Category: Perspective

Blessing Us Dirt

Thursday, July 29, 2021

God’s Light and Blessing

Makes Even

Dirt

Golden

Ezekiel 36:9

See now, I am for you; I will turn to you, and you shall be tilled and sown.

Acts 17:28

We too are God’s offspring.

Matthew 20:1

For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire labourers for his vineyard

Words of Grace For Today

I always enjoy the biblical humour: the good news Ezekiel shares is that God is for the people, and they are compared to the dirt of the earth that is tilled and sown in order that something good will grow from it.

The people are, in this metaphor, nothing, just dirt to be trod upon … until God chooses to use them, to turn them over with the plow, to put something good into them that will grow, taking nutrients from their useless dirt, in order to produce food that will sustain others in life. And yet they, though useful to God’s project of providing food for others, and though God is with them, … they remain still dirt.

God turns to them, and they are tilled and sown.

So it is with us.

The dirt of the earth are we, and yet God uses us, tills us with the plow turning us over into something that lays bare the darkness of us, and then God puts good seeds in us, they grow, and food is produce for others, and we remain only dirt, the dirt of the earth. In this metaphor if we become or are and remain the salt of the earth, nothing will grow in us, and others will have no food. Best we are simply dirt, so that others may live.

This we are, the dirt of the earth. Still God claims us as offspring, as God’s own children. Is it really a jump to a completely different metaphor. Yes, but no not really.

God’s children are only something special and good for the rest of creation because God makes it so. God’s children are saints … only because God makes us saints. We remain stains on the face of creation, sinful stains, even as God makes us saints.

The real story is that out of such dirt and such stains God demonstrates everything about God’s love for us: God makes saints out of stains, out of sinners, out of dirty old dirt. That is God’s miraculous work, that God can make saints out of us.

It may seem humorous to be compared to dirt as Ezekiel pronounces God’s blessing of turning toward us, humorous for the unexpected impossible comparison … but then that is what God does all the time. God surprises us with the unexpected.

God blesses us and claims us as God’s own children … though we certainly do not deserve it.

Now what are we going to do with this unexpected blessing, this daily unexpected, life-giving, astounding blessing!? What else other than to share it with as many people, especially those the world would call unfit, unacceptable, incapable of being a blessing for anyone.

God calls for workers, to care for the vineyard, to bring in the harvest, and make the wine. That’s us, dirt, children, and workers.

God’s Own Blue and Beautiful

Wednesday, July 28, 2021

God’s Creation

Blue and Beautiful

Darkened Always by Evil.

Job 12:10

In God’s hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of every human being.

Acts 17:28

[God made then so that ]… they … search for God … though indeed God is not far from each one of us. For “In God we live and move and have our being”; as even some of your own poets have said, “For we too are God’s offspring.”

Words of Grace For Today

Even the writer of the Acts came to know the truth, that God created us all and we thus search for God in our own ways.

Even so God needs not to be searched for, for God is not far from any one of us. For we in God we live and move and have our being; we are God’s offspring.

While the life of every living thing and breath is in God’s hands, that certainly does not mean that God protects our lives from destruction by those that would do us harm. Indeed we suffer great destruction from the evil one and from those that would advance themselves at other’s cost.

Our consolation is that God is never far from any of us. No matter how terrible it gets at the hands of our enemies we need not search for God, God is with us. No matter how difficult it becomes as resources, circumstances, friends, church, family, and even hope abandon us and we feel we are left isolated to die on our own in the wilderness, God walks with us. God provides everything to us that we need to live abundantly. This is not that we will have an abundance of anything in life, except that we will live with God’s abundant Grace, Mercy, and Blessings.

It can always get worse.

It never gets bad at all, since God is with us.

It is most terrible for those who work unjustly to do us harm, for they disconnect themselves from God, even as God is so near to them. By their own doing they walk alone in their self-made hell and terror.

For us every day is a day of peace, with ourselves, with God’s creation, and with God.

For we are God’s own children.

Plumb line – Remember & Pray

Monday, July 26, 2021

Even the blessing of a sandy beach

Can be darkened by a dirt.

