Rocking Chair

Thursday, September 22, 2022

The Fog Rolls In,

The Fog Rolls Out,

Always Fuel Is Needed for

the Fire of Life.

Psalms 89:9

You rule the raging of the sea; when its waves rise, you still them.

Ephesians 1:17

I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him.

Words of Grace For Today

Janet Rogner sat in her rocking chair wondering what had happened. Where had all the time gone? It seemed like yesterday that she and Ted met every day, sometimes on the lake, sometimes on the river, more often at school or on a date. Marriage, 2 kids, divorce, marriage and one more kid. That’s what they told her anyway. She did not remember any of it. They told her about the accident that killed her 2nd husband and 2 kids, and how it had left her in a coma for years.

She remembered Ted, but they told her he had died of a heart attack. They had reached out to his wife and two children. They came to visit, but she did not know them at all, even when the son reminded her of how Ted would twirl his finger in the air, like directing music. They said he went on to become a band director like his father, and more. He was an engineer of something called computer science.

She’d seen those things, computers. But they made no sense to her at all. They said they set her’s up to just listen and respond to her. So she swore at it nearly every hour. It still did nothing.

Now she looked in the mirror as the sun rose. Another day. Who was that old woman in the mirror anyway?

Then one day the storm gates broke open with memories that sent her scurrying for her bed, where she curled up to hide from them, from all the wonderful and beautiful memories, the challenges she and her husband and her friends had met with varying success, and then she remembered the old woman in the mirror and the accident and the deaths of her husband and her children.

It was days that she spent curled up, trying to hide from the pain. Until one day her son, Bill, walked in. She recognized him and he sat with her. He said he had come for years every week, but then he had to move for work and his wife’s job and his two children’s schooling, in computer science. And Janet remembered she had been good with computers, though she never had a degree, she knew more than most programmers and technicians.

They talked for hours, as Bill helped her remember things that were just on the edge of her awareness. He had to go but he came back then every day for a week and then once a week. The memories flooded in, like an angry sea in a hurricane at first, and then they started to organize, settle, smooth out. She started to dance in the morning. She swore at the computer, for the fun of it, before she sat down to type in her journal.

One day she saw a photo on line. It caught her, bounced her up out of her chair and tossed her back against the furthest wall. She didn’t know why. As the raging storm settled, she dared to look again. It was a photo of a lake, like the ones her family lived on through her High School years. Memories flooded in, of her mom walking with her and Bill. He was her first love. She’d never told her husband that is why she insisted they name their son Bill. Ted was earlier and Bill was everything to her, and then nothing but pain.

The love, the wonders, the fights, the break up and unequaled pain and chaos of life for months in her senior year in High School. She’d met her first husband, Greg, at a grad party and escaped into his life, but he turned out to be abusive and unfaithful. She stuck it out with him longer than she should have. He should have been in the car accident instead of her 2nd husband, Roger, and her kids should not have been there at all. But Greg would not bring the kids back after their visitation time with him, so Roger and Janet had gone to pick them up … and the drunk driver who rear ended them into the oncoming train brought them all to an end. Except Janet sort of survived in the storm of nothing remembered, loved or lost.

That weekend when her son came to visit, he brought his two grown children with him and their spouses and their little kids … and Bill said he had a surprise for her.

Her Bill from senior year in High School walked in and time stood still. He an old man. She an old woman in a rocker with her family all around. And she remembered before he spoke that she was the one who broke up with him because he would not marry her. She’d buried that for years through all that pain that it brought.

Her family talked. Bill talked. Janet sat stunned, quiet. Then Bill’s family, all ten of them came in. His wife had died decades ago. He walked with a limp, turns out from a surgery that was not quite successful. His grandchildren and great grandchildren danced and played and mingled with her children’s children.

Her son put some music on, one of her favourite waltzes. He danced with his wife. Then Bill asked Janet to dance. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, smiling for the first time in so long.

Today, may the wisdom of God be yours, that you may dance and smile and remember all that God has shared with you, the sorrows and the joys, as the water laps on the shore of the waters of memories.

Eyes Wide Open

Wednesday, September 21, 2022

God Blesses It All,

Even a Clump of Weeds

Like Us.

