Morning – Page 14

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – November 20

Friday, November 20, 2020

Given this Beauty,

To Claim to be Self-made

to Worship God as the Giver of Everything,

For which do you think God created the universe?

Daniel 2:21

He changes times and seasons, deposes kings and sets up kings; he gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to those who have understanding.

Revelation 15:3-4

They sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb: ‘Great and amazing are your deeds, Lord God the Almighty! Just and true are your ways, King of the nations! Lord, who will not fear and glorify your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship before you, for your judgments have been revealed.’

Words of Grace For Today

While it is so easy to proceed through life under the illusion that one has made one’s own success, or to accept that one should have and failed by not making one’s own success; this is the curse of persistent evil from generation to generation. We learn that one must work hard. The modern myth is that everyone is equal and has equal opportunity; thus those that are wealthy, powerful, and famous have done something to make it so for themselves. And everyone else has failed to live life the way it should be lived.

God gives us all sorts of signs, messages, and roadblocks in life to help us see that God alone determines who the powerful are, and which powerful people fall. God alone gives knowledge and wisdom to whom he chooses – though it is not the self-help book kind of pull yourself up and make something of yourself. God alone changes times and seasons

(though one has to wonder if Daylight Savings Time is not the work of the devil to disrupt our lives on such a fundamental basis – all so that the wealthy can become wealthier, at the expense of the safety and sanity of the populous.)

God alone is pure holy. God alone judges the nations. God alone is just and true, always.

Wealth, power, and fame may seem to be attractive, something to strive for, something to covet. Who would not wish that life be at least a bit, if not considerably more comfortable, secure, controlled, and longer. This is not, though, what God created us for.

God created us to worship and praise God, in all we say, do and hope for. God makes it possible for us wretched sinners to do this, by Grace alone, through Jesus’ sacrifice to redeem us and free us from our sins.

So what will you do this day?

Will you strive to make your own way in life? And take the credit for your success … or for your failure to become wealthy, powerful, and/or famous?

Or will you give God thanks and praise for all the life, the gifts, and the wisdom that God pours out on you each day?

The sinner in us will certainly strive to make itself.

The child of God, saint by God’s Grace, will recognize the giver of everything

with a grateful heart

and with a voice, with hands, and with feet that reflect Christ’ Grace to everyone.

We are simultaneous saint and sinner, all the time, everyone of us. We can but beg for God’s mercy, grace and love.

What a beautiful life!

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – November 19

Thursday, November 19, 2020

Given this Beauty,

To be Fearless in All Things or to Fear and Love God at All Times,

For which do you think God created the universe?

Psalm 34:9

O fear the Lord, you his holy ones, for those who fear him have no want.

Luke 14:17

At the time for the dinner he sent his slave to say to those who had been invited, “Come; for everything is ready now.”

Words of Grace For Today

To Fear God; this is the ancient, constant beginning of awareness of God. We lived on the plains, lived in caves, hunted for food, were hunted as food. Fear kept us alive. We could not understand many things of the world around us. We came to know that God created us, that God who created us was an awesome power, more fearful than the animals that hunted us for food. It took generations for us to begin to understand that God loved us, and that fear alone was inadequate a response to God’s love. We needed to fear and love God.

To fear and love God; this is the beginning and the end of all our lives and our purpose in creation.

While food does not come our way freely so that we must work constantly in order to have food to survive, God provides the food of life that nourishes us beyond the basic physical needs. For God created us hungry for truth, order, understanding, community, and love.

God sets the table for us again and again, to come and eat so that we can know truth, see and maintain order and gain a fuller understanding of the universe and our places in it. God feeds us so that we can dance our way through the challenges of community, and so that we can love as God loves us, freely and unconditionally.

Fear drives us. Love draws us. Together they help us sustain life for ourselves and those with us, and hopefully for all people.

How will you live this day, and all the days you have on earth?

Will you be fearless in the face of all challenges, diving headfirst into Evil’s temptations to be your own godlet?

Or will you fear and love God, the God who created the universe, and loves you and all people, and all creation, unconditionally?

