our Place is Always

Quite Humble

Job 40:3-4

Then Job answered the Lord: ‘See, I am of small account; what shall I answer you? I lay my hand on my mouth.’

1 Corinthians 15:9-10

For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace towards me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them—though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.

Words of Grace For Today

Job answers God, ‘I lay my hand on my mouth.’

Anyone who has read Job even a bit knows that Job does not ‘lay his hand on his mouth.’ Quite the opposite. Job is an example of one who speaks clearly, desperately and angrily at God. A good example Job is, too, in this way; an example that shows we can throw everything at God, everything that is in our hearts and on our minds, no matter how desperate or angry it may be.

The second half of that lesson is in the verses above. After Job has thrown everything at God, Job is more than ready to listen to God. Job does keep quiet. And God gives him an earful (which is more like a whole body-ful and a lifetime-full.)

Job knows God is the One great enough to handle all his pain, all his suffering, all his anger, all his frustrations. Remember Job has, through no fault of his own (though his enemies and even friends continually tell him it must be his fault – not really good friends) Job has lost all his livestock, his workers, his home, his wife, and his children. Job has lost everything and his health is failing. He is very near slipping into his grave. To put it in perspective, the view of how most people viewed misfortune was that when someone suffered a loss of any kind, it was because that person or that person’s parents had sinned. Job’s losses are so great that it seems so obvious to people that Job must have sinned greatly. The book of Job, in part, is the story that corrects that view. Just because one suffers, does not mean that one has sinned in a way to deserve that suffering.

The story of Job and that lesson needs to be repeated often, for the lesson is hard to learn and even harder to remember. Even in Jesus day (John 9:2) the disciples ask Jesus ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ And in our day, we so often dismiss the poor, the disadvantaged, the outcasts, alcoholics, addicts and co-addicts, the falsely accused and convicted because we think in some way or another or even directly, they have reaped the rewards from their own sinful living.

In this way we try in vain to build some protection for ourselves, some false barrier between us and the disasters that have taken these people down. Truth is, though, we could all be taken down. When an innocent person like myself can be falsely accused, the police invite so many people to make false reports, the lay pastor and church leaders create false scenarios and make false reports, even banning me from church, the lawyers invite false testimony, plenty of people provide outright lies under oath, and even the judges lie about the evidence in order to convict me (and the judges did not lie about peripheral things, they lied about the key evidence that exonerated me, and created false evidence needed to convict me) … when all this happens to an innocent person, then the truth is simple: there is no justice available to anyone (not even my false accusers) and anyone can be convicted of anything at any time. We live in a country where the courts are easily able to be no less than barbaric and cruel. It is one of the signs that our societal contract is shredded at it’s core. There is no protection for anyone, and all continues on it’s merry way as if the justice system were actually just because we are all too afraid (rightfully so) to admit that there is no justice system, there is only an institutionalized system of bullying people, whether they have broken the law or not.

Like Job, we need to take this to God, in all the horror that it is for us all, and then listen to God’s response.

Paul provides us an example of how we prepare to listen to God’s response. Though he writes and is listened to by many people as an authority, a messenger from God, Paul does not become a bully over others. He remains humble, knowing his place and knowing God’s place in his life. God walks with him. He remembers always that though he worked harder than any of [the other apostles] … it was not [Paul who did this blessed work of sharing the old, old story of Jesus and his love], but the grace of God that is with [him]. Paul remembers clearly the days when he persecuted the followers of Jesus, and even organized the stoning of Stephen.

Paul knows his place. Paul knows God’s place. Paul counts on God to keep God’s promise to walk with him, no matter the suffering that comes his way, .. and the suffering comes in spades.

Paul and Job are examples for us, to bring everything to God, and to count on God to keep God’s promise to walk with us, no matter what.

Job recovered, and regained more than he had lost. It rarely works that way in life. More often we come to the end of our suffering by the release of death, and being called home – as Paul was, like so many other martyrs for Christ.

Septic Truth; Glorious Blessings

Tuesday, August 10, 2021

Like Flower in the Grass

We Are Here Today and Gone Tomorrow

On Our Own We Are No More Than Weeds

In God’s Gracious Light We Become Beautiful

As We Turn Our Lives Towards God

Job 21:22

Will any teach God knowledge, seeing that he judges those that are on high?