Isaiah 12:5

Sing praises to the Lord, for he has done gloriously; let this be known in all the earth.

Acts of the Apostles 14:27

When they arrived, they called the church together and related all that God had done with them, and how he had opened a door of faith for the Gentiles.

Words of Grace For Today

Wonders never cease.

Faith based on God choosing us and not them is supplanted by God choosing them and us.

That can be very disconcerting when one has built one’s life on the assumption that ‘we’ are so much better than ‘them.’

And there we are, no better than them, and all chosen as equals to serve God … by serving others.

Things get messed around, so much so that pretty soon we’ve gotten people messing it around every which way to re-establish that their ‘we’ is the only good ‘we’ and every other ‘them’ is just not really human. And what that leads to is chaos, with ‘white supremacists’ [and many other flavours of racially based supremicists], religious intolerance and fanatical condemnation of other genders, colour, races, religions, and you name it … in various and sundry ways used to legitimate denigration, oppression, and ethnic cleansing.

Wonders never cease, and God responds to all this with mercy.

So we can sing praise of God’s great works for all to hear. Not that God has saved ‘us’ and condemned ‘them’, but that God saves us all.

Opening the door of faith to Gentiles is just a small sign of God’s inclusive stance towards humans. God welcomes us all, loves us all, forgives us all and sends us all out to do the same for all others.

Another day, when wonders will never cease to amaze those with eyes wide open to God’s great works.

Great Lordy, Lordy Over Us!

Tuesday, September 20, 2022

Those That Would Lord It Over Others,

Have Only Shadow Powers;

For God’s People Know

Real Power Is In

Serving,

Weakness,

and Self-sacrifice.

Isaiah 42:1

Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations.

Mark 10:42-43

So Jesus called them and said to them, ‘You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant.

Words of Grace For Today

Since the beginning of time, those who people have looked to rule them, to protect them, to keep peace within and without, have lorded it over them instead and given the better portion to their chosen supporters, so that they would remain lords, who could enjoy power and comforts taken from others.

Since the beginning of time nearly every person has prayed that they would be free from being lorded over by others. The greater the power one holds the greater it is that someone more powerful lords it over one. Until the most powerful, who is ‘answerable to those hidden powerful people’, and wishes to be free from that hold those behind the scenes have over them.

God provides a different vision of those who might lead, protect, and keep the peace, namely that those who are the greatest and most powerful will be those who serve others in all things.

So God’s chosen servant comes to bring justice, to free people from being lorded over by others. And Jesus points his followers to how greatness is measured in God’s Kingdom and among them: by the ones who serve others.

As always we think ‘those others’ are the ones who lord it over people and us, though in the privilege and comforts we enjoy (even homeless in the wilderness), we ‘lord it over others’ through the economics and world powers that provide us things like electricity, clean water, tools of so many kinds, decorations to life of more kinds, and places of relative peace. These we enjoy only because they are ‘taken’ or ‘kept’ from others in the world’s arrangements that favour us.

So we pray this day that we would be profoundly thankful for all that we have, from the bottom of our feet, to above our heads, from the first minute of the day in the midnight darkness broken by our electric lights, to the rising sun and the breakfasts that nourish us, to the high noon sheltered from intense weather, to the setting sun and the comfortable beds that provide us a safe place to sleep, and everything in between and beyond.

So we pray each day, throughout the day, for all things.

Nomads On This Planet

Sunday, September 18, 2022

Wherever We Live,

There Are Signs

of Lives Lived

Before Us

Now Gone,

As We Will Also

Numbers 9:18

At the command of the Lord the Israelites would set out, and at the command of the Lord they would camp. As long as the cloud rested over the tabernacle, they would remain in camp.

Colossians 3:17

And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Words of Grace For Today

Nomads moving according to the command of the Lord, moving only when the cloud over the tabernacle disappeared.

Doing everything in Jesus’ name, and giving thanks to God.

As our days fill with challenges, rewards, chance goodnesses and grace, kindness, and the ever-present traps of evil, this is the difference between living abundantly and struggling every day: how do we approach each moment?

Do we taken on the challenges, temptations, and take in the joys, goodnesses, and graces with the assurance that God walks with us, so that for everything we can give thanks.

OR

Do we see our demise threatened after the next corner that even joy can bring us to round?