If we fear and love God we can do no other than commit ourselves to living out the gifts God gives us, by promising:
to live among God’s faithful people,
to hear the word of God and share in the Lord’s supper,
to proclaim the good news of God in Christ through word and deed,
to serve all people, following the example of Jesus,
and to strive for justice and peace in all the earth.

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – November 18

Wednesday, November 18, 2020

Given this Beauty,

To be Ruled by God or by Humans,

For which do you think God created the universe?

For which do you think God created our hearts?

Isaiah 26:13

O Lord our God, other lords besides you have ruled over us, but we acknowledge your name alone.

Acts 5:29

Peter and the apostles answered, ‘We must obey God rather than any human authority.’

Words of Grace For Today

Human history is filled with cruel rulers, greedy despots, and evil dictators.

Trump is only one of many alive and ‘ruling’ today.

How is it that so close to half of the 140 million people who voted in the States, voted for Trump?

What comes out of his mouth has been and is still hardly anything that is true, yet millions of people accept it as true.

If you doubt that they actually think it’s true, one only needs to hear about people in the Trump supporters’ Dakotas dying in the ICU from Covid 19, who refuse to accept that the pandemic is real. Instead they insist it is just a hoax. They refuse to acknowledge they are dying. They refuse to speak with their families. And they die, alone, still believing Trump’s lies.

How can this be?

We know that cognitive reality therapy works, works well, works fast. That is, if a person wants to believe (based on what they have already accepted as true), constant repetition of an alternate set of ‘reality statements’ will bring that person to accept that alternate reality as true.

Media that spew propaganda, and advertising focused at individuals is a danger to the continuation of civilization; they attack people’s understanding of the ‘social contract’ that holds barbarism at bay.

Trump is right that there is a lot of ‘false news’ out there. It’s the news that reports what he says, as if it were true. Ever since networks and news stations were no longer required to present both (really all) sides to a story, stations have been bought up in huge conglomerates to present an alternate reality to millions upon millions of people, over and over and over and over again.

People buy into the thin wedge of Querdenken, an apt German word for it. It means crooked-thinking, or cross-thinking, or contrarian-thinking (contrary to reality.) Those who buy into the less extreme ‘alternate reality’ easily buy into the next potion, and the next, and on and on, until what they perceive as real is so far from real it is scary. Thus they vote for Trump, deny Covid 19, and ‘drink the bleach Kool-aide.’

Words matter. It matters what people hear, read, say, and write. Words shape our perception of reality. That is why leaders target truth. Truth is the first victim of war, and of any evil ruler. That is why evil rulers try to control media, arrest dissidents, and exterminate anyone who questions their authority and means of maintaining power.

In countries that supposedly allows free speech, the dangers are very real. Truth is constantly under attack. Chaos is created to cover the huge lies and evil that is allowed to flow under the guise of ‘free’ speech.

One needs to be vigilant, so as not to accept false words and eventually make them into one’s own pseudo-reality. The Kool-aide is sweetened so that at first sip, it seems delightful. Evil always is so.

One needs to hear God’s Word, often, clearly, well stated, graciously presented. Repeating a sermon from decades or centuries ago may be instructive. It cannot replace a sermon written for now, in this place and time. God’s Word proclaimed needs to be written so that the current names of challenges to truth and all other evil as well are provided, and God’s Gracious response to evil is also stated in our terms.

Who will we serve today: human authorities, or God? Simple question; from our answers flow radical consequences for everything we do each day: who we listen to, what we hear, how we hear it.

We cannot hide in a bubble of holy talk. We need to hear the Querdenkers out there as well, so that we understand what God’s Grace needs to respond to. That is we need to know to what we need to respond with Grace.

Human history is filled with cruel rulers, greedy despots, and evil dictators.

Before and above all of them is our God, who did, does and will always create, redeem and renew all of Creation.

So what are you up to today:

drinking human authorities’ Kool-aide

or being God’s Grace for all people?

Facing Covid 19: Words of Grace – 17 November 2020

Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Given this Beauty,

Grace or Law,

For which do you think God created the universe?

