Sunset – Page 27

Dread can be Dead

Thursday, March 4, 2021

God, through the Seasons, Removes the Ice

from the Lake.

God is Always Ready to Remove

the ‘Ice’ and Dread

from our Hearts and Minds

Jeremiah 29:11

For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.

Colossians 1:19-20

For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

Words of Grace For Today

Calm

Breathe and Relax

Be Calm

A year ago as Covid 19 spreading across the globe started to invade our lives we were afraid, unsure, perturbed and disturbed though without any focus of at what except an invisible thing that was coming for us! In Lent suddenly we could no longer gather for worship. We stopped and thought we’d start again in a month, right? It was just a temporary restriction, a temporary closure!

A year later, again in Lent, we think we have seen it all, and with vaccines being distributed slowly we hope that it will soon come to an end, though we are dreading what may come first, or almost never voiced, we dread most of all that it might never end. We dread now what we know is not just a very painful death, but even with mild symptoms the effects of the virus’ invasion into our body can leave long term ‘scars’ or scares, as strokes, organ failure and even heart and brain failure, strike without warning. Long-haulers refers to those who get sick, quite sick, but recover only sort of as they remain incapable of working, functioning, or thinking straight for fatigue and pain and …. The cost to all humans is more devastating than we could have imagined. Now the variants spread more quickly, perhaps more deadly, perhaps more devastating in the long-term disruption to our bodies’ functioning.

This is our life, suddenly foisted upon us, whether we were settled and bored or at least boring in our privileged lives, or whether we struggled to survive each day as our very lives were under threat of war’s violence, starvation or dying of thirst for lack of water … or whether our lives were already lost to an existential thirst for living water. No matter where or how or what we were before, now Covid 19 is upon us and has been for quite some time now, still an unknown quantity despite all we have collectively learned about it.

God remains.

God remains as always with us.

God remains as always with us and for us.

God has plans for our welfare and not for harm, to give us a future with hope.

To demonstrate God’s intentions and plans for us, Jesus lived as one of us, and as we (not God as some would claim) demand payment for sins God sacrificed Jesus’ life to our jealous, sinful, greedy, corrupt injustice.

Through him God was pleased to reconcile to God’s self all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of Jesus’ cross.

What lengths God goes to. What lengths we need God to go to, in order that we may be convinced that God’s attitude toward us is reconciliation, forgiveness, redemption, sanctification, and renewed life!

There are countless reasons to panic, to be in dread, to be overwhelmed with angst.

There is one ultimate reason to be calm.

God is with us and for us, and spares nothing to convince us that our future is good; we have every reason to hope.

For all will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well.

Relax.

Breathe.

Be Calm.

Be God-made saints (though we remain simultaneously sinners.)

Breathe.

God’s got this (Covid and all), too.

Equality Is Not Possible Through Revenge

Wednesday, March 3, 2021

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God Created All Equally Favoured.

We can be courageous to live so, today!

Genesis 2:18

Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.’

John 19:26-27

When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.

Words of Grace For Today

There is something very wrong with this creation account in Genesis. How it has been used makes this very clear to anyone who wishes to pay attention.

While humans are both female and male, the story places one as the first consideration for God, and the other as an after-thought, a help mate for the first.

This story came out of a male biased culture and has been used to devalue females as second class humans. Abuses have abounded through history based solely on this false preference of God’s for males. These biases and their subsequent abuses used to seem so acceptable to some people, especially those that benefited from them. In truth they always have been an abomination for the whole species.

Today, as if this helps at all, many have turned these biases and abuses on their heads. Females are given free license to devalue, abuse, lie about, gaslight, and even kill males freely, as if it were their birthright as females. This ‘new’ bias-abuse of males can never set right the bias-abuse of females. In fact it is worse. For many the bias-abuse of females was unintentional, even by females who saw it as something for their benefit.

The ‘new’ (to our culture) bias-abuse of males to benefit females cannot be claimed by any to be participated in unawares. It is the flip of a terrible bias in history. For that matter continuing male-favouring biases is no longer excusable (because one was unawares) either, if it ever was.