This is life abundant:

To know we are not settled, not ever, in a security provided by our circumstances in this world.

To know that we move through this world even as we do not take direction from God, then God accompanies us down into the messes and hell-holes we create for ourselves or other toss us into.

To know that our demise is not the end, it is not to be feared, and in it God will gather us home, to a home with all the blessings and security we wished for in this life.

To know that until then we get to share with everyone God’s promise to walk with us and show us how love, grace, and kindness bring goodness to life even in the dankest corner of our lives.

To know that today is God’s day for us, again.

Swords, Pens, and Tongues

Thursday, September 15, 2022

Words Can Sooth

Troubled Waters

With The Golden Presence

of God’s Mercy and Love

Proverbs 12:18

Rash words are like sword thrusts, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.

Romans 14:19

Let us then pursue what makes for peace and for mutual edification.

Words of Grace For Today

The power of the tongue is famous.

More powerful than the sword. As is the pen. Though the mouth can out do the pen when wielded effectively.

The power is not necessarily damaging and evil. It can be more destructive than the sword. The power of the pen and of the mouth can be exactly opposite that of a destructive sword.

The words of the mouth and of the pen can be words that reflect God’s grace, and in that address the greatest evil that can ever come at us, and turn it from destruction to healing.

Smooth words of deception are not healing words, though. They are, despite all appearances and sounds, more destructive than the sword. Only truth can heal. Only truth which names evil as it is, and offers God’s merciful response to it, can heal.

So we go into each day, confessing our sins, acknowledging the great destructive power of deceptions and evils of all kinds, and trusting that God has a response to it all which brings us to live life as God created us to live it, in peace.

Hear the Lion! Mercy Me!

Wednesday, September 14, 2022

We Fear the Waters That Will Flood and Drown Us,

And God Sends

the Mist Covered Waters of Life

to Revive Us!

Psalms 81:8

Hear, O my people, while I admonish you; O Israel, if you would but listen to me!

2 Timothy 4:17

But the Lord stood by me and gave me strength, so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed and all the Gentiles might hear it. So I was rescued from the lion’s mouth.

Words of Grace For Today

God does not give up on us.

While we wander away and ignore all God would give to us as wisdom, putting ourselves first and leaving others to fend for themselves against hopeless odds, God still cries for us: Hear, O my people while I admonish you! If you would be listen to me!

When we tune our ears to hear God’s Word to us each morning, noon and night, it is full of surprises what we will hear. We thought we’d hear God condemning us and or others for all the dregs of sin we toss around, at each other and at the planet.

We thought we’d hear God demanding reparations.

We thought or rather fully hoped we’d hear God giving it to our enemies with lots of ‘smote keys’.

Doch, God is prodigious with love, forgiveness, and mercy, especially for the likes of us, great sinners that we are. Ready to deny it at moment’s notice.

And God is prodigious with love, forgiveness, and mercy for our enemies that we think are so much worse than we are.

Well, they may well be by some scale of measurement of terribleness, though that scale is useless or even hugely damaging in God’s world.

So God is merciful to us all, each as we require to hear that we are invited back to the table at the banquet. All of us ‘saved from the lion’s mouth’ as it were.

Mercy Me, Now Ain’t We All One of Them?!

Tuesday, September 6, 2022

Stumped, Cut Off, Dead:

That’s Us and All Creation,

Until/Unless

God Has Mercy On Us.

Daniel 9:9

To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness, for we have rebelled against him,

Luke 15:1

Now all the tax-collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him.

Words of Grace For Today

We would like to believe that we are good people.

Honesty escapes us when we fall into the trap of not just liking to believe, but actually lying to ourselves and convincing ourselves that we are good people.

God looks down on the devastation that we have collectively brought down on the earth and, seeing into the future, sees a void as bleak as it was before creation. God is angry and sends a dry, life-sucking wind across all we have done, drying it of all water and life and hope, until it is returned to the dust of what it was before we were created.

So it is with all we humans do. We undo the creating that God does. God sees it, and burns it away, back to as it was before we existed.

Thankfully that is not the end of the story of our lives on earth.

God sees us with mercy.

God sees us with mercy, forgives us, and welcomes us in to God’s Kingdom, not because we deserve it, but because God ‘don’t create no junk’ and we are precious to God, every last one of us!

