Category: Spring

Where, Oh Where … !?!

Friday, March 18, 2022

Where Is God?

Down This Path?

On This Mountain?

Beside This Lake?

In The Crowded Cities?

God Save Us, Now!

Psalm 10:1

Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?

Mark 4:38

But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, ‘Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?’

Words of Grace For Today

I flew out in the fall to a remote fire tower to make a pastoral visit to the crew there. There was no way to announce my visit. I just took off, navigated by dead reckoning, and landed at the small grass clearing that served as a air strip. I’d circled over the tower and taken in the paths through the bush that wound the kilometre or so between it and the air strip. Airplane secured, I set off and …

hours later I was deep in the bush with no way of finding the tower in time to spend even a minute with the crew and still find my way back to the air strip before dark, and before dark I needed, most desperately needed to be in the air. There was no way a take off in the dark in an unknown airstrip was something I was even considering as doable. And anything not doable was certainly not ‘well, let’s see if it’s possible!’ So I oriented myself by the sun low in the sky back towards the plane.

As I came to a junction of paths in the bush, both directions on the new path hidden from view until I stepped into the junction, I got the scare of my life, or one of many.

There, not more than six feet to my right (the direction I needed to turn) was a calf and her mama, a cow moose. The calf was half size and still looked down at me. I froze. Moose have a pea size brain, and they survive only because they are bigger, tougher, and faster than most any predator.

Encounters with humans are so dangerous because, being so … well stupid … they are totally unpredictable and usually they charge, especially when their young are threatened! The results are usually -10 for the human and no effect on the moose.

Where was God!? How could this be happening to me? Why was this happening?

Always the photographer I reached for my camera hung on my shoulder, slapping my backpack with every step until I froze in my tracks. Why not document this so that if I did not make it someone would know how I came to my demise (or at least the last few seconds?) If I’d had a rifle, that would have been a smarter option, but useless as well, given the moose’s speed.

Before my hand was on the camera, mama and calf were well on their way across my path and down the to the left.

I breathed, settling the adrenaline rush to tolerable, and marched on. By the time I reached the plane all that adrenaline was gone. The take off was in the shadows, the sun just below the horizon, and my way home full of wonder.

God sometimes does save us from our own stupidity, from terrible circumstances, and from sure death. Other times we join the Psalmist’ and the disciples’ desperate plea: God where are you!? Do you not care what happens to us?!?

…

Only with time, and sometimes not even then, do we gain the insight to see and know … and trust that God walks with us, and suffers with us everything we suffer, and provides life abundant in every hour with every breath we breathe on this gift of creation God has brought us to live in.

So we pray, with full trust (or maybe barely any trust) that God hears us, for ourselves and for all other people faced with disaster, illness, and death this day, this week, this year: God be not stern with us, but gently save us and help us live each minute you gift us.

Selling Out Our Future, Or Trusting God’s Future For Us?

Tuesday, March 15, 2022

We May Pray for Warmth,

Yet New Beginnings,

Like Young Seedlings,

Require the Water of Winter Snows

to Prosper

in Christ’s Light.

2 Kings 20:1-2 4-8

In those days Hezekiah became sick and was at the point of death. The prophet Isaiah son of Amoz came to him, and said to him, ‘Thus says the Lord: Set your house in order, for you shall die; you shall not recover.’ Then Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and prayed to the Lord. …

Before Isaiah had gone out of the middle court, the word of the Lord came to him: Turn back, and say to Hezekiah prince of my people, “Thus says the Lord, the God of your ancestor David: ‘I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tears; indeed, I will heal you; on the third day you shall go up to the house of the Lord. I will add fifteen years to your life. I will deliver you and this city out of the hand of the king of Assyria; I will defend this city for my own sake and for my servant David’s sake.’” Then Isaiah said, ‘Bring a lump of figs. Let them take it and apply it to the boil, so that he may recover.’

Matthew 7:7

Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.

Words of Grace For Today

Hezekiah received 15 years added to his life, deliverance from Assyria and … Then when the Babylonians arrived he showed off all his treasure, which Isaiah predicted rightly the Babylonians would return and take back to Babylon with them, and Hezekiah is pleased for there will be peace and security during his lifetime.

Like many people, politicians in office most tragically, Hezekiah’s concern is not for the long-term well being for all the people. Instead those in power sell out the future for short-term peace and security while they are yet in office, while they are yet alive. All that sacrified for their present power, comforts, and questionable security.

It is very doubtful that many Ukrainians would agree that God is honouring Jesus’ promise: Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.

What are we to make of this?