A bias participated in aware of the bias and one’s participation in it is worse than an accidental bias in that it , on top of everything else, consciously chosen.

Female favouring biases are also most often pursued with revenge in mind. For example it is as if the abuse is pursued against this good male to take revenge for the abuse of other abusive males, even though the males are related only in that they are males.

That kind of blind revenge bias is many measures worse. It claims to set things right, yet it adds layer upon layer of lies and deception and damage to every situation.

Only Grace brings us to live past bias of any kind.

Jesus, on the cross, does not change that woman have next to no possibility to ‘take care of their own business.’ They require a man to own the property and from that provide for the woman. Instead Jesus acknowledges the disadvantage this places upon Mary, his mother, and he ensures that one of the disciples is now recognized by Mary as her son, and she is recognized by him as her mother.

Jesus does not remove the bias. Instead he ensures, despite the bias, that his followers and his mother are cared for as all people should be.

We can make changes, if all too slowly, to cultural biases. We need to do this with great courage and persistence. We need to work to remove the bias and all vestiges from our own lives. We need to actually remove and end the bias, not to merely replace it with an equally if not worse bias!

As we recognize our own sin (including biases), and the sin of our culture’s biases, we need swiftly and effectively mitigate the suffering all our biases cause people, including ourselves. We need to provide the care every human deserves for everyone we can.

This is the meaning of life, and the purpose of each day; to provide God’s Grace to all people.

For this we can live grateful lives.

God’s Wonders Keep Us In Life, No Matter What Comes Our Way

Sunday, February 28, 2021

God is with Us

Always

Though we Despair,

Nothing Can Separate Us From God’s Blessings and Joy.

Isaiah 43:5

Do not fear, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you.

2 Corinthians 4:8-9

We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.

Words of Grace For Today

God promises us no easy or comfortable life. God promises us, though, when life is horrendously challenging, we need not fear what may come our way: We need not fear.

Some people somehow learn not to panic in the most stressful situations, though we all have our limits. There are things that drive everyone of us over the bend, and into such distress that we cannot see our way forward.

Life with Christ as our guide, though, need never leave us in doubt; God accompanies us, and when we stray, God gathers us and our offspring in from all the corners where we have strayed and been scattered like dandelion seeds in the winds of summer thunderstorms. Life can be rough, so rough that it will easily appear to do us in.

God promises us we need not fear that such misadventure will do us in. Paul puts it well: We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.

God calls us to be saints, the people who reflect Christ’s light to all the world. As we work to bring to light the wonders of God’s miracles among us, there will be no end of challenges that we will face, that will tempt us, and that will do us in, except God finds us, delivers us, and sets us right again, to breathe for yet another day of service.

Light and easy our lives may not be, though accompanied by God we can trust we will endure everything that comes our way. Knowing God’s promises are sure, we need not panic. Not because we are so great or practised or immune. We need not panic because God guards our hearts and minds and strength with God’s own strength. Life for us never ceases to amaze or challenge or inspire.

Breathe. God’s spirit enters us, cleanses us, and inspires us.

Breathe. All will be well. All will be well. All manners of things will be well.

Breathe, Relax, Choose, Do the Saints’ Work

Thursday, February 25, 2021

Relax, Breathe,

No Matter the Path We Choose,

Nothing Can Separate Us From God’s Love.

2 Samuel 22:3

My God, my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold and my refuge, my saviour; you save me from violence.

Romans 8:38-39

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Words of Grace For Today

Covid 19 has brought many of the challenges to abundant living to the fore, making it impossible to ignore them. Poor care in (only some) senior care facilities, the real costs of homelessness (which we used to minimize by large social housing projects which were stopped decades ago, resulted in large homeless populations nearly everywhere, which we are only recently addressing and saving money doing so!), the huge percentage of our populations who have absorbed as the basis of their ‘rational’ thinking ‘Querdenken’, false-news, science-deniers, and wild conspiracy theories, which has fed racist and minority focused hate – this is possible since the powers that be have long since used propaganda, and all the above to rationalize their corrupt agendas and to remain in power. Fear mongering by politicians and power brokers and even courts has long term costs for a society and we are paying for it now, again, and will be for decades.