Isaiah 48:9

For my name’s sake I defer my anger, for the sake of my praise I restrain it for you, so that I may not cut you off.

2 Timothy 1:9

God saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works but according to his own purpose and grace. This grace was given to us in Christ Jesus before the ages began.

Words of Grace For Today

It is a marvellous thing that God does for us, saving us and calling us (as God’s children) to a holy calling.

God does this for us.

We do not earn it, or deserve it. We can take no credit for it, not in the least.

With Jesus’ life, ministry, death, resurrection and ascension we encounter God in a new way; yet God did not change to meet us in this new way, living the life of a human being. Indeed God’s Grace made so clear in Jesus’ story, was God’s Grace for us since the beginning of creation.

Why does God do this for us?

God does this because God chooses to do this; God defers God’s anger, restrains it toward us, so that we and the whole creation can sing God’s praise. Dead people do not sing. People who receive Grace have every reason to sing and sing at every opportunity!

Pastor Erin from Trinity Edmonton preached a sermon 15 November 2020 on Jesus’ parable of the talents given to three servants, and the condemnation of the servant who hid his talent in the ground, instead of investing it. Her point was that the traditional interpretation of this as a parable about ‘investing’ our gifts in order to return even more to God is wrong. Instead it is a parable about denouncing the greed and avarice of the owner that demands unfair use be made of millions given to the servants. The owner’s condemnation of the servant who ‘plants’ his owner’s talents in the ground is all wrong; in fact that servant rightly refused to participate in the avarice of using wealth against others to multiply one’s wealth. But Pastor Erin insisted, since the parable was told by Jesus long before capitalism it was not a parable against capitalism. She said the point of the parable was: we need to subvert systems that take advantage of poor people. We must tear down these systems and replace them with ways of being equitable and fair to all people.

Which is interesting if poorly stated. What’s missing is that as Lutherans we proclaim that we are saved by GRACE, and Grace alone. We are not save by what we do, or how we think rightly, or how we subvert unjust systems … nor MUST we do anything. Trouble is so many pastors are ready to ‘tell us’ what we ‘must do, think or believe.’

Worst of all, what Erin and others preach is simply another form of telling us what we must do in order to please Jesus and God and thereby earn God’s favour. It is a futile exercise in the ‘power’ of the office of ministry entrusted to a pastor. This is all Law, in the most destructive, subversive way: debunk traditional interpretation of scripture and then point to what Jesus ‘said’ with a parable (interpreted through one’s own eyes/history/perspective/drive/hates/self-chosen-life-purposes) we must do as Christians, so that people will make changes to the perverse and evil world order that we live under.

God, fortunately, does not wait for us to subvert unjust systems, as just as those actions may be; God acts first, not by overpowering or undercutting or destroying unjust systems and the people who support them and benefit from them. God acts by graciously forgiving, renewing and guiding us, all of us.

Therefore we are free to think differently about unjust systems, and in thinking differently we change how we interact with them; which forces the systems to change in response to us.

Jesus tells parables in such a way as to shock his listeners into imagining that something can be different, that God enables us to be different, that God enables us to be God’s Grace for all people. (That’s what any good sermon has at it’s core.)

God gives us ‘talents’ (i.e. gifts of a great variety) in an overabundant quantity and quality. Like money, we get opportunities to ‘invest’ our gifts in God’s kingdom. Our investing in God’s Kingdom (unlike investing in the unjust money systems humans always have had, which Jesus slams in his parable) reaps great increases in our gifts, of which we are only stewards All we are, have and can believe, think and do belongs to God. We ‘have’ it all only by Grace.

Wasting Grace by reducing life to what we must do, whether that is to believe the right things, to maintain a particular piety, or to work in whatever ways to subvert injustices, is a waste of the Grace given to us; it is like burying a great treasure in the ground, instead of using it to do God’s work in this world.

Why does God do anything for us? Why does God chose to exercise Grace for us?

Because God so chooses.

How can we respond?

By giving God thanks and praise!