All is possible in God’s creation,

Good and Evil.

Amos 7:2-3

When locusts sent by God had finished eating the grass of the land, I said, ‘O Lord God, forgive, I beg you! How can Jacob stand? He is so small!’ The Lord relented concerning this; ‘It shall not be,’ said the Lord.

1 Timothy 2:1

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings should be made for everyone.

Words of Grace For Today

God sends locusts and then plagues that devastate Israel. Amos begs God to forgive the people, and God does. Yet God establishes a plumb-line in Israel’s midst, and God will not pass them by … yet then Amos reports:

The Lord said, ‘See, I am setting a plumb-line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass them by; the high places of Isaac shall be made desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste, and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword.’

God follows up relenting and forgiveness with full desolation of Israel’s high places and sanctuaries, with their enemy rising up powerfully with the sword against them!

This does not seem like God provides much of a life for Israel. The message is clear: God does not protect anyone, not even the most blessed, from the consequences of sin and evil in the world, their own sin and the sin other others around them, and the evil that would take all we build up as signs of our prosperity and security we provide ourselves.

Paul, knowing full well the price that can be suffered by even himself though he deserved none of the persecution directed at him, advises the younger disciple Timothy (and all of us reading the letter so many generations later) to continue in practising his (our) faith by making supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings for everyone.

We cannot save ourselves. Nor can we save others from the evil and consequences of sin that is possible since God has given us the freedom to choose to love God and all creation.

We can remember that God has saved us.

We can remember that God has saved us and continues to save us each day.

We can remember that God has saved us and continues to save us each day though we do not deserve it.

We can remember that God has saved us and continues to save us each day though we do not deserve it, at no cost to us, fully paid for by Jesus’ sacrifice and God’s Good Will for us.

We can remember to pray … each day …

in thanks for all God does for us

and for all people, that they would also remember God’s mighty, blessed works for them.

Forgetful Us

Thursday, July 22, 2021

We remember the Joy

of the Light freeing us from winter’s grip.

Help us remember

God’s freeing us from evil’s grip

each day.

Deuteronomy 6:11-12

When the Lord your God has brought you into the land that he swore to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you—a land with fine, large cities that you did not build, houses filled with all sorts of goods that you did not fill, hewn cisterns that you did not hew, vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant—and when you have eaten your fill, take care that you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

1 John 3:17

How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?

Words of Grace For Today

Today’s world is in upheaval again and for sure still: Covid 19 has taken it’s toll on the world economy and specific countries’ economies, including ours.

Prices for food are up markedly. Prices for fuel are up markedly. Lumber prices are doubled and doubled and tripled again. Prices for goods, if you can find them, are up markedly. Saved money (not able to be out spending it) is burning holes in people’s pockets (not mine) so that demand is up, supply has been cut and the result is shortages and leaps in prices. Thems with lots of money can get what they want while the rest of us get less of what we need.

We do not remember being slaves.

We are still slaves …

slaves to global economies that drive us to behave in markedly unwell ways, unwell for ourselves and to the great detriment of so many other people alive on earth …

so much so that we must ask along with the writer of 1 John, How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? For we have, collectively well forgotten the Lord who would bring us up out of the house of slavery.

The measure of our forgetfulness is easy to see: how many poor among us live without even the basics of life to survive, yet alone flourish?

How we have forgotten the Lord,

for among us

so many people survive or barely survive or don’t survive long without clean water

so many people survive or barely survive or don’t survive long without nourishing food

so many people survive or barely survive or don’t survive long without sufficient clothing

so many people survive or barely survive or don’t survive long without housing or shelter

so many people survive or barely survive or don’t survive long without meaningful labour

so many people survive or barely survive or don’t survive long without being able to love or be loved.

We have the means to provide for everyone in Canada, and for everyone in the whole world, but instead we have forgotten the Lord and we luxuriate in

an overabundance of clean water

good (and not so healthy but sweet and salty snack and luxury) food

huge multiple houses for only a few people (houses that could provide homes for ten times the people).