While the stress of isolation taxes each person’s resilience, the first step in responding to each new wave of stress is to relax. It is in fact the only healthy thing we can choose to do in the face of overwhelming stress.

Breathe.

Breathe deeply and slowly.

Breathe in the Holy Spirit’s presence to be in us. Allow it to cleanse and renew each fibre of our being.

Breathe out the effects of all evil and stress.

Breathe in deeply and slowly. Breathe out every source of stress.

Then we can remember who our rock and salvation is. Then we can remember the words of Paul which have sustained generations of God’s people:

Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

So assured, again, that God is with and for us, loving us, now we can return to providing that same unconditional love to those in need around us. We can start addressing, one by one, the ills of our society that Covid 19 has made more obvious. We can in fact bring an end to chronic homelessness. We can in fact provide better value (pay) for essential workers, and less for overpaid un-essential leeches on our society, like money brokers and stock market manipulators. We can ensure all people receive respect and care. We can deal with violence (physical and psychological) against all people by anyone, not just against women by men. We can begin to deal with the many who use religion to accumulate power for themselves, to hide their abuse of others, and to perpetrate violence against anyone who stands up to them. We have more than enough ‘wolves hiding in sheep’s clothing’ in our congregations. We can begin to deal with Querdenken and raw hatred based on religion, ethnicity, gender or any other measure by speaking truth, and protecting those who speak truth for us.

And we can begin and end each day thanking God: My God, my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold and my refuge, my saviour; you save me from violence.

Sheep of a Not Good Kind

Saturday, February 20, 2021

As of Old,

God’s Magnificence is Very Present

and God’s Love Redeems Us

When We Are Lost and Cantankerous.

Isaiah 63:9

It was no messenger or angel but his presence that saved them; in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; he lifted them up and carried them all the days of old.

Luke 15:5

When he has found [the lost sheep], he lays [the reckless, cantankerous, wandering-into-danger sheep] on his shoulders and rejoices.

Words of Grace For Today

Today so many people make up their religion from what they find available around them, as if it were all on a smorgasbord, all-you-can-eat for one small price.

They pick a little of this, and little of that, pile into their lives and try to make it through the day. Their smorgasbord is not certified or health inspected, nor governed by any safety measures. It contains delicious looking poisons, some that work fast, some that work slow, some that only work as death approaches from some other cause.

I met an older man when I was on 4 different medications and a regular injections just to make it through the day. He told me his story when he saw me take one pill. Years before he had a small health problem, went to the doctor and was prescribed a powerful medicine to deal with the issue. Then after months he developed a more serious issue, went to the same doctor and again received a script for medication to deal with that issue. In a few months he had three other rather debilitating issues including that he could not sleep through the night. More medications and a referral to a sleep clinic and thousands of dollars later he went to sleep with a breathing machine on his face. The first mask had eaten into his nose creating a sore that just would not heal, so he had to pay hundreds of dollars to get a different larger mask that covered most of his face. The sore took months to heal and left a noticeable scar.

One day, four years after his first minor issue, he got up and went out to repair a fence. It was rather simple manual work. Before this all started he did this kind of thing easily. Now he could barely gather the tools and supplies together. He made two slow trips to get the tools and supplies to the fence where it needed repairing. He spent hours to get the simple repair done that should have taken less than a half hour. Finally toward supper he came back into the yard, completely exhausted. He left his things for the next day to be put away and shed his jacket and boots as he came in and barely made it to his bed to lay down.

The next morning he woke up famished. His last meal was the morning the day before. He had not used his sleeping machine, he’d forgotten to take his medications. He felt better. He realized that while taking his medications and using the sleeping machine he felt ten times worse then he had with the first minor issue he went to the doctor to have dealt with years earlier. He stopped taking all the medications and using the sleeping machine.