Once we do that whole-heartedly, then God can use us in new ways to share God’s way of being, to share God’s Grace for everyone with everyone.

Why us? Because God so chooses! Despite our deserving only God’s anger.

Thanks be to God.

Now let us get on with giving God thanks and praise, by sharing Grace with all the people we meet … even if our pastor has forgotten the beginning and end of God’s Word is always GRACE.

Facing Covid 19 and inherent Evil: Daily Words of Grace – November 11 – Lest We Forget

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

The Light of the Sun Reflected

We get to reflect the Light of the Son

Why Pursue Anything Else?

Proverbs 15:16

Better is a little with the fear of the Lord than great treasure and trouble with it.

Mark 8:36

For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?

Words of Grace For Today

Remember lest we forget those who sacrificed that we might live without overt fascism!

Covid 19 is in it’s second wave, and it runs rampant through Alberta (as many other places). Officially the word is that people are partying. This can be taken to be true … and stupid if understandable. There is likely more … also stupid and somehow some of it is less understandable.

Caution is thrown to the wind in so many ways in Alberta. Premier Kenny refuses to do more than make suggestions to people in order to stop the wave that is well on its way to overrunning the health care system. Cities and local governments have led the way mandating masks.

In Cold Lake nothing is mandated by the city. Stores with headquarters elsewhere have mandated masks and hand sanitizing upon entry. Guides are in place for physical distancing and in some stores for one way aisles. Nothing is done to mitigate aerosol transmission, which evidence shows is a likely path of transmission. That means unless huge volume air ventilation systems are in place an infected person can spread the virus in the air for 10 or more metres and leave the virus hanging in the air for hours.

The measures in place are of little use since there is no enforcement past the entrance doors. People remove their masks when they are away from the door, wear their masks so as to cover just their mouths or just their chins. People regularly touch their masks pulling them up or down and then touch products they do not buy. Everyone, store staff included, walk wherever they please, against the one way arrows, with no thought of physical distancing, regularly passing within inches of other people.

The majority of people speak volumes with their reckless behaviour, and their tolerance of other people’s reckless behaviour: they are ready to forfeit their life, or rather someone else’s life.

God created us to live as Jesus set the example: with grace forgiving, healing, and welcoming all people, sacrificing ourselves in order to bring other the abundance of life that God has provided for all people.

After SARS in Canada the recommendation for future pandemics was clear: the government should act quickly, decisively, and strictly, long before the evidence is in what the minimum is that is required. Immediate, maximum restrictions should have been in place long ago.

Now with the second wave, again slow minimal responses continue to be the norm, and the new case numbers are skyrocketing. Why the slow ineffective responses, last January and now this fall? Because the maximum restrictions cost the economy hugely, and it’s all about money for the rich, though the story now is that it robs ordinary people of their income. That it does. But a quick decisive response costs everyone less in the long term than slow minimal responses do!

Decisive maximum responses can cost politicians in the polls, but the record shows that lack of action, like Kenny’s, costs them more.

So why this slow, ineffective response?

Who is to profit from it? What kind of dictatorial interests are at play to trade people’s health and lives for their profit, power, and privilege?

Then one reads today: what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? or rather our lives. – Though we understand clearly to forfeit others lives is to forfeit everything about one’s own life that God created us to be: reflectors of Christ’s Light.

It is simply better to live with very little, fearing and loving God; than it is to live with a great deal of wealth, power, influence, status, and/or fame and have a great deal of trouble with it.

So what are we to do. Dr. Tam almost said it: We should do EVERY LITTLE THING we can think of to protect ourselves, our loved ones, and EVERYONE ELSE.

We are in this together, and the virus does not distinguish it’s victims according to wealth, power, influence, status, and/or fame. It just needs a live human, and healthy, young, minimally affected are the best for transmitting it to many others.

Every live human counts equally.

We are all in this together.

So let’s ALL start behaving like there are a lot of LITTLE THINGS we can do, and start doing them!

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – November 8

Sunday, November 8, 2020

Light in the Trees

Blessings among People Sorely Tempted

If One Knows How to See

Both are Easy Enough to See.