The passage from Matthew is not preceeded by some context that makes is more believable, such as if we ask for what is God’s will for us. In fact the passage continues and makes it even more unbelievable for those in desperate straights, fearing for their country, their cities, their friends, their families:

For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

There are many attempts to explain Evil’s destruction, especially to such great swaths of humans so undeserving of the what they face; and to explain how a loving, caring, attentive, protecting God can allow such things to happen. None of them will ever suffice for those facing their own death or the death of loved ones, and the death of their reasonably peaceful way of life.

The only one that I have for my own situation (my enemies seek my death trying to achieve it within the ‘legal’ framework possible in this country) is that God suffers with us, even dies again and again with us. First though God created humans in order that we would love one another, God and all creation. In order that we are capable of loving, God gives us all the prerequisites, including freewill, that is the choice to love or not to love. After all, love that is not freely chosen is not love. Love is the free choice to give the best of life to another.

So we humans have freewill and can choose to love, or not to love. And as we so often choose not to love, those choices are evil in themselves and lead to even greater and greater evils, which always lead to the destruction and death of other people, creation, and our foolish attempts to deny and put God to death, once and for all.

Bleak.

Until we remember Jesus’ story: God always brings life out of death. God always responds to evil with Grace, Love, and Forgiveness … which offers people renewed life, and freedom from their past choices to not love, freedom from the evil that ensnares their hearts, minds and strengths. God always responds to our bleak present with a future of hope, peace, security, and joy fearing, loving, and serving God, and God alone.

We do receive all that we ask for. Most of the time on the other side of death, as God brings us to new life after death, life in the city of God where we all freely choose all the time to love.

Ask and we will receive … according to God’s timeline.

Power, Manipulation, and Spans of Life

Friday, March 11, 2022

We Dominate Much, Fracking for Oil, Destroying Fresh Water

Never Can We Change the Light of Christ

That Gives People Life, Blessed Life

Ecclesiastes 8:8

No one has power over the wind to restrain the wind, or power over the day of death; there is no discharge from the battle, nor does wickedness deliver those who practise it.

Matthew 6:27

Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?

Words of Grace For Today

As a young girl, Garcia quickly learned (brilliant as she was) that her world was populated by those who got whatever they wanted, and those who had very little. More significantly she learned that she could manipulate almost anyone into giving her what she wanted. She just had to make them think they could get from her what they wanted.

Her parents worked long hours. Her father as a pastor, her mother as a nurse. They were seldom at home with their five children, so she would get her siblings to fight among themselves and she would somehow always walk away with what she wanted, a bigger portion of breakfast, the best part of the fish for supper, two oranges at Christmas time (a treat that was so rare they only had oranges five times while she was growing up.)

As a teenager, when her parents could not provide her money to buy the special things she knew she deserved, she sought out the men who could make almost anything happen for her. All she had to do was report what her parents and their friends said in quiet whispers about the national socialist government … and they had plenty to whisper about as friends and other church leaders were arrested and jailed … or simply disappeared. The church was the only place anyone dared protest against the government, yet the leaders were throttled and threatened without mercy.

When her brother ended up in the hospital with a broken arm, cracked ribs and a broken collar bone after a fight with her, she visited him often because she was fascinated with everything at the hospital. She decided she wanted to work there. She asked her ‘friends’, to whom she reported on her parents and siblings, and everyone else she could, what she had to do to become a doctor. They, knowing full well how bright she was, said it would not be a problem. They would make sure she would get into the program at the University after her Abitur.

True to God’s promises, though, wickedness deliver those who practise it and she graduated a half year after those ‘friends’ were no longer anyone, since their government had fallen into ashes. Everyone in that government or aiding it ran for cover, hiding from their past realities, the better to benefit from the new reality, a democratic government. No one was concerned for Garcia’s future. When she applied for medical school, they knew she had been an informer and they denied her application without hesitation. She applied to be a nurse. They denied her application. She asked what she could train for to be able to work in a hospital and she was offered training as a nurses aide. Later she would falsify her resume and claim to be a registered nurse, take an exam in her new country of opportunity, and with almost no actual training start working in a hospital in an operating room. Being brilliant had it’s benefits as did her ability to manipulate almost anyone she met.

No one has power over the wind to restrain the wind, or power over the day of death.

Jesus asks, ‘Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?’

Garcia had no idea about adding hours to her own life, but she knew from her experience that she could manipulate other people to subtracting every future hour from their lives. When she saw no advantage to her husband, except his two life insurance policies, she got what she wanted.