Our meaningless labours are left to others to sweat out their life long

and

love is made impossible by our demands on people, families, and even children who are not ‘our kind’.

We pray:

Lord help us to remember.

Lord help us to remember

the freedom you offer us each day, the slavery that encases us and makes us blind and deaf to other’s real needs, the gifts you have given us that we have not earned or deserved, our ability to and joy in sharing your gifts with those who need them most.

Free us from our blind prejudices and hate-based, made-up ‘faith’.

Free us from our gluttonous abuse of the earth’s resources that others’ need to survive.

Free us from our unfounded self-righteousness by which we condemn others.

Free us to live by giving life to others.

Lord help us to remember.

Lord help us to remember

You and Your works for us.

Lord help us to remember

Your bounty of gifts given to us as your provision for us as stewards, stewards charged with sharing them all with those most in need.

Broken hearts, minds, and hopes … ?

Saturday, July 17, 2021

No Matter What Dark Barriers Block Our Way Towards Grace

God Removes Them

And Sends Us To Remove the Barriers from Others’ Ways Towards Grace.

Psalm 147:3

He heals the broken-hearted, and binds up their wounds.

Mark 16:2-4

Very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, ‘Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?’ When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back.

Words of Grace For Today

There are always obstacles,

waiting for us each day,

stopping us in our tracks if we let them,

obstacles that are so big they defy any expectation that we can deal with them.

We can only continue on if God deals with them,

by sending someone to remove the obstacles from our way forward.

Physical obstacles are one thing.

Obstacles on our hearts and minds, obstacles of our faith or lack thereof, are the kind of obstacles that most severely trap us in places where we cannot live, thinking ways that rob us of life, fearing life and our enemies (most of all our unseen and unknown enemies) with each breath.

…

God heals our broken hearts and minds.

God heals our broken hopes and dreams.

God rises from the dead, laid in a tomb, and is nowhere to be found when we go to move the processes of death one day forward.

God overcomes death, overcomes our brokenness and our sinfulness and our everything that gets in the way of living abundantly for God.

God gives us life, again and again even as we turn from God.

Thanks be to God!

Now it’s our turn to be God’s healers for others’ broken hearts, minds, dreams and hopes.

What will that look like for us today?

Unending Complaints, or Enduring Grace

Choose for Yourself this Day

Thursday, July 15, 2021

Bright Light

Shines on Our Complaints

and

on God’s Generous Grace

Which Puts Life Back Together Again.

Exodus 16:11-12

The Lord spoke to Moses and said, ‘I have heard the complaining of the Israelites; say to them, “At twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall have your fill of bread; then you shall know that I am the Lord your God.” ’

Hebrews 10:36

For you need endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised.

Words of Grace For Today

Hebrews is a book that often gets it backwards: if we do this then God will reward us with that.

The way God works is as God works for the people following Moses. They are enslaved, they do nothing to deserve their slavery or God’s blessings, yet God leads them (through Moses’ acting as God directs him) through the Red Sea and into the freedom of the wilderness.

Then they complain that they have nothing to drink. Though they show little appreciation for the priceless freedom God has already provided for them (they have not earned more from God at all, not at all!) God provides them with water that flows at the wack of Moses’ staff on a rock! They drink their fill that day and each day of their sojourn in the wilderness.

Then they complain that they have nothing to eat. This ragtag band of free people simply knows nothing about gratitude and everything about being slaves to their own bad attitudes and complaints.

They deserve nothing God has given them again and again, and still God again gives them what they ask for and need: meat at night and bread in the morning!

That’s how God works for us, and always has, and always will.

We screw up royally, and God does for us what we need having done so that we can get on with living life abundant (as God created us to be able to live!) Then we screw up and God continues to save and bless us … and repeat endlessly (ad nauseum!)

We receive from God blessings upon blessing, endurance among them, as we already today receive what God has promised us: an inheritance as God’s children, God’s presence with us each moment of our days, and eternal life that has started already long ago ….

Because God is so generous with God’s Grace for us, we have plenty of Grace to also be overly generous with all other people. That’s part of the abundant life: that we share all God gives us, especially with those who need the basics of life to be able to survive another day and another year, with hope for the future.