Genesis 39:9

Joseph said to Potiphar’s wife, who wanted to seduce him: ‘Potiphar is not greater in this house than I am, nor has he kept back anything from me except yourself, because you are his wife. How then could I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?‘

2 Timothy 2:1

You then, my child, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.

Words of Grace For Today

Potiphar’s wife covets Joseph, and badgers him to sleep with her. He refuses. This is the right thing for Joseph to do, out of respect for all Potiphar has done for him, buying him as a slave and elevating him to be overseer and in charge of everything Potiphar has.

Potiphar’s wife eventually tries to force Joseph, grabs his robe, and he runs away leaving his robe behind, which she uses to accuse him of trying to rape her.

False allegations by women have cost men their lives since the beginning of time. It is still the case today. My financial and reputation lays in ruin because a woman lied, and then more women lied, and then those with authority lied, a lay pastor, lawyers, prosecutors, and judges.

It’s a common corruption that eats at the social contract that keeps barbarism at bay. It is the tip of the spear of barbarism that tears civilization to shreds.

It is a good example that Joseph sets for us, to resist overtures for evil’s pleasure. Temptations are everywhere. Resisting does not guarantee you will have a good life, only that you will lived blessed with the free conscience. Setting good examples and doing the right things can get you buried in jail and left there to rot like Joseph, and or driven into ruin like me (as millions before me and millions after). Right is still right. Lies are still wrong.

There are many things that tempt us, evil pleasures are but one.

We are not to give in to evil temptations,knowing that Jesus brings God’s grace to bear on all our sins, as if our gleefully sinning gave witness to God’s grace.

We are to live, unafraid of our sins, for God’s grace does save us continually.

We can, and we can expect others, to live righteously. And when we fail, we can and can expect others to forgive, trusting God has already forgiven … us and others.

Evil will persist, false allegations and convictions will continue, civilization will crumble into barbarism. Only God’s Grace saves us.

Pray it comes to bear before it is too late for those who bear false witness, and bring the curse of evil persistent in their lives.

Pray God’s Grace comes to bear before it is too late for each of us.

Evil is powerful, temptation is overwhelming, and we cannot resist, doch our strength is not our own, it is God’s who walks with us always. As the air that is blown in the wind, God is always with us blessing us. And God is always with those who choose to destroy us with lies and injustice, revealing their sins against the backdrop of Christ’s Grace.

There is nothing boring about this life that God brings us to live, unless we are like Potiphar’s wife, always adding more evil to our accumulated sins, so much that nothing is enough for us. Life remains boring for we try to be our own purpose; God has more than enough purpose for us.

Is your life boring or is it full of God’s blessings? Choose whom you serve and it has consequences … hardly those you expect or we expect. God’s forgiveness keeps reshaping the world we try to make sense of … into something new, re-newed, re-created. A miracle.

It is a miracle that we can be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – November 7

Saturday, November 7, 2020

Under the Snow and Ice

Is the Beauty of Creation

Waiting to Blossom,

Also in Our Hearts

Jonah 2:8

Those who worship vain idols forsake their true loyalty.

Hebrews 6:12

For God is not unjust; he will not overlook your work and the love that you showed for his sake in serving the saints, as you still do. And we want each one of you to show the same diligence, so as to realize the full assurance of hope to the very end, so that you may not become sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.

Words of Grace For Today

While this passage of Hebrews descends again into the If we but do, think, or believe; Then God will reward us kind of thinking that perverts the Gospel of Jesus, namely that God saves us freely, through Grace, though we deserve only condemnation. True to Jesus’ way we hold up always as the measure of all things: Because God saves us, makes us God’s children, and equips us to be Christ’s feet, hands, and voice in the world, Therefore we can be grateful and active every day in every way to be just that.

It is always tempting to revert to IF, THEN theology. It appears to place us in ‘control’, instead of being always ‘beggars’ for God’s Grace and Mercy. It does no such thing for us. It is a deception of the Great Deceiver.

This is one of those vain idols that God’s people so often worship, which corrupts their hearts, minds and strength.