Each day he felt noticeably better. A week later he went out to repair another area of the fence and it took him a half hour. Then he went online to the Mayo Clinic website and read about his first symptom, the medications he added each few months and their side effects. He realized that the first symptom could be dealt with by a change in diet and more exercise on a very regular basis. All the other symptoms were known side effects for the medications, each as they were added, at least for the first 4 drugs. Then it became clear to him he’d been on such a soup of drugs his body was completely incapable of dealing with all the powerful effects and side effects and it had started to slowly shut down.

His last comment finally caught my attention: he’d talked to a number of men who’d suffered the same thing. It was as if doctors were trying to incapacitate men with medications.

It took me a few months to realize the same thing had been done to me. I stopped taking all but the one medication I’d been on for decades that I needed for my GERDS. Life returned to normal and I started to realize I was also being abused and gaslit by my now ex.

As in the days of old, God gathered in this wandering sheep, carried me back to the flock, and saved my life, literally and figuratively. For this I give God thanks each day, and pray for those that tried to do me in, and still try to this day. May God gather them into the flock, as in the days of old.

Faith and one’s faith community is not a smorgasbord, any more than medications are a smorgasbord to pick and choose from. Traditions develop and continue because they provide a healthy manner of living. Humans continually mess up the traditions, and the traditions, at least my Lutheran Christian tradition, is well prepared to face such challenges and call us back to rely on …

to rely on God alone, and God’s Grace for us as the only thing that saves us. We need one thing, something like I needed only one medication. We require God’s Grace. Everything else only appears to provide us life abundant. In fact the ‘side effects’ of most religious self-made conglomerations is that one finds oneself out in the wilderness, defenceless as the wolves come closer and closer.

Thanks be to God, for God’s Grace, made known to us through Jesus’s old, old story.

As of old, God walks with us, and rejoices when we return to the flock after we inevitably stray into danger that could do us in. Our enemies, and God’s enemies, may want us dead and work hard to accomplish that, doch God works wonders to save us, and there is joy for us, because of God’s Grace, all the days of our lives.

In Our Sin God’s Greatness Is Most Clear

Friday, February 19, 2021

The Cracks Let’s the Light In, The Shadows Point to God’s Greatness

We May Think Sin Keeps Us From God

It Is In Our Sin That God

Most Clearly Demonstrates God’s Greatness

Deuteronomy 3:24

‘O Lord God, you have only begun to show your servant your greatness and your might; what god in heaven or on earth can perform deeds and mighty acts like yours!

Colossians 1:27

To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

Words of Grace For Today

It matters not how much we’ve experienced of God’s great wonders as blessings poured out on us, there is always going to be more and more and more. We cannot know everything that God has in mind for us; the goodness and blessings flow without end.

Jesus’ contemporaries expected that God’s blessings would flow only to the Israelites. The surprise and unexpected comes after Jesus’ death when it is made clear that God’s blessings flow even to those who are not Jews. Paul did Jesus’ work well, as did others, ensuring that Gentiles and Jews alike knew God would bless all kinds of people, Jews and Gentiles.

Today, we also try to restrict God’s blessings to only some people. As people have since the beginning of time, we try to claim we are better, more blessed, by God than others, which somehow explains that while others do not have God’s favour, we, even if we do not deserve it, are God’s chosen few.

False pride in all that, and to ensure we are not found out to be no better than others, we try to make others out to be much more terrible than they really are. Lies, deception and all that goes around freely.

This is what we do, unabashedly sinful to try to make ourselves appear to be better than we are.

God knows all this about us. Even so God exercises grace upon grace for us, forgiving and renewing us to live as God’s own children, God made saints.

Such riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in [us], the hope of glory, are made known to the Gentiles … exactly in this way: the Gentiles have no expectations of God’s blessings, unlike the Jews. So the Gentiles, when they know God blesses them without end, know that this is God’s real work for us all, this is the sure demonstration of God’s wonderful Grace – the greatest work of God, that the undeserving receive God’s favour and blessings.

This is the good news for us: we do not deserve anything good from God, and still we receive blessings upon blessings.

Then the big surprise comes: God blesses those we most think do not deserve God’s attention yet alone all of God’s blessings poured endlessly out upon them.

What a surprise, a surprise of all God’s goodness for us … and for all people.