The atom bomb can blow the world apart at the atomic level; God’s love and grace puts the world and all that lives on it back together at the super-sub-atomic level, at the level of existence created.

God puts life back together for us, too, no matter how we ‘blow it up’ and apart for ourselves and others around us.

God is the only One who can put life back together again, even when ‘all the king’s men and all the king’s horses could not put Humpty Dumpty back together again.’

Grace, Tiger … Grace!

Sunday, July 4, 2021

Tiger Lily

Bright Orange on Green

God mixes colours just fine,

As God mixes us bad people in with creation and comes up with Grace and Wonders!

Psalm 71:16

I will come praising the mighty deeds of the Lord God, I will praise your righteousness, yours alone.

Ephesians 2:10

We are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.

Words of Grace For Today

It’s simple: God created us to do good works.

We sign God’s praises for God’s righteousness, God’s alone.

It’s all way too simple said this way and expounding on just these words will leave out the truth about God all together.

We will set ourselves up to have to praise God, and God alone. We will set ourselves us to do what we are created to do: to do good works. We will fail, and many of us will lie to ourselves and others in order to pretend we are not failing … so great is the cognitive dissonance when we cannot do the good deeds we think we are created to do.

Not that we should give up on doing good works and praising God alone.

On our own we can never do either.

How is life then ever at all good enough with us for God to even pay us any attention?

Simple in a word, and as complicated as the whole universe held together at the subatomic level, yet vulnerable to even the smallest parasites and viruses!

Grace is that Word. God acts first to forgive and renew us. Then, guided by the Holy Spirit (in spite of our wishes and understandings that would lead us astray) we are able by Grace to do good deeds.

Thanks be to God, for the greatest miracle is that God chooses to save us, again and again.

We start each day with prayers. We end each day with thanks.

All day long we are caught (if we stop to notice at all) by the wondrous miracles God does to forgives us and renew us … we are caught up on God’s Kingdom, and we share it, imperfect and ungraceful as we are, with others … who are also imperfect (needing forgiveness) and ungraceful as the like us bungle through life, as if we were wild elephants in a china shop.

Crash, Bang, Crash.

Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle

We keep breaking God’s heart of steadfast love. And God keeps on forgiving us and renewing us.

Now that is a simple word and as complicated as moving to live in the mountains and ensuring we can enjoy both sunrise and sunset; The way the world works, we are privileged if we can have either one or the other … but both, and new life? That’s a miracle for which we can give God thanks and praise each day.

The Words of Life

Friday, June 25, 2021

Fly Baby, Fly!

Psalm 91:4

He said, ‘If now I have found favour in your sight, O Lord, I pray, let the Lord go with us. Although this is a stiff-necked people, pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for your inheritance.’

John 8:31-32

Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, ‘If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.’

Words of Grace For Today

Finding favour in God’s sight, and continuing in Jesus’ word; there is nothing better in life, for though we are a stiff necked people, God has pardoned our sins, and given us the promise that we are God’s children, inheritors of all that God has to give.

While the world goes nuts with fake news, deception, and gaslighting of whoever can be had, Jesus gives us the truth and makes us free, free from the all our sins, and free from the losses from others’ sins, and most of all free from all the sheer craziness of life formed from lies, from the foundation on up to the latest addition of the day.

For that we can rest at night and dream of things unreal at night, because during the day all is tied clearly to reality.

So we ask:

Can

A

Canoe

Sit in the dark

And stand against the wind

Alone?

Or does it need company,

Security cameras,

Or chains

To hold it down.

‘Fly baby fly’

Might not

Be the mantra?

Rather the words

that give one heart

are ‘Come, let us see the loons,’

by which we mean the birds on the lake

not the two legged nutters

that waste life from sunrise to sunset.

‘Rest, baby rest,’

in Jesus’ hands

all is well, all is well, all manner of things are well.

Blessings in All Things!

Tuesday, June 22, 2021

The Blessing of Winter is there are no Mosquitoes

The Blessing of Summer is …

You can say what you will about summer.