We all turn to worship vain idols, pursue corrupt and futile dreams, and turn from those around us that need our love, empathy and compassionate justice to reflect Christ’s sacrifice to save us all.

God remains true, walks with us even into the Hell that we create for ourselves and those around us, and guides us to keep walking back out into the Light of Christ, once again saving us from perdition.

God is just, merciful, and steadfast in love … for us and all creation. God does not overlook anything. God cannot reward us for the good we do … there is none, not without God being the agent that brings us to do the good that comes out of us poor miserable wretched sinners.

God rewards us for the record that Jesus places before God on our behalf, Jesus’ own unblemished record.

Now that’s some record, and some reward, considering everything about us! Our response, when we realize again what Jesus has done for us, is nothing short of more gratitude than we could have imagined ever possible for anything … and a re-dedication to reflect Christ to each person we deal with each day, and to reach out to and provide the basics of life and God’s Grace to the outcasts, the forgotten, the homeless, the disadvantaged, the ill, especially the mentally ill.

The evils of injustices, abuses, and perversions destroy people constantly everyday.

Our reflecting God’s Grace, love, and compassionate justice make the world a wonderful place to live, for they counter evil at every turn, providing hope based not on our fickle promises and actions, doch on God’s steadfastness.

What a reality to notice everyday! It makes this quite a miraculous place to live!

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – October 31

Saturday, October 31, 2020

The day done, a deserted place, and the prayer is always the same:

Thank you for all that you bless me with,

and sustain me, when others would take my life from me.

Psalm 59:17

O my strength, I will sing praises to you, for you, O God, are my fortress, the God who shows me steadfast love.

Mark 1:35

In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.

Words of Grace For Today

In the morning, while it is still very dark … this describes everything in the morning here for months. The sun rises at 8:00 ish, later, it’ll rise at 10:00.

he got up and went to a deserted place … this describes every morning, for thankfully this place is deserted. No one is around to threaten me. I’ve had my fill of lies about me and people trying to Gaslight me to think I did something wrong when I have done very honourable and courageous things.

there he prayed … and each morning I pray, with thanks for what I still have available to sustain my life and make it even blessed, fresh air, water, fire for heat and sometimes even hot water, food, clothing, a bit of shelter, work and love.

I have every reason to sing God praises, for God is my strength. In the face of all this gaslighting, of late some very transparent and intentional, God shows me all the steadfast love that holds the world together. Indeed God is my fortress.

Those who lie about me, and Gaslight me … these people I know could not survive with the little that I have. I can with God’s blessings survive many many years. They would give up, capitulate or simply die of an accident of their own making, dying by fire or by ice.

They have fancy houses, houses of privilege, houses made with deceit and fraud, yet their houses crumble even now, for the comfort they enjoy, the conveniences, the relative safety, … all that is won by dishonesty of whatever kind will crumble not from others or from mice and ants, but from within themselves, from their own corruption.

And you, have you provided life abundant for anyone lately, OR

or have you taken life’s essentials for yourself and left others without?

Who is our God, if not the God that is knowable in how we behave when the stress is turned up high, as it has in Covid 19, especially now with the 2nd wave, which as predicted is worse than the first?

In the early morning, in a deserted place, what are doing each day?

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – October 29

Thursday, October 29, 2020

Shows Us the Way Home

Do You See, the Beginning Place for Life

Starting with an Egg?

Deuteronomy 4:2

You must neither add anything to what I command you nor take away anything from it, but keep the commandments of the Lord your God with which I am charging you.

1 John 2:7

Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment that you have had from the beginning; the old commandment is the word that you have heard.

Words of Grace For Today

God created a wonderful universe, and us in it. We also can be as God created us, wonderful.

As scientists explore, research, and experiment, they come up with formulations of theories, which if they prove to be reliable become known as laws. These are serious, accurate descriptions of how the universe works. Until they are not … not reliable, not serious, not accurate descriptions of how the universe works. Or sort of.

We still call Newtons Laws, laws, even though they fail on so many levels.

Still scientists plug on to describe how what happens around us … and as a result they or others are able to develop amazing technologies.

