Category: Winter

Faith, Hope … and Life Now!

Saturday, January 8, 2022

Tracks Lead Us To Places Unknown

Always We Walk Not Alone,

for God Walks with Us.

Job 16:19

Even now, in fact, my witness is in heaven, and he that vouches for me is on high.

Hebrews 11:1

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

Words of Grace For Today

It’s a quiet day ahead, for a cold winter Saturday, following many cold, cold days …

and not a little frustration with people who live by full disregard for truth, and who seek my death, sooner than later, but slowly so the suffering continues and they can be pleased with their sadistic efforts. It’s one thing to have one’s ex after you, it’s another to have the courts helping her. There is always more injustice than justice, more evil than good, and more death of good people (and not enough of evil people?)

How to remain hopeful that the future will be better?

…

Well, that is actually a futilely placed question,

for one cannot hope that the future will be better.

The only thing one can do is live well in the present, in the face of evil to be gracious and good. In the face of those who wish one dead, to live joyously.

The moments are not rare when the spectacular works of God can be seen here and now, they require only that one has ears to hear and eyes to see … and hearts to celebrate life with gratitude.

We have faith and hold to it as the future moves into the present and then the past. That faith is not something we conjure up or make or assemble … no in any way.

Faith is a gift … a gift freely given by God to us. Therefore it will never fail, nor succumb to evil of any kind or quantity.

Facing evil, God vouches for us saints, and there is no surer witness. More we do not need.

Therefore we see the future, not as something that need be better, but rather as more of the present gifts God gives us: that we are vouched for, and we can live gracious and gratefully and generously …

in this present moment

each moment

of each day, even today.

Cold Hard Truth

Friday, January 7, 2022

It May Look Soft and Comfy

Easy Light and Curves Shown by Shadows

But It’s Already -41⁰ at 18:00

So It’s Hard Cold

And Was Even as the Sun Set Golden Light All Over the Snow.

God is Exactly the Opposite:

Appearing Hard and Judging All,

God is Actually Gracious and Generous For All.

Deuteronomy 4:39

So acknowledge today and take to heart that the Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other.

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

The all in one package of God

Three in One, yet all One.

Acknowledge God and take it to heart that God is God. Simple

and

yet

So impossible

for us frail, sinful humans.

The real nugget in all that we can say about God is that Jesus is God’s clear statement that God is pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

Jesus’ story is not God making a special appeal to special people.

Jesus’ story is God making a very demonstrable appeal to all humans of all time: God wants to reconcile us all to God, no one is left out.

When God is pleased to do something so gracious and generous for all people, all people being so equally undeserving, then this is something truly awesome. It changes everything we thought we might have known about how life works.

We get to respond.

So do we respond by lying about others, framing them for our own sins and failings? Do we hide behind lies told by others, and corrupt practices, and the corruption of people in high places?

OR

Do we start to exercise God’s grace and generosity for ourselves and for all other people?

Spoils and Siblings

Tuesday, January 4, 2022

Whose Land Is It, Anyway?

It is God’s

Given to Us as Stewards

To Share with Our Siblings.

Deuteronomy 3:7-9

All the livestock and the plunder of the towns we kept as spoil for ourselves. So at that time we took from the two kings of the Amorites the land beyond the Jordan, from the Wadi Arnon to Mount Hermon (the Sidonians call Hermon Sirion, while the Amorites call it Senir).

Mark 3:35

Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.

Words of Grace For Today

Ancient claims of land belonging to a particular people are seldom anything but a bit hypocritical.

The land claim of Jews in the Middle East is well known to be established on their claim that ‘their land’ was stolen from others and their right to it was that God promised the people land. To this day the displaced Palestinians have legitimate grievances and suffer terribly waiting for the world to provide a reasonable resolution to being displaced since 1947, and earlier.

Indigenous land claims in Canada are based on white people stealing the land, though the indigenous histories are not without similar events through their own histories.

As long as people have lived, the competition for land has been a repeated source of terrible struggles, losses, and long term grievances.

So we, in our history, record that we took land from the Amorites, and kept livestock and plunder from their towns.

We are no better than the worst of all humans.

We are only saved by God’s Grace.

Only if the Holy Spirit inspires goodness in us, inspires us to do God’s will, and inspires us to be saints, are we able to reflect God’s love for us to others.

The Holy Spirit’s work, God’s work (by God’s will) alone determines then who is Jesus’ brother, sister, and mother. God alone makes us children of God, makes us Jesus’ siblings, and brings us to recognize that we are all ‘in this together.’ We are all each others’ siblings.