God is Great, … We Ain’t Even Close To Great

Wednesday, February 17, 2021

We May Creatively Make All Sorts of …

God Makes Everything We Create From.

Psalm 65:6

By your strength you established the mountains; you are girded with might.

1 John 2:2

He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.

Words of Grace For Today

God is the mightiest further beyond the existence of the universe. God established the mountains. God established the whole universe and beyond, also time itself. So great is God.

We on the other hand in comparison can only pretend at greatness.

It is terrible what we require. We require forgiveness, all of us require forgiveness.

God is great enough to speak a word and make it so. We on the other hand need more. We expect grace and forgiveness to cost us something, and for that God does so much more than speak. God sends God’s only son, Jesus, to live as one of us, to demonstrate God’s love, grace and forgiveness, by dying to demonstrate that God forgives us, demonstrating that Jesus pays (atones) for our sins.

The story is simple. The implications for us are wide and deep: we cannot pretend that God created the universe only for us, that we and not others can receive God’s Grace and atonement. Jesus’ death is God’s demonstration that God has paid for all our sins, for all the sins, of the world.

With a word God created the universe and all that is in it, including us, all of us. With a life God demonstrates for us sorry lot that God provides all that we need, including the demonstration for us that all our sins are forgiven.

All the other things that we need God provides as well. Life in God’s world is not a zero sum game where we have to take from others in order to have enough. In fact, God showers us with more than enough so that we can share it with others. In our sharing the goodness of life, the goodness of life is multiplied for all people, and for us. It is God’s way that the abundance of life comes to all people. It comes in such a quality as to ‘infect’ the whole world with it’s goodness exactly then as we share God’s goodness with others.

Covid 19 spreads, with new variants it spreads even faster, through droplets of virus in the air that spread and linger like the aroma from a meal cooking in the kitchen can be appreciated upstairs and downstairs, and for hours after the stove is turned off.

God’s Grace spreads even faster, through our sharing with each other the goodness that we find in life.

So while the restrictions are in place, call someone new each day, and share some goodness with them. For God’s sake, and for everyone’s sake, including your own sake.

Injustice At Home, From Bottom to Top

Tuesday, February 16, 2021

Some Days Are Deceptive

We Think Troubled Waters are Elsewhere,

But the Heavens Tell Us Otherwise!

1 Kings 8:59-60

Let these words of mine, with which I pleaded before the Lord, be near to the Lord our God day and night, and may he maintain the cause of his servant and the cause of his people Israel, as each day requires; so that all the peoples of the earth may know that the Lord is God; there is no other.

Revelation 15:4

Lord, who will not fear and glorify your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship before you, for your judgments have been revealed.

Words of Grace For Today

We bring our petitions to God each day, praying for justice. Many people think of countries far away, where we hear reports, believable reports of war and genocide, of intentional starvation and deprivation of populations in opposition to or of different ethnicity than those in power, gender and sexual orientation based violence and murder. We pray indeed that God will bring justice to these places around the globe, for we know that we are all in this together.

Covid 19 has taught us that there is no population anywhere on earth that can be separated from the rest of us, denied safety measures and care, without that allowing Covid 19 to multiply, mutated and spread faster, deadlier to all of us on this planet. The effects from infection are deadly to the elderly, at first. Now we learn that for all others, even those with minor symptoms the ravages of this virus can be chronic and debilitating, or give rise to sudden deadly mis-health events like stroke, heart attack, and sudden death. No age, no degree of health before the infection seems to be ‘safe’. We are all in this together, whether we like it or not, whether we admit it or not.

It is good that we pray for many peoples far and wide. Our petitions for justice closer to home are harder to pray. We are right in the middle of horrendous injustices. We call for awareness of women killed by violent men; and we ignore that ten times more men are killed by violence than women. Why?

It is good that we pray for the vulnerable, for women, for children, for elderly, for the poor, for those caught in systemic prejudice, for the homeless, for those now caught by Covid 19 restrictions and tossed into poverty, for the disabled, and for those of different faiths, customs, genders, sexual orientation, colour, nationalities, and abilities. It is not nearly enough for we ignore so much reality when we pray only these prayers, when we work to bring God’s justice only to these people.