He was not the first, nor the last. Garcia lived a life of wealth and privilege and comfort … though she did not know it. She always wanted more, more, more. She worried and fretted about others who had more. She lived in terror that her life would fall apart as she had helped so many other’s lives fall apart, in her home country and in her adopted country.

God patiently waited for her to ‘wake up and smell the roses’ of God’s great blessings and grace. She came close a few times but walked right back into her well worn habits of destroying others to make her way in life.

When she died it was poetic justice; she gave up all her future hours during one of the increasingly debilitating terror episodes that haunted her.

No matter what power we think we have, the winds of God’s Holy Spirit, along with the ferocious winds of climate change, blow in ways we cannot predict. For all of us there is no discharge from the battle, nor does wickedness deliver those who practise it.

Today we pray for all the men who now spend time in jail for crimes they certainly did not come close to committing, as all the Garcia-s out there who manipulate reality, getting eager police to join in with false reports and judges who relish their power to cruelly ‘punish’ men for being good, honest, law abiding, and gracious people.

No one has power over the wind to restrain the wind, or power over the day of death.

God does have the power to give us, not everything we want, but everything we need in this life to live blessed to be a blessing for others.

The Gardener and Helpers

Saturday, March 5, 2022

Plants

and

People

Need

Water

and

Light

Living Water, and the Light of the World

Psalm 65:9

You visit the earth and water it, you greatly enrich it; the river of God is full of water; you provide the people with grain, for so you have prepared it.

Luke 8:1

Soon afterwards he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. The twelve were with him.

Words of Grace For Today

God visits the earth and waters it.

I see the gardener (not me for sure) with her water can in hand, sprinkling water on the vegetables and flowers planted and weeded and left out in the sun to grow, for when the rains are not regular, as they seldom are, the plants still need water to grow healthily to produce nutritious foods and splendid flowers.

There are many times in our lives when there is hardly enough rain, and we dry up, parched deep inside, thirsting for a good word to revive our souls.

There are many times in our lives when there is hardly enough light, and we shrivel up like whitened plants so promising just days before at the bounty of their produce, the beauty of their blossoms, and then the plants hang nearly dead, beaten by the lack of sun and blown by the winds.

We thirst for water, living water. We stumble, fall and shrivel up in the dark when we have no sunlight, no Son light, the light of the living world, of the living word for the world.

So Christ comes even today, borne up by the many successors to the 12 who accompanied Jesus as he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God.

Perhaps you are one of these, who is gifted, able to bring words that inspire many to walk wet (baptized) every day as those who receive the living water (even in times of the worst droughts) and who see the light that shines in every darkness.

No matter who you are, God calls for you also to be one who carries the Good News, to be a servant of God serving as of a great throng of angels who save others from dry droughts and hard darkness.

Fahrenheit Fear, Death, and Freedom

Thursday, February 24, 2022

That’s Not Winter Temperatures

Nor Desert Temperatures

That Bring Death Close

And

Fear Closer

Isaiah 25:8

He will swallow up death for ever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken.

Luke 1:73-74

This is the oath that God swore to our ancestor Abraham, to grant us that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, might serve him without fear.

Words of Grace For Today

If you have ever served God in the midst of being attacked by your enemies, who have your death planned for you, then you know fear …

fear that drips with acrid sweat and foul tastes and smells …

and knowing fear you know there is a temperature to it, a temperature that you’d just as soon not be able to measure ever again.

Yet, always curious in our desperate drive to make order out of the chaos of life, we still try to put that temperature in the records, maybe so that we can ignore it or try to avoid it for the rest of our lives. The first challenge is to find the correct scale on which to measure this temperature. Maybe Fahrenheit, used in the US, the enemy of so many people, even it’s own people, and an enemy that creates so much fear around the world, sometimes without doing anything at all. History does the job for it.

How did Fahrenheit come to be?

Celsius uses the points for freezing (0⁰) and boiling of water (100⁰) … water being so basic and an ubiquitous substance needed for life.

But Fahrenheit uses 32⁰ for water freezing and 212⁰ for water boiling. That’s nuts.

It seems that Fahrenheit, in order to set the first standardized scale for temperatures, uses fickle human feelings, conglomerations of past experiences skewed by complex and unpredictable chemical and electric storage mediums (brains), filtering and skewing present experiences which are easily skewed by raw emotions, false and destructive beliefs, and diseases that disturb the uptake of reality.

So on the Fahrenheit scale it turns out that:

It feels real cold at zero degrees and it feels real hot at 100⁰!