Land claims are crucial to pay attention to and to honour.

More important is to honour the gifts God gives us, not to try to hoard them for ourselves, and to share them with all those in need.

Apostasies and Wisdom

Monday, January 3, 2022

The View to God’s Glorious Power

Is Clear

As a Brilliantly Cold Winter Day

on the Lake

Jeremiah 14:7-9

Although our iniquities testify against us, act, O Lord, for your name’s sake; our apostasies indeed are many and we have sinned against you.

O hope of Israel, its saviour in time of trouble, why should you be like a stranger in the land, like a traveller turning aside for the night? Why should you be like someone confused, like a mighty warrior who cannot give help?

Yet you, O Lord, are in the midst of us, and we are called by your name; do not forsake us!

Ephesians 1:16-19

I do not cease to give thanks for you as I remember you in my prayers. 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, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.

Words of Grace For Today

Jeremiah knew, even if the people of his day refused to admit it, that they had all sinned terribly against God. Jeremiah prays that God will not be known as a stranger in God’s people’s land, or like a warrior with dementia who has forgotten how to fight to save his own people.

Jeremiah knows that God is with the people, in their midst, as God has been through all the generations. Jeremiah also knows that God does not automatically ‘save’ the people as they wish to be saved.

God is not always a God of great displays of might while saving God’s people. In fact this time, God turns a deaf ear to Jeremiah’s cries for the people, and the people suffer greatly.

The truth about God is that God cannot be fully comprehended, predicted, or controlled by any human. The writer of Ephesians knows this well and prays that the people of Ephesus (and all the readers of the letter, including us today) will receive from God a spirit of wisdom and revelation so that with the eyes of our hearts enlightened in the mysteries of the saints, we may come to know the hope that God gives us, that guides us, that draws us forward each day as God’s own saints. With the wisdom we may then ‘see’ the great power of God, the power of weakness, humility, suffering, and self-sacrificial love. This is the power of God demonstrated in Jesus’ story, living, teaching, dying, and raising to new life … in order that we might finally believe the impossible … that God saves us even as we think we are losing everything we treasure, even our lives.

God’s power is the greatest power in and beyond the universe. It is the power that creates, sustains, and provides the universe as a place-time for us to live, and to live free to choose to love as God does, or to turn away from God, sinning and creating evil.

Even then God comes to save us again, and again, and again, and … always forever again, so that we might live in God’s love, and live that love for all people around us. This is the spirit of wisdom that God gives us, freely, and the hope that guides us, and the love that is life itself.

What a year to come! To live as God’s saints in this time and place, as real and messy as it is, as challenged as we all are by Covid and the limits it places on our lives, and as wondrous as life has ever been.

The Year Past, The Year to Come …

Friday, December 31, 2021

As the Days Come to a Close in Darkness

So the Year May, too,

Yet by Faith Through Grace

We Know

God is With Us

Always,

All Ways.

Numbers 21:7

The people came to Moses and said, ‘We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.’ So Moses prayed for the people.

Jude 1:22

Have mercy on those who doubt.

Words of Grace For Today

The last day of the year

leaves us to ask (as so many media do for us in various ways):

Where has this year taken us?

Where will this next year bring us?

Will we have any choices that will make a difference, a real difference, for ourselves and all living on the earth, and for the course of human history?

We, if we were here at the beginning of the year and if we are here at the end of the year, have survived.

What have we survived besides merely to live on? Our enemies have sought and continue to seek to kill us by whatever means they can use (trying not to get caught of course or pay any price for their efforts.) We have survived all the attacks of our enemies. Our enemies have built up a collection of lies about us, which has next to nothing to do with us (except … well read on) and which clearly defines who they are, what kind of people they are … and as humans have been wont since the beginning of time their lies reflect rather clearly exactly what they have done. They have lied that instead of them being the ones doing terrible things, they have names us as the perpetrators of their great evil. Which we have survived, though … the consequences of their lies are that more and more people believe their lies, and more and more people join their efforts to kill us, slowly or more quickly. And still we have survived.

We have survived not because we are so strong, no, we are old and weak. We have survived not because we are so rich and influential, no, we are caught deep in the grips of poverty from which we likely will never emerge and most of our friends we used to have, have deserted us, afraid of being associated with one who is attacked so ferociously. They do not want to become collateral damage. We have survived only by the Grace of God, and by many and various miracles that God has worked to keep us alive.