We need to pray for those with privilege, power, influence, and wealth. They perpetrate injustices while hiding from themselves perhaps and definitely from others their complicity in and complacence to injustice which helps guarantee their continued privilege, power, influence, and wealth. We need to pray not just for our government leaders, and all in government, elected and hired. We need to pray not just for those in business, large and small, who benefit greatly from the greed based economy of the world. We need to pray not just for those who serve as police, enforcing injustice as much as they enforce law and order. We need to pray for judges and justices who determine how laws are applied, or as it is in Alberta, how laws are ignored along with truth, as they knowingly, gleefully, and even cruelly hand down decisions that are irrational, unjust, and favour those with connections, influence, and wealth.

Bill Hordern wrote:

Therefore, as Reinhold Niebuhr saw so clearly, governments are never simply a protection against injustice, they are also strongholds of injustice. Although the Christians ought to seek to have the government protect the weak from the strong, in fact most governments tend to protect the strong from the weak. The sword is wielded to maintain the status quo and all its inequities. Therefore, we should be prepared to see that service to God rather than to man may sometimes bring us into conflict with the rulers over many more matters than just the niceties of theological doctrine or ecclesiastical practice. (Living by Grace p.195)

These words were quoted by a now bishop in a text study decades ago. This year a good pastor added: Hence the wisdom from the theology of the survivors of WW2, and the wisdom of the Civil rights warriors like John Lewis who said: ‘Get into good trouble!’

We need to pray everyday that God’s day of judgment will come soon, and save us all. So we plead with our ancestors:

and

Lord, who will not fear and glorify your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship before you, for your judgments have been revealed.

Reality: Sins, Confession, & God’s Joy.

Monday, February 15, 2021

It is as good as it gets: blessed by God!

It looks beautiful.

The reality is the lake is poisoned and the weeds are fortunate to survive.

God redeems us and all creation:

Poisoned by sin and evil

God makes us beautiful again.

Judges 10:15

The Israelites said to the Lord, ‘We have sinned; do to us whatever seems good to you; but deliver us this day!’

Luke 15:7

Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance.

Words of Grace For Today

Confession is admission of one’s sins.

Confession is really possible for us only when we know that God is ready to forgive us.

So the Israelites say to God: ‘We have sinned; do to us whatever seems good to you; but deliver us this day!’ They know that God will deal fairly with their sins … and that God will deliver them from their sins.

This we know as well.

Yet, we often hesitate to confess our sins. We prefer to hide our own sins, even hiding them from ourselves, yet alone … from God. Well, we try to hide our sins from God, even though we know that there is no way, no way at all, to hide our sins or anything else from God!

This is what we know: God’s priorities and reasons for joy are not what ours are. As we try to hide our sins and hide from our sins, we think that the greatest thing is for God to know we are righteous, worthy of God’s favour.

Of course, there is no one who is righteous before God and worthy of God’s favour. We are all miserable, wretched sinners. None of us deserve God’s favour. Not on our own.

God’s joy is truly then when we recognize reality, our reality as sinners, and our reality before God, that we desperately need God’s forgiveness. God offers us forgiveness and waits for us to repent. God forgives us first and then waits for us to repent.

It is God’s joy to see us repent. Our sins are not what God desires, they are miserable after all, and they are inevitable. God knows our sins long before we commit them, long before we are even conceived, even before God created the universe. God knows what God created and who and what we are. The joy God finds is when we take our situation that God created us to live in as seriously as God took it before, while and after we were created: we are sinners and we need forgiveness, and life for us is much better for us when we confess. That’s just how it works the best.

Of course that does require us to be humble, and be humbled again and again. That’s just our reality. Better to take reality for what it is, and celebrate God’s Grace as the lubrication that keeps life running smoothly, or at least as smooth as God can make our sinful lives by redeeming them freely.

Which certainly beats trying to live out our own lies about our own sins! One would describe living redeemed by God as …

well, blessed abundantly by God!

May We have Peace on Valentine’s Day!

