The Thorns of Life to the Goodness God Intends for Us All
Genesis 13:8
Then Abram said to Lot, ‘Let there be no strife between you and me, and between your herders and my herders; for we are kindred.
Romans 12:10
Love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honour.
Words of Grace For Today
Tim’s father, in the movie About Time, has one line written for him that reflects a simple wisdom that many generations have discovered and passed on (from the umpteenth best man’s toast at Tim and Mary’s wedding):
We’re all quite similar in the end. We all get old and tell the same tales too many times. But try and marry someone kind.
When you marry, or you have relatives you did not choose, or friends you may or may not have chosen most everyone’s flaws and faults can be dealt with graciously … if both people are kind.
This is the quality of a relationship that one person in it cannot make up for in the other. One can try to forgive the lack of kindness, but eventually one will run out of energy and succumb in one way or another.
So the wisdom that Paul knew well and recommended to even strangers in a new (potential) congregation in Rome, and the wisdom that is carried for generations in the Abraham and Sarah stories is quite simple, basic, and essential to living abundantly: be kind.
In other words, show honour to each other, let there be no strife between you and your people and others, love one another with mutual affection.
Simple wisdom that is impossible to achieve at all if one is not well practised in being kind.
Being kind is a matter of choice … for a few times each day, but being kind always in all things to all people is impossible except by Grace the Holy Spirit inspires us to be like Christ for other people.
So we are kind … as we are able … and we pray that God will help us to be kind always …
that it may go well for us and our people in the land that God has promised us …
Whether we see others as ‘weeds’ in our lawn of life
God sees us each as precious and
God shines Light on each of us,
the light of love and life.
Isaiah 56:7
These I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt-offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.
Colossians 3:11
In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!
Words of Grace For Today
We humans keep building walls, us and them.
God keeps telling us and showing us that God is for all people, without any us or them.
Christ is all and in all … and for all peoples!
…
Christ is even for me, and for you, sinners though we be, God has claimed us a God’s children and made us saints, able to share God’s light with all people …
without any ‘us’ or ‘them’
or
walls
or
judgments
or
condemnations,
…
…
just
Grace for all.
It’s a wonderful dance of love, this life is (at least as God intends for us, and makes possible for us to live it.)
Ready or not here it comes, one day at a time, one hour at a time, one minute at a time … one decision at a time.
Set a place for Elijah, keep an eye for the poor at your gate, invite in the homeless …
This is God’s day, and out day to give everything back to God, one decision in one minute at a time.
The living water of Christ that spans the globe in the oceans,
Breaks in on us (at the right time and place)
and Gives Us Life
For this we give thanks.
Psalm 48:10
Your name, O God, like your praise, reaches to the ends of the earth. Your right hand is filled with victory.
Acts 3:1
One day Peter and John were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, at three o’clock in the afternoon.
Words of Grace For Today
When Jim, George and Helen, Wayne, and Frank went on a canoe trip, they were not fully prepared for what they would encounter. (Pretty normal for most of life for most of us.) Three days out a storm threatened a great deal of rain. They made camp on an island, not as far as they had planned to be that day, with one day before their return.
They set their tents rotating out to kitchen duties, to prepare supper, a pot of hearty soup. Chilled as they were when George and Helen started out they called on their southwestern US residence and added a bit of extra pepper as they fried the meat for the soup, knowing it would take off the chill.
Jim relieved them so they could set up their tent, nicely trenched as they knew it needed to be to provide a dry night’s rest. Chilled as he was from the afternoon paddling in the rain he added a bit of extra pepper to the soup in addition to the vegetables he chopped up and added to the meat.
Wayne, his tent set up and nicely trenched, returned with more firewood and took over from Jim, stoking the fire and warming himself as he went. He stirred the soup, more a stew by now, and added some minute rice, and a little extra pepper to take the chill off the wet evening.
Frank arrived, tent setup but not trenched, since he’d gotten the last available spot and the rocks and roots were not about to be trenched.