We have survived, though it has appeared at many times that we would not, could not, simply because even in those darkest moments of doubt, God has made us able to remain grateful of all God does for us and for our enemies, offering us forgiveness and renewed life. With grateful hearts more and more miracles have sprinkled our path, been noticed, convinced us that God walks with us making us saints and this has given us hope … and hope has carried us through the darkness to the light of day, to the Light of Christ.

We are thus quite able to trust that this coming year will be more of the same: God walking with us, miracles in abundance, hope carrying us always into the Light.

Our choices? Well our choices will be as always, the best we can make at the time, and even then always imperfect, yet made perfect by the Grace of God alone.

And that same Grace, as only God’s Grace can, will make a difference, a real difference, for ourselves and all living on the earth, and for the course of human history.

So Moses prayed for the sinful people, and God continued to write God’s story with the lives of God’s people, bringing us to each new day, as a miracle-gift, for each of us.

No New Year resolution will carry us to a better life. Only God’s resolution, covenant, promise will carry us, as it has, into the best life ever, the life of God’s own children, God-made saints, given breath and time … to be God’s Grace for others, especially our cruel enemies.

Tender God, Tender Hope.

Wednesday, December 29, 2021

The Sun Goes Down

The Ice Captures the Weed

The Snow Covers the Ice

…

Always

By God’s Tender Mercy

We Are Healed and Live Abundantly

Psalm 30:2

O Lord my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me.

Luke 1:78-79

By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.

Words of Grace For Today

By the tender mercy of our God …

Everything that is blessing and gift in this life is

By the tender mercy of our God.

…

By the tender mercy of our God we learn to treasure all that each day brings to us:

The sunrise, the sunset.

The COLD outside (-46⁰C), the HEAT of the furnace’s chimney (2000⁰C).

The relentless attack of our enemies’ (lies to destroy, destory, and kill us – by which we learn to trust God alone) and the gracious response of truth, both exposed by Christ’ light (by which we learn to hope only in God’s tender mercy).

New food allergies and intolerances (that increase our food costs and teach us with pain how to eat well) and the plethora of good and nutritious food available from the food bank and the grocery stores (from which we can choose how to deal with new dietary limits.)

The skills of many decades of capturing the good beauty of life in photos, of writing words that inspire hearts and minds to live better, to live well, the dancing steps to music and through the snow and woods and atop the roofs, the knowing of languages from ancient times, of foreign lands and using ‘artificial intelligence’, the piloting precision-decision-making over and under clouds, around obstacles on the ground, and between hills and mountains and leaving & returning to earth, the melding with machines to accomplish work and travel safely in all kinds of conditions, and the seeing God present walking with us each moment (good and terrible).

And most of all the miracle of being healed so that we are able to love those that love in return and those who return for love betrayal, who return for love hatred and evil, and even for those who corrupt justice for so many giving privilege to the wealthy and connected.

By the tender mercy of our God we live filled with hope for our tomorrows, and for theirs.

By the tender mercy of our God.

Record Lows

Sunday, December 26, 2021

Blue Christmas Morning

-40⁰

Take Your Pick F or C

Temperatures are cold

And Hearts are Frozen Hard.

Maybe no records there, It’s been that way in each generation.

Psalm 109:21

But you, O Lord my Lord,
act on my behalf for your name’s sake;
because your steadfast love is good, deliver me.

Acts 7:59-60

While they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’ Then he knelt down and cried out in a loud voice, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them.’ When he had said this, he died.

Words of Grace For Today

Courageous of Stephen to forgive those who killed him without just cause. They were filled with hate at someone different, someone with hope, someone who knew Jesus as his Lord and Saviour.

So they gathered around him and threw stones at him until he was dead. Blunt force trauma, repeated, and repeated, and repeated by a mob.

We think that we do not do such things today, but …

My story and many like it give clear evidence (denied by most – what can one do for the mob?) prove that mobs of many kinds exist today. Women trying to assert themselves make up stories about good men so they have a man to abuse, ruin, and kill … and feel like they have gained power over men. Cops who need to bully someone like they are bullied so they encourage civilians to create damning false stories about their target. Cops who lie in court. Lawyers who leave the cops’ victim defenceless in court, and judges who love to add their own lies to the blatantly false evidence in order to convict good people, just because they all can. Just because they hate life. Just because they fear truth. Just because.

We should cry day and night to God to act on our behalf. Our only hope, as ever it has been, is that God’s steadfast love is good and God promises to deliver us.