God sees us with mercy and sets the table for us in celebration that we are found, and carried back home.

God sees us with mercy and Jesus sits with us ‘tax collectors and sinners’ at the table.

So it is we get to eat each day, and celebrate with thanks all that is, all that we can do, and all God does through us to welcome in every last lost soul.

Now ain’t we all one of them!

Amazing this Mercy God has for us. It’s not at all what we expect of each other. It is what makes life so precious and wondrous.

Another day, another miracle or a million.

As The Sun Rises…

Saturday, September 3, 2022

It’s a New Day. What Will We Make of It?

Deuteronomy 29:28

The Lord uprooted them from their land in anger, fury, and great wrath, and cast them into another land, as is now the case.

John 17:26

I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.

Words of Grace For Today

God’s anger, fury, and great wrath have been held responsible for all sorts of misfortune.

That is the If-Then perspective evident in the Deuteronomic passage for today. The truth behind it is that faith in God, or not-faith in God, will not save us from disaster. Sometimes there is nothing that can save us from such disasters.

Climate change brings plenty of disaster to plenty of our doorsteps these days. There is nothing we can do to stop climate change. Maybe we can slow it’s rate of increase, but only slightly. It’s effects are with us for decades if not centuries and millennia! We may be able to mitigate some disasters, but certainly not even most and definitely not the worst.

How do we live in such times?

As always, we start by confessing our sins, our inability to earn God’s favour, and our total dependence on God for all things good. In the end we trust Jesus will bring us home after our deaths. In between we give our all fearing and loving God, loving our neighbours as ourselves, and loving even our enemies, as we share all God gives us with those in need, which is pretty much everyone. Physical needs are many, and spiritual needs endless.

So we live, loved and loving. How else?

Clarity, Energy, and Relief!

Friday, July 29, 2022

Relief!

Proverbs 4:18

But the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day.

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

The path …

I’m not so sure anyone really knows what any ‘path’ looks like, until they have travelled it and since no human can travel the path of righteousness (righteousness is reckoned to us by God, as a gift, unearned, untraveled, perhaps hoped for).

We wish we could. We pretend we have. We write about it as if we have. We try to inspire others to choose to travel the path that we have not travelled.

We should instead inspire people to trust God to reckon righteousness to us, and to be alert to the path that God provides for us. Though we do not travel it, God hauls us on that path in spite of us and our constant rebelling, and false, arrogant claims that we, oh yes, we have and do travel the path of righteousness. That is like most of our human powered efforts: it’s bunk. Or as the writer of Ecclesiastes said, it’s all vanity.

Theologians and writers who claim to know how we will be like Jesus, and what Jesus will be like upon his return speak that same language of over-exuberance at least and often pure arrogance and goal of controlling other people, even though they can control so little of themselves and their own life.

Humility is our beginning point, our mid-point, and our reality all the way to the end. The only thing we can ‘boast’ of is God’s good work in us, and in all creation.

Like the sun rising, with the most beautiful light, until it rises clear of the horizon and burns heat and energy down on the day-lit-earth. From that we have learned to create solar electricity. And from that energy plants through photosynthesis live and thrive … unless and until the heat and energy from the sun becomes too much and they wilt, burned out of life by the very energy that gave them life.

So it is for us. We need the sun to live, vitamin D being the least of it. Until the sun becomes too hot, too intense, too powerful an energy that it burns life up around us, and us with it.

Today it will burn hot in the meadow, with a forecast 30⁰ it will climb to at least 35⁰ and likely 40⁰ or more as the heat gets trapped in the meadow.

Thankfully the evening comes and cools it right off, usually 5⁰ cooler than elsewhere. A regenerating time, not just for sleep but recovery from the intense heat.

What do people do without that relief? They suffer. They die.

What do people do without the energy (Love) of God entering their lives with the great relief from the evils of the world to revive them (Grace). They suffer. They die.

We pray that today God will exercise Love and Grace abundantly for us and make us clearly aware of God’s work for us, as clear as the noonday sun, with relief from the cool water of life in the shade of the tall and healthy tree canopy, where so many of God’s creatures know to find relief from the heat.

Feared Creator? Beloved Saviour!