He added a bit of pepper to the stew to take the chill off and then as everyone gathered divide out the stew to each person, with only a small bit left in the pot, all covered with dark spots of something.
…
With gusto they all started to dig in, hungry after a long day paddling and a wet afternoon, as the rain continued to fall … having no effect on the heat created in their mouths and stomachs by ‘just a little extra’ pepper in the stew.
…
There is a right time, a right measure, for everything.
Help us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of your name; deliver us, and forgive our sins, for your name’s sake.
1 John 4:10
In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Words of Grace For Today
The beginning of every moment, every event, every situation, every life, every day … of every every is God’s Love.
God’s Love that created a universe with life in it, and us as life self-aware in among the many forms of life,
God’s Love that gave us freedom to love, and therefore freedom to not-love (that is: to sin),
God’s Love that holds the universe together (whether it’s String Theory or particles and strings, it’s all God’s Love),
God’s Love that holds life together, even our lives, giving us our daily needs, including meaningful labour and the ability to love and be loved,
God’s Love that gives us God’s answer to our sins: forgiveness and renewed life,
God’s Love that walks with us each moment of each day, even when we walk ourselves into the hell of the Evil One’s influence (as God’s Love keeps us walking right out the other side of hell back into life abundant),
God’s Love … it is the every every of our lives.
God loves us not for our sakes as if we somehow became more valuable and the purpose of the universe just because God loves us. Rather God loves us for God’s name’s sake, for God’s message about God to be seen and heard by all people through God’s grace acted out for us in forgiveness.
God forgives us and we receive life again. The rest of all humans, those long since have lived on earth, those that live now, and those that will live, receive a clear message about God: God loves people. God loves us. And God loves them!
We get to screw our lives, because we are going to anyway, and because we become the raw material for God’s communication to all humans: God’s clear message that God loves us, and that God’s Love is the beginning of all, it is the every of all, and it is the end of all in all (the purpose and the result and the finality – the end of all time for each human as well as that for all humans.)
Until then we are privileged to be the message of God’s Love for all people: that we are forgiven and renewed, and that we can live for others, as Jesus lived for others, that all people may have life, and life abundant!
So it is that we enjoy the reprieve from the record-breaking, sweltering heat of climate change that sat over us last week with the cool more common in autumn.
So it is that we prepare for the next days of heat, hopefully not record-breaking.
So it is that we learn to enjoy winter all that much more, and especially autumn, after the bugs are gone and before everything freezes requiring more wood for a modicum of warmth inside.
So it is that we enjoy having an ‘inside’ that can be heated against the cold outside.
So it is that we enjoy everything about life, and find pure joy in a breath of fresh air, a stormy day, and a calm morning sunrise … as we wait for our last sunset that comes to harvest every mortal creature … knowing God’s Love walks with us each precious day and will walk with us also then.
Until that day our purpose is to be the message for all humans, that God loves us all!
In this is love, not that we loved God but that God loved us and sent God’s only Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.
Matthew 5:13
You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.
Words of Grace For Today
Jesus sends the disciples out into the world to share the Good News, that God has sent Jesus to demonstrate God’s love, forgiveness, grace, and favour bestowed on all peoples.
We are out in the world, now in a world that ‘does not need God’, has no room for God, and pretends that everything is fine (without God.) The Good News is needed more than ever before.
How is this sending by Jesus different than God ‘exiling’ the people of Israel to foreign cities, cut off from their homes? It is done by force, first of all, against the people’s will and established by the sword of a alien ruler, not of faith in God. When Jesus sends the disciples, they choose to follow Jesus and they choose to obey him as he sends them. The exiles are not able to travel ‘back home’. The are captives in the foreign city. The disciples go out and they return ‘home’ to follow Jesus as he goes about the Galilean countryside.