Christ was born, and killed for being good, a threat to corrupt, dirty and evil powers, and simple fear and hatred of what is good in life.

So we live, pray, and hope, also these c…c…c…cold days that God would deliver us, from the hatred in us, from the fear in us, and from the hatred and fear in those who would kill us by any means possible.

We pray, God let not our enemies triumph. Rather show your steadfast love as more powerful in the weakness of forgiveness and steadfast love.

Silent Celebration, Christ’s Light Bright

Friday, December 24, 2021

Christ’s Light

Rises each Morning,

And Remains with Us Through All the Dark

Evil of this World.

Psalm 38:22

Make haste to help me, O Lord, my salvation.

Luke 1:68

Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has looked favourably on his people and redeemed them.

Words of Grace For Today

As we begin this evening to celebrate Christ’s birth, not the first time at all, not at all, the temperatures are set to drop deep below -30⁰. That cold will not hinder the blessed warmth that God’s story of Jesus’ love for all people provides for all the faithful.

Candles are lit on the wreath, one for each Sunday of Advent, reminding us that Christ comes and brings light to all the darkness of our lives and of this world, all the darkness that robs us of life.

Yet, this year, again, for all those intelligent to act wisely, there will be no worship service with great crowds, music, and candles lit while we sing Silent Night.

How God moves us through the challenges of life!

In the cold, in the wilderness, in the dark, in great solitude, the blessed quiet of the woods next to the lake, there is always great reason to celebrate all that God provides us.

Breathe.

Pray.

Give Thanks.

Hope.

…

It will all be well, very well, all manner of well … for all us God-made saints.

God Created Also This!

Saturday, December 18, 2021

…

G g g g g good Morning!

…

(It ain’t Vietnam!)

Genesis 5:2

Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them ‘Humankind’ when they were created.

Jude 1:2

May mercy, peace, and love be yours in abundance.

Words of Grace For Today

It’s c c c cold outside.

God created this?!

God created us to share one another’s company so that we could warm each other against the cold?

Would that even help in this cold of below -30⁰ C?

…

Maybe a little, but certainly not enough, unless …

…

unless one of us is able to plan and prepare and build a shelter that can be warmed by heating fuel to the burning point … safely.

So the wood stove gobbles up wood and produces heat, mostly safely (if one is particularly alert to the immediate dangers of burning the whole thing down or gassing the occupants with carbon monoxide or … well there is a whole host of dangers to be avoided while heating a stove to 400⁰C and a chimney to 2000⁰ C

and there are benefits, like sitting in a sauna after jumping through the ice into the lake.

Not that I have a sauna or a hole in the ice, nor the foolishness in these temperatures to jump in such a hole! But walking outside is bracing and then biting and then dangerous, so it’s nice to know the ‘wood eating monster’ has done it’s thing well and 40⁰C awaits me to warm up by. Of course the floor temperatures are anywhere from 20⁰ to 60⁰ cooler than at head level. At Advent we remember that God comes to level … well, this variation could use some levelling!

Still, we breathe and live, and marvel at systems that work in such cold were metal looses half its strength and oil congeals and skin freezes in minutes or seconds.

So we give thanks that God’s mercy, peace, and love are ours in abundance!

And we pray that they may be yours as well!

Encounter God … And Live

Thursday, December 16, 2021

Hear God’s Word

As Clearly As We See

The Ice Between the Snow

Joshua 2:11

As soon as we heard it, our hearts failed, and there was no courage left in any of us because of you. The Lord your God is indeed God in heaven above and on earth below.

Matthew 28:19-20

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.

Words of Grace For Today

To encounter God is an awesome thing,

more terrifying than anything we have imagined or ever could imagine,

which brings our hearts to stop, and all things in us to cease to be, other than what God has given us.

…

When we realize that everything we need for life, abundant life, God has already given to us, then we can but be grateful for all that life has for us

…

and we will be ready to hand on everything that God has given us to others so that they may also live and live abundantly.

So we go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey the commandment Jesus gives us, to love our neighbours as ourselves, and even our enemies, and first that we love God with all our hearts, minds, and strengths.

Even when we see the face of God and hear God’s Word for us, as awesome and fearful as that is for us, we then trust always that God will walk with us to the end of all time.

All courage is given to us by the God that walks with us, each day, no matter how cold, no matter how hot, no matter the challenges our enemies place in our paths.

Let us celebrate each moment all the great wonders of each day.