Romans 12:16

Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are.

Words of Grace For Today

The beginning of wisdom is the fear and love of the Lord.

The critical piece in fearing and loving God is that one has then identified one’s place in creation, in the universe, and among God’s people.

Some have said (and said rightly) that the original sin (the one that leads to all others, the first sin, the one portrayed in Eve and Adam eating the fruit of the forbidden tree and getting kicked out of the garden of paradise) is pride or arrogance, that is hubris. It is to place oneself incorrectly in creation and among God’s creatures. It is to place oneself above what one is not above. It is to claim one is wiser, purer, better, more powerful, etc., etc. than one actually is. It is to forget that one is God’s creature, and a miserable sinful one at that.

This misplacement of oneself is often borne of and supported by luxuries that one enjoys (that others cannot) leading one to think one has ‘earned them’ when they are only gifts given by God, and then abused as trophies reflecting one’s supposed station high above others. In fact one, with this false pretense of status, has actually placed oneself on the lowest rung of sinners, those that delude themselves with falsehoods about their own worth.

So we see that money corrupts, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The danger in being one to speak about these corrupting self-image sins is that one participates more fully in them; the only difference is that the ‘luxury’ that one touts as a marker of one’s ‘better status’ in creation is a supposed wisdom, one about other people’s sins. Wisdom about other’s sin and a blindness to one’s own sins is a powerful tool of the devil to win hearts and souls. With the goodness of God (wisdom in this case) claimed as one’s own, one has misplaced oneself in creation, supposedly better than all those miserable rich, powerful, famous sinners. In fact one actually marks oneself therewith as right in the pack of miserable sinners who think they are above others in God’s creation.

Ahh, what is one to do? Should one pretend to know nothing? Should one abandon one’s calling and consecration to bring God’s Word to all people? No, one simply need return to remembering that all people sin, oneself as well. That everyday is a sinners path for every person, oneself included. That only by Grace is one able to be a saint, a God-made saint. One humbly prays for forgiveness, trusts that it is given even before one asks, and proceed humbly through the day, as one of God’s lowly creatures, called to speak truth, even though one is at ‘the bottom of the cesspool of sinners’ on earth.

One will then have no trouble associating with the lowly, providing comfort to the lonely and distressed, aiding the helpless and hapless alike, freeing the prisoners, and acting for justice for all people … all in Jesus’ name. One lives filled with gratitude, giving God credit for anything good one is able to do, proclaiming from ‘the bottom of the cesspool of sinners’ on earth how great God is to bless such a miserable sinner as oneself, a sign that God does bless any and all who will receive the blessing even as they fear and love God from ‘the bottom of the cesspool of sinners’ on earth.

Dumbstruck

Monday, August 9, 2021

Winter, Spring, Summer, or Autumn

God’s Gracious Wisdom

Leaves Us All in Awe,

Dumbstruck.

Isaiah 11:2

The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

Luke 20:26

They were not able in the presence of the people to trap him by what he said; and being amazed by his answer, they became silent.

Words of Grace For Today

God blesses us all with gifts. Most often we ignore them as gifts, assuming we have full title to them and all they can bring to us.

God blesses some of us, it seems very few of us, with amazing gifts of the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

Quite understandably when those who claw their way on their own efforts to positions of power and status, at others’ expense and lives, encounter the one so blessed they attack to undo what is foreign to them and therefore a threat to their fragile ‘house of cards’: simple goodness and kindness.

The encounter rarely goes as they planned or hoped and if …

if they are at all honest or honourable, they will quickly realize that this person embodies for God the reality of God’s rule over all, which their lives so contradict, and yet which is what they seek to achieve on their own …

and

they are dumbstruck, with awe

and

with fear.

Such is the encounter with God’s blessings that are not denied or rejected by the person receiving them.

The world needs more such blessed, holy saints … those who God chooses as God’s own children, who do not pervert or attempt to control God’s blessings. The world needs saints to embody God’s will for all on earth, namely that we live for each other, simply, gently, kindly, and graciously.

The wasps built another new nest, since I did not eliminate their queen with the second nest destroyed. That nest was eliminated last night, for the wasps are so plentiful that they make simple tasks a huge risk, as they buzz my face without notice if I am outside working or walking.