How is Jesus sending the disciples the same as God ‘exiling’ the people of Israel to foreign cities? The passage for today from Jeremiah provides the link: in both sendings God’s people are to seek the welfare of the places and cities where they go. The exiles are more permanent, perhaps life long, and even many generations long. Their well being is intricately tied to the well being of the cities to which they are exiled. The disciples bring nothing with them, so their welfare is tied to the welfare of the places they go as well. The difference for the disciples is that at some point they get to leave the welfare of the places the visit and reclaim the welfare of home as their own, perhaps … if the welfare at home is controlled by people who will welcome them home.
The passage from Matthew ties it together nicely: the quality of one’s life as a disciple of Jesus, as a person of God’s people is not determined by the prosperity of one’s surroundings. Rather one’s life is determined to be of the greatest quality because God has adopted us as children. No matter what comes our way we remain God’s children.
Like salt we do not change as the surroundings around us change. We remain salt.
The danger to our lives is not prosperity or poverty. Each we can deal with easily enough, poverty perhaps more easily than prosperity because in prosperity it is too easy to forget from where the goodness of life comes. We too easily attach goodness to the things of luxury and comfort, rather than to the essentials of life provided always by God’s goodness and grace. Soon we start to assume that we can make it well through life without God’s blessings, grace, forgiveness and guidance. In poverty we do struggle to remain alive, though there are few reasons to doubt that the goodness of life comes not from things, but from God, because so often without any goods or things to divert our attention from God’s blessings we immerse ourselves (in order for life to continue) in giving God thanks for all the goodness that pours over us each day.
We are God’s children. Simple and easy. Like salt it’s not complicated. Like salt too much stops life, but the right amount preserves sustenance through the sparsest of times.
When we lose our saltiness, our simple dependence on God for everything, and our ever present gratitude for everything, then we become useless. We lose grace and have no Good News to share. There is nothing left but to make up nonsense about life. We see so much of that, so much more than we could imagine civilization can endure and still survive.
To this saltiness-lost-world Jesus sends us with Good News.
To this saltiness-lost-world God exiles us to live out the Good News.
Wherever we are or go God walks with us, and guides us to share and hear anew the old, old story of Jesus and his love, for us and the whole of creation.
One step at a time today, again; not towards our goals, but towards God’s will for us.
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.
Even the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as dust on the scales; see, he takes up the isles like fine dust.
Revelation 21:3
I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them.’
Words of Grace For Today
Wonders upon wonders stare us in the face each morning, noon, and night:
The universe is a great and expansive place. It is a great thing to wonder about: How did it come to exist? Where does it extend to? What is beyond? What holds it together? What is ‘next door’ to us?
Life around is continually renewing itself. It is a great thing to wonder about this process: What holds it all together? How is it that the ‘birds and the bees’ came to be able to renew life, to procreate and have life continue despite so many challenges to life? How much of it have we already destroyed or put in danger with our huge population and luxury demands for energy?
The atomic make up of this universe is a curious expanse. What regulates the sub-atomic pieces of the universe and life so that what we encounter has a semblance of order, an order that we ‘discover’ and passionately pursue understanding, so that we can ‘progress into the future’?
Human life and consciousness bring us to wonder about all around us, with curiosity and purpose to ‘make life better’. No more wonder is possible than to wonder how it is that we can wonder at all. What are we made up of? Certainly it is more than chemicals and happenstance!
The greatest wonder of all is that God deigns to live with us, as Jesus, and always as God who sojourns with us each day of this miracle of life.
God is the One who created all this, the universe of galaxies and black holes, life on earth of so many varieties and interconnections, human spirit of body-mind-soul, and all that is – even if we cannot know of it or even imagine it!
God sees the nations so grandly constituted for good and evil as entities smaller than grains of sand. God could scoop up the isles out of the oceans all in a moment and toss them into a black hole on the other side of the universe. God knows the inner workings of every life form and every interconnection between forms of life and even between each life form and the cosmic events of which we may or may not be aware. God knows everything about humans, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the miraculous.