Tuesday, July 26, 2022

The Fog Melds With the Clouds,

Bringing Heaven to Earth

for Precious Moments

Isaiah 12:4

Give thanks to the Lord, call on his name; make known his deeds among the nations; proclaim that his name is exalted.

Revelation 14:6-7

Then I saw another angel flying in mid-heaven, with an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who live on the earth—to every nation and tribe and language and people. He said in a loud voice, ‘Fear God and give him glory, for the hour of his judgment has come; and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water.’

Words of Grace For Today

It’s one of those nearly perfect mornings. After weeks of too much heat, it’s cooled off, and then this night brings quiet rains, fog lifting after sunrise, drips of the past rain everywhere off the camp and then leaves, and a quiet-stillness broken only by a few birds singing. A small sparrow hunts in the meadow grass, a robin listens and hops and listens and pecks out a worm and flies away to share the morning food.

A morning survey places in wait the pieces of a project that will be a huge step forward in security blocking possible CO out and capturing heat to warm the water hose so that water can run during the coldest days. A fire resistant, air tight membrane will arrive to move everything to the next steps. With tape measure in hand the next posts for a new wind-snow shield for preparing fire wood are measured out from the wood available. Plans move forward a step for work for today. Mouse traps are gathered readied to be baited and set out to ensure the mice of the meadow stay in the meadow and out of the camp.

Water is set to boil for coffee and washing, not in the camper where I will write and work today, which will help keep it cool through the day. The sun is already intense. The thermometer in the sun registers 24⁰ even though it’s a good 10⁰ cooler in the shade.

The wine (grape juice, since I cannot afford wine) and bread (crackers, since I can afford those, sort of) are set ready and the day begins:

With thanks for all that keeps me alive, the daily bread and the wonders of this place, and the amazing works of God walk with me each day.

With a petition for a young man suffering so much pain from small accumulative injuries from skate boarding that he can barely move.

With a petition for all the men who are abused, that God would make his presence obvious to them with kindness and love, giving them courage and protection, and a view to reality beyond their abusers.

With a petition of thanks that I am alive in spite of so many people’s unwarranted efforts to kill me.

The Eucharist celebrated, in Luther’s language, and the morning meal that sustains my body: creamy, smooth, sweet and bitter, cool and hot; all signs of the breadth of life that God intends for us each.

This is a morning to stand in awe at God’s wondrous works, evident in nature, in the wilderness, and in God’s sustaining life on planet earth despite our sustained attacks on it. We excuse ourselves saying it is progress, it is profit, it is energy, it is growth, it is a global economy. Still the attack is relentless and the planet becomes more angry, more wild, more extreme even beyond our own abilities to survive it’s wrath.

Are we to fear God?

Definitely, or we are patent fools!

In other words we would be airheads, birdbrains, blockheads, or dodos, dolts, donkeys, dopes, dorks, dumbbells, dummies, dunces, fatheads, ganders, goons, idiots, ignorami, imbeciles, know-nothings, knuckleheads, morons, numbskulls, pinheads, schlubs, schlumps, schnooks, stocks, featherbrains, scatterbrains, butts, dupes, laughingstocks, mockeries, monkeys, chumps, losers, schlemiels, crackbrains, crackpots, cranks, kooks, oddballs, screwballs, weirdos …

That should give at least an idea of who we would be.

If we only fear God, then we would be patent fools and … (same list.)

For God did not create all the wonders of the universe to create us who would fear our creator. God created the universe and holds it’s rhythm and rhyme together with divine love, so that we creatures could also participate in planting, growing, and producing love in every corner of this small planet earth.

To this end God created and gave to us such mornings as this!

To this end God created and gave to us such mornings as this, that in loving creation and creatures we might at least momentarily be the progenitors of wisdom, a counterpoint to our usual foolishness. As we fear and love God, God gifts us with the ability to be seers, mentors, and teachers who spread God’s steadfast love in kindness, listening, and healing.

From all these good works of God in us springs up in and among us the one thing that gives us breath: faith, hope and love.

[I know we usually count those three things, though here they constitute one. It’s math like Luther’s and the Trinity.]

What happened to your morning and the wonders that hold the universe together? Did you see God again? Right there … to be feared and loved?