Wikipedia puts it out there that Mr. Fahrenheit’s (who created the F scale) “original paper suggests the lower defining point, 0 °F, was established as the freezing temperature of a solution of brine made from a mixture of water, ice, and ammonium chloride (a salt). The other limit established was his best estimate of the average human body temperature, originally set at 90 °F, then 96 °F.”

Wikipedia goes on to put it right. Today temperature “is now formally defined using the Kelvin scale and hence ultimately by the Boltzmann constant, the Planck constant, and the unperturbed ground state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium 133 atom.”

I can read the words … and not much more, and I still know the temperature of fear has little to do with F, C, K, Boltzmann, Planck or caesium 133. It has to do with the drive to stay alive, and not succumb to one’s enemies that would have one dead, lately by leaving a brake job unfinished when I had a 4 hour trip ahead of me … and charging me 1/3 of my annual income for the privilege of being forced to learn to drive without brakes in an automatic transmission vehicle. (Another plus for manual transmissions.)

God never leaves us in the lurch … that our enemies (sometimes we are our own worst enemies) try to put us into.

God promises that God will swallow up death.

And

God has long since granted to us that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, might serve him without fear.

Temperature for fear on a scale is no longer needed.

For everything else Celsius will do.

Gentle

Tuesday, February 22, 2022

The Beauty of God’s Grace

Is

Reflected

In the Holy Spirit’s

Working In Us

Judges 5:3

Hear, O kings; give ear, O princes; to the Lord I will sing, I will make melody to the Lord, the God of Israel.

Philippians 4:5

Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near.

Words of Grace For Today

It doesn’t take much to be gentle, …

not really.

It just takes everything we can possibly give to …

to respond to …

well …

to respond with Grace …

with gentle Grace to …

to respond with gentle Grace to all the evil that other people throw at us, on top of us, and under us so that we can do no other than slip and slide to our demise.

Yet … first God responds to us and all our sins with gentle Grace,

gentle Grace …

ah gentle Grace meets our sins though we do not deserve anything of it at all,

not at all, and then

because God so responds to us we have hope …

we have some hope of responding with gentle Grace.

It takes more from us than we can possibly give, and only have some hope of responding gently as the Holy Spirit holds, guides and enlivens us with what we simply cannot find for ourselves,

unconditional love.

Ahh, as the sun rises and sets we simply cannot find unconditional love except as God gives it to us and as others, by God’s Grace, extend it to us and for us.

So gently it comes to us.

And so gently God gives us all that is needed to give gentle Grace to others.

God Reveals and Gives Renewed Life

Friday, February 18, 2022

The Sun Sets,

The Son Lives On

The Key to Life Itself

In God’s Creation

Exodus 33:20

‘But’, he said, ‘you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.’

1 John 4:9

God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.

Words of Grace For Today

There is the complication of communication between such different kinds of beings.

Science fiction has dealt with this in many ways: humanoids that have varying degrees of bodily appearances: facial hair, skull protrusions, different finger counts, different leg articulations, antennae, and on go the differences imagined. Then there are the other humanoids who require different atmospheres and must use equipment to provide their atmosphere when present with humans in theirs. And then there are the greater differences: the aquatic and air based life forms, and then the energy life forms, and more and more. Always there is, if not at first, some way for communication between the life forms.

What kind of communication can there be between the being whose power exudes greater than the sun, the creator of the universe? How can we imagine, even in science fiction terms, that we could stand inside the sun, or close to the sun, close enough to talk to the sun? What would the sun use to communicate to us, when a small burp would wipe out us and everything within millions of kilometres?

The creator of the universe did not leave us creatures clueless about our creator. Creation teems with evidence of God’s creative powers and God’s beauty and God’s Grace. Patterns are everywhere. Order is there to be recognized and understood and applied to improve our lives. Science and technology are possible because God created the universe so that we could understand and apply our knowledge in many and various ways. God also sent the Law, the Prophets, and the Son.

Whereas the sun will incinerate us long before we can approach it, the Son is a human just like us, and yet is still completely God. Those living at the same time as Jesus interacted with him just as with any other human, even though this human was different in how he lived, healed, loved, sacrificed himself, and rose to life again. Jesus’ life lived among us created a story. That story provides us the keys to understanding the universe and God’s Will for us in it: the Son’s power is unconditional love that forgives, generosity that heals and gives life abundant, and self-sacrificial love renews life and provides an example of how to respond to God’s call to live, live well, and to live fully in this universe.

God Creates A Story

Monday, December 20, 2021

God Creates the Heavens and Earth

For Us

To Live

and

to Love In

Isaiah 45:12

I made the earth,
and created humankind upon it;
it was my hands that stretched out the heavens,
and I commanded all their host.