God has all knowledge of all things. God has all power over all things in all time and beyond time. God has all everything above every thing and moment.
This God chooses to walk with us, each day. To love us. To protect us. To guide us. To accompany us in the best of times and the worst of times.
If God is for us, who can be of consequence standing against us?
No one. Not even the Evil One and those who do the Evil One’s bidding, trying to lie about reality, to create a false reality supposedly more favourable to themselves while destroying so many around them.
No, not even our worst enemies, nor the Evil that drives them … nothing can separate us from God’s love and grace. With God’s love and grace working for us, we are able to help God makes wonders happen for all God’s people, all God’s creatures, and even all of God’s creation.
It’s so hot that I put out six eggs, cheese, and spices
by the outside propane stove.
Then I went inside to get the iron skillet for making scrambled eggs
and they were hard boiled before I could crack them
and the cheese was burned to charcoal.
The spices were still good.
We are to be like the hot spices for life!
2 Samuel 14:14
We must all die; we are like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be gathered up. But God will not take away a life; he will devise plans so as not to keep an outcast banished for ever from his presence.
Luke 5:30-31
The Pharisees and their scribes were complaining to his disciples, saying, ‘Why do you eat and drink with tax-collectors and sinners?’ Jesus answered, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick [do]!
Words of Grace For Today
The secret to life really is to recognize how screwed up everyone is, how far from God’s good books we all behave and remove ourselves. We like to cast others out, out of God’s house, out of civilized company, out of our lives. In fact the ones who do the casting out are usually the ones most deserving of being cast out. They not only are so screwed up and so far from behaving justly, lovingly, and with gratitude for God’s gifts; they also deny they are anything but perfect or maybe just slightly flawed.
GUFFAW
The other part of the secret to life is to recognize that nothing can help us, especially not ourselves, and not even chocolate or coffee or scotch (or any variation on those themes.) Nothing can help us except God. Knowing God, fearing and loving God, frees us to recognize that God WANTS us! God works all kinds of miracles to convince us that God actually forgives us! God freely and generously gives us forgiven, redeemed, and renewed life, again and again and again and … without end.
God wants us to know God walks with us always.
God does not banish us. Other people pretend they can, but God remains by our side. When we get tossed onto the garbage heap of life and even tossed out into the darkness of hell itself, God walks with us, and keeps us walking right out of that darkness back into life abundant.
Jesus came not to care for those who thought they were healthy. Jesus came to show us that we were all sick, and that Jesus was ever ready to heal us of our every illness.
Death will come to us all. That will end the injustice done by many. Still God does not abandon us, nor give us our enemies’ deaths as the only hope for a better life. Already today God gathers us into Paradise with all the saints in light, if we will only see and recognize all that God does for us! At our deaths God keeps walking by our sides and gathers us still into Paradise with all the saints in light, who have accompanied us on our sojourn each day, hoping for us, hoping that we will also be the saints who share Jesus’ wonderful healing presence and promise with those the world casts out, and those who cast others out.
God continually devises plans so as not to keep an outcast banished for ever; God sends Jesus the physician of the universe to all who are sick; God sends us to heal the sick in heart, spirit, and body with Jesus’ Word and Jesus’ story.
They shall be mine, says the Lord of hosts, my special possession on the day when I act, and I will spare them as parents spare their children who serve them.
Ephesians 1:5
He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will.
Words of Grace For Today
To be a child, not an orphan, means one belongs to those who are very alive, a parent or more parents.
If one’s parent(s) are good parent(s) the future is always filled with promise and hope.
When God adopts us as children our parent is the best parent, and our futures are filled with more promise and hope than we will ever realize.
Each day, no matter the challenges beyond comparison or even joys that seem to free us from any need for God or darkness for which we cannot find words nor coherent thoughts … each day because God claims us as children, we need not fear anything, not anything at all. We can be assured that in all things God walks with us. God claims us as special children, children that God spares from the destruction of the Evil One.