I’d say, it is that

winter will come again

so there will be no heat (except in the furnace)

and no mosquitoes!

Psalm 103:15-16-17

As for mortals, their days are like grass; they flourish like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more. But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him, and his righteousness to children’s children.

Romans 5:2

Our Lord Jesus Christ is through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.

Words of Grace For Today

We always like to think we are more than we are.

It’s almost built into our DNA.

We strive to achieve more, to become our own godlets, to no avail.

We are but like grass, here one day for a short season, and blown down, mowed to nothing, overtaken by weeds, eaten up by even vegetarians, and the gone, just gone with only a few people who perhaps remember us to live on after us.

Short and brutish … that’s how life is described by poets and philosophers and even wise theologians and priests … though the last along with other wise people do not stop there.

They also go on to give God thanks for the greatness of creation we are privileged to participate in, and especially God’s Grace which gives us more than meets the eye, or rather just as can meet the eye of a faithful mystic, one who looks and sees God at work in the most common things of every day life.

Jesus brings us the story that tells us this Grace is ours to live in, to enjoy, to trust … and to share.

It is this steadfast love of God that gives us breath even when we should not be still alive at all. It is God’s steadfast love that promises that everyday common and usual events and things are much, much more … and we can see them as works of God’s steadfast love.

As we fear and love God, God is able to show us that we live in, work from, and can prodigiously share God’s steadfast love with all people.

Hot long daylight days, short ferocious loud and destructive storms, and cool calm after the heat of the day … all are blessings from God.

I’m not sure about the mosquitoes that just devoured me while I was outside for a few minutes … okay even they are blessings from God. I was driven back in to write and give God thanks.

This is God’s blessing – that we know how, can, and do give God thanks for all things … so much so that we pray for our enemies unceasing, that they may be a part of a double victory for Christ.

Let the storms come, let the heat come … even let the mosquitoes come in droves. There is calm after the storm, there is cool after the heat … and there is ammonia based glass cleaner to dry out the itchy poison the mosquitoes inject to get blood to flow to their bite. Itch, itch, itch. Itch to distraction, endless itch .. until the ammonia works it wonder and the bites settle finally to a comparatively marvellous calm. Thankfully there is no malaria here!

And the night settles in, the day is done. The only thing to do is give thanks, wash up, and sleep deeply in God’s embrace. Tomorrow promises to be another marvellous day, all in all.

Weary? You Bet!

Monday, June 21, 2021

Rest, at Sunset, In the Calm

That Christ Offers

Isaiah 12:3

With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.

Matthew 11:28

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.

Words of Grace For Today

Like no other words these are so welcome …

now after 15 months plus of Covid 19 restrictions and unknowns,

when my enemies pile on more lies and destruction, take more money I will never have piling debt on debt, and when it seems there are too few people who know who I a really am. Because I certainly am not the person reported to and by the RCMP, or testified about in the courts, or convicted and labelled a vexatious litigant by judges who care not for the actual truth,

when illness and disabling arthritis and injury combine to keep me from doing what I had planned to do to keep healthy, busy, and keep the mosquitoes at bay: mow, mow, and again mow,

when the death of a loved one rips the foundation of life out from underneath us,

when the darkness of the Evil One convinces us that the world is always going to be dark, even when the sun shines longer today than any other day in a year, and that evil will always win the day,

…

What we thirst for at those times, and now, is a place to rest in safety and

Jesus calls to us:

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.

Once again God works to convince us, to reassure us with hope beyond hope, that

With joy we will today draw water from the wells of salvation.

There are no better words that these:

Come you who are weary and I will give you rest, so that with joy you will draw living water from the wells of salvation!

When we have rested, and washed ourselves and souls once again clean, when we have drunk our fill, then Christ calls us to share these words, these opportunities to rest and be renewed, and this living water. Christ calls us because there are so many people weary, carrying heavy burdens, who lose themselves as if they were separated from the love of God.

These words, these offers, this living water is all we have, it’s all we need to be able to share, it is all that anyone needs from life.

What joy comes when God calls us out of our weariness, and we share it all with others!