John 1:11

He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.

Words of Grace For Today

The world is a wonderful place for us to live life, from the beginning to the end.

That’s what God does when God creates:

God creates the earth … and it is good and we can make enough evil to ruin it completely, or we can enjoy life fully.

God creates us … and creates us good, and free to love, so we are also capable to make enough evil to ruin everything completely, or we can enjoy life fully.

God creates the heavens and their host … and God creates everything good and we can make enough evil to ruin the universe completely, so completely, for ourselves and all future generations, or we can enjoy life fully.

Because we can be so evil, when Jesus comes, when the Holy Spirit comes (even though we are God’s own people) in our sin we reject Jesus’ way, we reject the inspiration of the Holy Spirit that makes us holy, that makes us saints. Instead of living well, we live … lost.

And lost we are lonely, and lonely we are desperate, and desperate we do so many unthinkable things to others, and at the same time to ourselves.

Thankfully that is not the end of the story.

Jesus comes as a vulnerable infant born in a barn, which starts a life that continues to a death and a resurrection … by which God creates a story of God’s unconditional love for us all, and God’s response to relentless hard hearts that make enough evil to ruin the universe completely, so completely, for ourselves and all future generations. In response to our Evil God forgives us and gives us renewed life, capable of loving again …

…

so that we can choose to enjoy life fully.

The Journey

Sunday, December 19, 2021

‘Matt’s Mess’

Left for years after Matt is Seen Here No More.

Where Did His Journey Take Him?

Our Journey As God’s People Is Blessed

Even if we seem lost to ourselves, or even to others.

Psalm 105:3

Glory in his holy name; let the hearts of those who seek the Lord rejoice.

2 Corinthians 13:11

Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell. Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you.

Words of Grace For Today

Last words.

What would be your last words to your best friend?

To your child?

To your spouse?

To your spouse who gaslit you and lied to send you to jail?

To the contentious congregation that never could stop fighting among themselves?

To the saints who gave you faith, nurtured it in you, and inspired you to sacrifice everything to do the good and right things in every situation that you could, even for your mentally ill, abusive, and pedophile spouse?

Paul wrote to that contentious congregation in Corinth his last words, pointing them once again to Christ: Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell. Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you.

What else could he write after so many years of writing and hoping that they would realize the treasure they were for each other, gifts to each other from God?

Life of faith in Jesus the Christ is often referred to as a life seeking the Lord. This only somewhat apt description recognizes that we never can grasp hold of and possess the Lord, or even be guaranteed that we have ‘arrived’ at knowing that we are God’s alone. Since we continue to sin all our lives, having embraced our faith, or rejected the gifts of God, we cannot point to a perfected way of living. We always continue on, ‘seeking the Lord.’ This is only partial correct in that it puts the onus of ‘finding the Lord’ on us. In truth our journey is a gift from God. Our effort at ‘seeking’ has little to do with the outcome of our journey. Hubris ruled as we are we like to claim that our own efforts determine our faith journey and all of our lives. It is simply not so.

All we are that is good, is a gift from God, including our faith.

Knowing and trusting this we can indeed rejoice in the journey that God gives to us, no matter how obstacle ridden, or unfruitful, or hopeless it may seem to us along the way.

Rejoice!

This we can do because God acts for us, first. Then we get to respond with all our hearts of faith that God has given to us. This is God’s way in God’s creation for God’s people.

Rejoice!

What is Our Portion?

Friday, December 17, 2021

No Matter the Weeds Or Ice In Our Way, Christ’s Light Guides Us.

No Matter What Our Enemies Do

Or Take From Us,

No Matter the Wilderness They Abandon Us To

God Walks With Us

Lamentations 3:24

‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him.’

1 Peter 1:8-9

Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

Words of Grace For Today

So many things challenge us each day, sometime making our day’s progress the usual grind, sometimes throwing up road blocks that could put us in reverse to find a way around them, and sometimes they stop us in our tracks, dead halt.

Whether it’s our enemies trying to undo us, or someone using us as a stepping stone to get ahead, or questions about our own worth brought on by lies about us or our own real limitations or others’ unreal expectations, or it is our health that fails us … no matter what it is that challenges us we all experience them every day.

The only way to live life abundantly is to be able to know that the Lord is our portion and only in God we can hope.

When we fear and love God, when we believe and trust God’s promises to carry us, when we know that glorious joy from knowing God walks with us … then we can know as well that God is at work in us, having given us faith and sent us out to share all God’s gifts with all God’s people.

God is at work in us showing us that our portion is the Lord, and that we can trust and hope in God alone.