To have a safe place where I can live the wasps need to be reduced in number so that this space is rarely prowled by wasps. Thus the nest must go and all in them. So last night at 1:20 the new nest was saturated and the wasps all eliminated, queen and all in the nest.

This is not how God calls us to live with other people, no matter how threatening their prowling is in our lives, no matter how many times they have ‘stung’ us leaving us incapacitated for days, weeks, years.

It is not difficult to image how much better life would be if one’s enemies and their ‘nests’ could be eliminated.

God chooses that even our enemies receive grace, and the time for the amendment of their lives. Better a convert (a grace-made saint-sinner) than a dead wretchedly evil sinner.

The sun rises. The sun sets. Another day in God’s creation as a blessed grace-made saint-sinner. When we recover from encountering God’s awe-fully wonderful and gracious wisdom our prayer is the same: God bless all goodness, leave sinners dumbstruck at your gracious wisdom, and eliminate all evil … in us sinners, all (also in our enemies.)

Blaster or Refuge Giver? Which Are You?

Sunday, August 8, 2021

Just Another Sunset

Which is Everything.

For It Is God’s Promise Fulfilled.

Isaiah 25:5

For you have been a refuge to the poor, a refuge to the needy in their distress, a shelter from the rainstorm and a shade from the heat. When the blast of the ruthless was like a winter rainstorm, the noise of aliens like heat in a dry place, you subdued the heat with the shade of clouds; the song of the ruthless was stilled.

Luke 1:51-52

He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly.

Words of Grace For Today

God definitely favours the poor, those in distress, and those lowly in life.

God provides the refuge, shelter, relief from the storms of the wickedly ruthless. God lifts up the lowly that they may not be so low as not to be able to live, and live abundantly.

God definitely does not favour those who cause others distress, those who are ruthless, those proud and haughty, nor the powerful.

God subdues the ruthless who are like a blast of heat or a blast of a wintry storm (snow and ice or rain, it matters not). God stills the song of the ruthless who think they have won so they sing their songs. God knows theirs is not a song to have sung by anyone. God scatters the proud with the terror of their own thoughts, the turmoil in their own hearts. God takes down those who are powerful and cruel.

There are many who camp for months on crown lands, never removing after 14 days their equipment, or they play a game and move every 21 or so days to a different campsite, so it looks like they have not camped in the same place. They are proud. They are hard on the land. They are sure that they are entitled to special treatment; they do not have to obey the laws.

There are many who come for a weekend, or 4 to 7 days, maybe even 14 or 28 days, and they camp with a wonderful view of the water, a mere 2 or 10 or 15 metres away. Perhaps they are oblivious to the proper care of the land and water, that camping is allowed but not within 30 metres of any body of water. They come in large motorhomes, in huge 5th wheel units, or long bumper pull campers, or short motorhomes or even tents. They claim the right to enjoy the water up close and to party and have open fires and drink at all hours and walk between campsites drinking.

Then there are those who bring quads and side by sides, who erode the fragile roads, plow through the brush, and make noise at all hours with their engines. And the partyers blast their loud music into the wee hours of the morning.

It is hard work to respect the laws and respect the land. Moving every 14 days, leaving crown land for 3 is expensive. Setting up and tearing down is not simple or easy.

What does God do about these proud people who destroy the land and water for their own ease and enjoyment.

Nothing.

God sends enforcement people from time to time; but they do little.

God sends educational people even less often; and they do precious little.

The Devil sends bullies and they simply rip up the place.

We thank God, that the storms of evil are calmed, if not all, then the ones that would steal our lives and our safety from us. We thank God that many of the people who come, even if they disrespect the laws and the land, do show a minimum of respect for other campers, and we are able to survive.

It’s not very high that God has lifted up the lowly homeless campers, yet it is high enough above the rock bottom of sure and quick death that there is always another sunrise to enjoy, another rain storm cooling away the searing heat, another snow storm laying down enough for skiing, another sunset to close out a full day, and always another gentle, kind person to speak to.

These are God’s people, doing God’s work of providing refuge. Are you one of these?

Or are you one that blasts others to get ahead?

God provides refuge. That keeps the grave at a distance. That keeps alive the promise of new life each day. That enables us to be God’s people for others, providing them refuge.