Computers are one example. Not just the one on many people’s desk or hauled with them in a pack pack. – I remember when the computer at the University of Minnesota which one could book time to run one’s punch cards through and receive answers on punch cards and reels of magnetic tape filled more than one floor of a building that occupied a long, very long block. I got to visit with my dad, a post grad student, in the input room and walk the hall, looking in the windows at the air conditioned rooms that held monstrous rows of tubes and wires and what ever not! I was impressed, sort of as a kid. This was bigger and more powerful than the computer that sent the first men to the moon.

That computer had the power of one of today’s hand held calculators, a simple one.

The computer carried in a back pack today is what? millions and millions times more powerful than that computer at the UofM?

The laws of physics allow technologies that make computers possible. And they are everywhere, in vehicles, in almost everything with a combustible engine or electric engine or even an electric anything.

We know more, and we seem to know less about the universe, than we know and do not know about God and God’s Will for us humans.

God sends us signs, and laws, and prophets, and rituals grow out of all the extra-ordinary experience of God.

Evil people have since the beginning of time used religion, changed it, bent it and perverted it to serve their own purposes of control over others.

So God spoke to Moses and commanded that not one iota could be removed from the law, and not one iota could be added to it. That really did not stop people from trying and seemingly doing just that.

Jesus, God’s Son, came and lived as one of us. God’s Will for us ‘spoke’ to us in his life, death, and resurrection. Jesus is God’s Word.

Many thought that made different laws from God the by word of the day. It’s been done so many times that religion of every kind is full of the results.

Jesus, the Word of God, John wrote to teach us, was at the beginning. This Word created the universe.

There is no ‘new’ Word.

For many there is a new hearing, a new comprehension, a new life for sure.

God’s Word remains the same.

Adding to it, or taking from it does no one any good.

The mystery is grand enough that if we love God with all our heart, mind and strength, and our neighbours (including our enemies) as ourselves (as Jesus loves us – unconditionally) we are in for a life of discovery, research and experimentation, of happiness, grief, despair and profound joy, and of faith, love, and hope.

We do not add or subtract from God’s Will or God’s Word, but there is always more to comprehend, and more sins (ours and others) to forgive, and more life (ours and others) to redeem and set anew.

From the beginning of life to it’s end we have only Grace, which is the old, old story of Jesus and his love.

It’s old, and if you engage with it, it will always surprise you as if it were new … in it’s demands on you and in it’s rewards for you and yours.

Warp drive or not … plot in a course … engage.

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – October 27

Tuesday, October 27, 2020

Simple Light

on Ice

As Easy as Kindness

Job 9:2-3

Indeed I know that this is so; but how can a mortal be just before God? If one wished to contend with him, one could not answer him once in a thousand.

Mark 12:32-34

Then the scribe said to him, ‘You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that “he is one, and besides him there is no other”; and “to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength”, and “to love one’s neighbour as oneself”,—this is much more important than all whole burnt-offerings and sacrifices.’ When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, ‘You are not far from the kingdom of God.’ After that no one dared to ask him any question.

Words of Grace For Today

Jesus brings wisdom, wisdom that the intelligent, the powerful, the wealthy, and the privileged rarely comprehend yet honour and embrace.

Jesus calls the simplest part of each of us, the kindness string of our DNA, and commands us to love God with all our heart, and with all our mind, and with all our strength”, and to love our neighbours (all of them) as oneself.

It is not complicated. It is not really difficult.

It just goes against the selfishness that drives most people to success with wealth, power, privilege, and intelligence. Love is not built on one’s own accomplishments.

This selfless, unconditional, complete love for God, one’s neighbour (including one’s enemies) and oneself can only grow out of one’s acknowledging that God provides as free gifts all that one needs for life.

Many fools with power, privilege, intelligence, and wealth have attempted to argue with God that it is the way they have lived that is God’s will. It is a futile argument. No one can contend with God, nor without God’s Grace survive.

Thanks be to God. We live, breathe, and laugh. Kindness and real honour win the day, for all eternity.