This is God’s good pleasure, that we can live free from the destruction to which the Evil One would subject us.
Great is our Lord, and abundant in power; his understanding is beyond measure.
Mark 10:27
Jesus looked at them and said, ‘For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.’
Words of Grace For Today
Tina stood outside her camper, breathing in the sunset air with light pounding against the still lake waters. How had it come to this? Such beauty, wonders, and peace after a decade of Gaslighting?
She had not earned it, nor felt any claim to it, though her attachment to the land and waters ran through her bones deeper than it had a right to.
For mortals this would be impossible to imagine; but even this is not impossible for God.
For years what troubled her is that people could do what they had done: lied, gaslit, scapegoated, made false reports to the police, blatantly lie in court (even police officers), and then the lies the judges told in order to convict her, send her to prison. How could people choose to do such things? How could people think they would get away with it, and then it seemed they got away with it.
She had always known she had not committed the crimes, or done the terrible things reported and rumoured about her around town. The impact of being declared a criminal though ran deep and she questioned what she had done wrong to ‘earn’ this kind of treatment, even if people were so evil, corrupt and cruel to do to her and say about her the things they had.
It took years of loneliness, despair, prayer, hope, and many repeat acts of people lying about her, pushing her back down as she tried to gain a voice. That was it for the first few years, silenced about the false police reports and false charges. Then silenced about the lies told to the courts. Silenced by unjust and cruel judges. Everyone was so afraid of the truth, now that the ‘game was afoot’ to scapegoat her for evil they had previously, otherwise done, and which they still continued to do.
It took years of coming to understand that the evil done to her had very little if anything to do with her at all. All those years of confusion, pain, loneliness, silence, and lost hopes. Slowly, ever so slowly she came to understand how very little it had to do with her and how terrible the things were that she had learned about, the lies and games that people played creating the lies, the horrendous perversions that people participated in and covered up, with influence, money, and raw force.
Arnold had invited, begged, persistently courted and pursued her. In court he’d said she was the one who had pursued him, for his money, for his children, for his home. All of that was lies. He had pursued her for the good company she was, for her great way with children, and, after he’d seduced her, for the sex. He made out that he was charmed, needy, and fulfilled by her. But he really knew nothing about love at all. He begged her to marry him and not just have an affair. She agreed and he promised they would marry when she was divorced. And when she was divorced he said they didn’t need to get married, that it would be just like they were married.
On it went, a marvellous, unbelievable six months of being in love, with the isolation from friends, the constant critique of little things mostly of things he did and blamed her for, the silence about her past, and all the stories about how perfect his first wife was. All that even after he confided to her that he had driven her to kill herself when her two life insurance policies overlapped and both paid out handsomely making him a multimillionaire in months. She was perfect in every way, and when she made a wrong decision he made sure she changed her mind and made the right one, especially the last decision to end her life.
He went to work on Tina right away, and got her on a drug that caused her to be suicidal, and he drove her hard, hard, hard until one day with half a bottle of sleeping pills and a bottle of alcohol Tina was ready to find her freedom from Arnold’s abuse.
How had it come to this?
How had that come to sitting by a lake breathing in the sunset with light pounding against the still lake waters. Such beauty, wonders, and peace after a decade of abuse, Gaslighting, and one suicide that failed only because the cream in the Irish Cream slowed the absorption of the sleeping medication – that took three days to work it’s way out of her system?
How had it come to this after that?
Great is our Lord, and abundant in power; God’s understanding is beyond measure.
So many times Tina had resigned her to God’s care and understanding of what was being done to her, for it made no sense at all, not at all, at all!
It took years but it had come to this, by the lake.
Tina still did not understand, though she agreed, For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.
…
Where are you today? How did you get there?
What unbelievable challenges blocked your path so many times in so many ways?
How has God shown you, that for God all things are possible?