Sunday, February 14, 2021

God Gives Us Light To Find Our Way Home,

To Accept and Give Forgiveness Always to Everyone

So That All May Know Peace!

Psalm 29:11

May the Lord give strength to his people! May the Lord bless his people with peace!

Ephesians 2:17

So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near.

Words of Grace For Today

Peace is not the absence of conflict, nor the absence of violence even. Peace can coexist with both of these, though it works to pull us from violence to negotiation with each other, and from conflict with each other to harmony with (not each other) … with God’s Will for us.

CBC gave air time to a woman looking to organize mass fasting to call attention to domestic violence. She wanted those fasting to explain why they were hungry, and how terrible it is, now with Covid 19 restrictions, for women to be caught at home with their abusers. She wanted men to find a better model of what men can be. She wanted to call attention to the many, many women who are killed as a result of abuse.

All sort of good and well, as far as it goes. She seems to want, as many do, for us all to forget that ten times, got that, TEN TIMES! as many men die from violence as do women. Her project is a common one voiced today: women need to be protected from evil men. There are no good men, just evil men.

If similar things were said about women, their would be an uproar of denunciation of the misogyny. But no one even mentions that this woman’s statements devalue men, categorizing us all as abusers and as evil men who need to rethink who we are in order to become something better. No one voices the realization that this is misandry (the hatred of and devaluing of men.)

Make no mistake: some men kill women. AND some women kill men. Some use force, some use manipulation.

As if to make it sound like women are under greater threat, among other misandrist statements, it is said men are afraid a woman will laugh at him; women are afraid a man will kill her. The reality is when a woman laughs at a man, she devalues him, announces it for many to see, and taking his respect from him leaves him easy prey for both men and women bullies and abusers to kill him, if not directly with force then with psychological manipulation until there is nothing left of his life, not at all, not at all. The truth is men are as afraid of women killing him (often using men to accomplish the deed) as a women are afraid that men will kill them.

Abuse is abuse. Gender is not really a factor. Stereotypes are a serious problem because the mask the real issues with false issues.

That’s what is so terribly wrong with this woman’s campaign to get people to fast; it assumes all men kill women, and forgets that lots of women kill men, and regardless of who does the killing and how, many more men (ten times as many as women), our brothers, fathers, uncles, sons, and grandfathers, are dying, murdered by others.

Peace is not to point fingers and eradicate the falsely identified murder or the murderers. Peace is much more profound. Peace, real peace, requires that we acknowledge true reality. Real peace is to first realize that a part of each of us contributes to the conditions and circumstances we all live under in our society. Peace is second to forgive ourselves and accept others’ forgiveness of us, and to accept God’s forgiveness (actually that has to come first before other forgiveness is possible.) Third, peace is to forgive others so that there is no more finger pointing or calling out for others to change. The change has to be made within each of us first, and we have to point to the other as already forgiven … so that they may choose to change. Fourth, peace asks of each of us that we be profoundly thankful that forgiveness is possible, that God starts us off down that path, again and again each day.

If we are going to fast (and some like me cannot fast without putting ourselves at great physical risk of needing hospitalization to recover or we die) then it is to fast quietly, for this is what we need most: an inward healing of our relationship with God, God’s creation and God’s creatures, especially other people.

If we are going to put on a campaign to raise awareness of injustice, and in particular avoidable murder, then we cannot tie that message to misogyny or misandry. That only exacerbates the underlying lies we tell ourselves about the polarized genders, which drives us further and further from any possible reduction of avoidable murder. It in fact raises the conflict to higher levels, which in turn gives rise to more pain, which gives rise to more violence (physical and psychological) and that leads to more destruction of people, including physical and psychological deaths.

We need models for real peace. God sent us Jesus to live that model for us. There are a great number of saints who have provided models as well. We need to remember the old, old story of Jesus and his love, and of the saints that teach us faith and real peace, giving us real hope. Remember the good examples (they were human so they were not perfect) of Martin Luther King Jr., Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, Bonhoeffer, and many others. Above all begin each day remembering Jesus and his love, and all God does for us. From gratitude for all God’s blessing we can find our way to peace, even amidst conflict and violence and injustices all around us.