Category: Breathe

Of Whom Shall We Be Afraid?

Saturday, February 26, 2022

We Live

In The Light Of Christ

And Need

Fear

Nothing

Psalm 27:1

The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?

John 8:12

Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.’

Words of Grace For Today

There is the Ukraine, following Georgia and Crimea; just one place on earth where military force is used to invade neighbouring countries to control them.

These kinds of invasions rightfully create fear in us all.

Africa’s conflicts never end.

These kinds of invasions rightfully create fear in us all.

The Middle East is one conflict and war and invasion after another.

These kinds of invasions rightfully create fear in us all.

Police apply force unjustly against so many minorities, and also against now men falsely accused by vengeful or deranged women. For some women are blood thirsty as some are to destroy any man possible in order to avenge violence against women, which even though dramatic and terrible, today’s violence against women is still only a fraction of that conducted against men, some of it also by women against men, with the same deadly results. It’s all the same thing: violence aimed at innocent people, and the first victim is truth, and those impacted the worst are the children.

These kinds of invasions rightfully create fear in us all.

More subtle kinds of invasions happen all the time as truth is sacrificed in our own courts, and many, supposedly just, courts around the world.

These kinds of invasions rightfully create fear in us all.

There are so many more real reasons to be fearful of all the evil that is perpetrated indiscriminately and directed exactly against us.

What are we to do?

We have no other choice or option: we get to trust God’s promises: that Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life and

that the Lord is our light and our salvation, and therefore we have no reason to fear anything, nothing at all.

Nothing at all.

So we, no matter the reasons that are so many to fear, … we have no reason to fear … for no matter what evil happens or is done to us or other people,

God is with us, the Light of the World is with us, there is no darkness for us …

nor is there reason to fear anything, anything at all.

We live in the Light.

Of whom shall we be afraid?

Ukraine, Ukraine!!

Friday, February 25, 2022

Peace Here

Affords Many

The Freedom To Fish

In Different Directions

Under The Same Sky

Psalm 135:14

For the Lord will vindicate his people, and have compassion on his servants.

Matthew 5:6

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Words of Grace For Today

Today there is little to say other than prayer on prayer for the good people of the Ukraine, who have lost so much, and now so much more is taken from them … and for all the people for generations to come who will loose again and again because of this occupation and stealing of land by Russia.

So we pray that the Lord will vindicate his people and have compassion on his servants, and that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be filled.

And that Justice, based on truth, will prevail,

there and here, as well!

Lord, help us if it does not.

Crumbs

Wednesday, February 23, 2022

Most Often

The Path

Following Christ

Appears to Be

A Maze

…

Yet

There Is

An Amazing Path

to the Light of Christ

Psalm 119:6

O that my ways may be steadfast in keeping your statutes! Then I shall not be put to shame, having my eyes fixed on all your commandments.

John 4:34

Jesus said to them, ‘My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work.’

Words of Grace For Today

Most humans have never thought to listen at all to God. Their loss, literally, as they plow through life, destroying more than they could imagine.

Most humans who have thought to listen to God, have learned just enough in such a way to make God’s Will into their own will, and they blithely continue on plowing through life, destroying more than they can imagine.

Those who strive to listen to God … well …

It’s really no different for us either: we continue to plow through life, destroying more than we can imagine.

So we, we who would live life in order to give life to others … so we pray constantly that we would be able to hear God’s will for us and follow God’s will with our thoughts, words, and deeds.

Yet without the Holy Spirit it is hopeless for us and our prayers.

Jesus was a different kind of person, one who knew and followed God’s will, not his own will made to appear to be God’s will. Rather Jesus knew, followed, and received nourishment by following.

Sometimes it is not hard to think that we are more like Hansel and Gretel trying to find the bread crumbs of Jesus, and receiving mere snippets of nourishment for the little treasures we find, sometimes most unexpectedly on what we thought was certainly not a path Jesus ever trod or sent us out on to tread one step at a time.

The most precious gift we receive from the Holy Spirit is to see, hear, and touch the presence of Jesus in our lives each day, in the most unexpected manners.

To see, we look …

To hear, we listen …

To touch, we reach out ….

Another day, this day, and we pray nourish us Jesus, with your bread of life and the gifts of the Holy Spirit most precious.

Journeying With Goals That Give Life

Thursday, February 17, 2022

Always Christ’s Light

Beckons Us

To Journey Onwards and

To Live Blessed Lives

Sharing Blessed Life

with Others

Psalm 25:5

Lead me in your truth, and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all day long.

John 8:31-32

Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, ‘If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.’

Words of Grace For Today

Lead me in your truth and teach me …

You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.

Life is not a journey with a final destination that we can reach or achieve or earn or miss out on. Life is a journey always becoming in the next moment what is next, whether that is new, old and oft repeated, or old and first for us. So we look forward with goals and plans that guide us, yet always these goals and plans are secondary to celebrating that God gives us the journey each day and walks with us no matter what we encounter, no matter what our enemies do to us, no matter anything and everything. Our goals and plans are chosen to reflect that everything we have and everything we are right down to the latest breath we’ve taken God gives to us, freely, lovingly, wonderfully.

When I was much younger I worked at the airport in Fargo, on the line of a small flight school and charter service. The chief pilot (the only pilot) drove his black Grand Prix out on to the apron where fueled up the airplanes on day, got out and started chatting with me. Usually I was not even noticed other than to be given orders on what to do with my time.

He pointed to his car. I wasn’t impressed. Cars were not something I was interested in other than as a means of transport. Airplanes of course were a different matter, though even they were for flying somewhere fast, or getting somewhere and being able to land with little to no runway, or doing aerobatics in.

He continued with his tale that he’d dreamed of having one since he was a young teen. Other than becoming a pilot that was what consumed him. He’d dreamed and planned and dreamed and worked. Finally he had one. He was in his early thirties, growing a bit of a paunch. He never had been athletic. The business he worked for was owned and run by his friend, and it turned out it was losing money hard and fast as the two of them ran it into the ground. It had been a gift to the friend from his father who’d built it up from nothing and now was not wealthy but comfortably retired.

The chief pilot finally got to the reason he was telling me his story about his wonderful jet black Grand Prix. “Now that I have it I don’t know what else to do with my life.”

I worked there a few summers during college, and then one final semester when I audited classes since I had more than enough credits to graduate (in 3.5 years) but there was nothing like graduating at any time except after the spring semester. So I was waiting for graduation, and then I’d be off to Yale Divinity School, except a full scholarship year in Germany sandwiched it’s way in first.

I did not understand a life focused on attaining a thing, a piece of metal, plastic, and rubber, as fancy as we humans have been able to make things of a great number of materials.

I can understand it sort of now, but not really. That kind of a life is, as the chief pilot said, pretty empty after one attains one’s dreamed goal. In fact that orientation for life empties life of life itself step by step as the goals is pursued. Things just do not make life worthwhile. They never have and never will, and there are countless stories from history that bear witness to this.

What we know, as followers of Christ, is that all the things in the world cannot fill one’s life with meaning. We receive things, skills, and everything else as gifts from God so that we can give life, abundant life, meaningful life, blessed life, to others.

Continuing in Jesus’ Word is not a choice we make, though our choices, especially our choices of goals and things we hope to attain or achieve in life, reflect whether we have surrendered and continue to surrender our own will and hopes and dreams to God’s Will for us each day.

We pray that we will continue in Jesus’ Word, giving as Jesus gave of himself, so that others can live and living they can know (as the Spirit teaches us) that God’s abundant, unconditional love, is the guide to a meaningful life.

This is the truth that frees us to know that God walks with us each step of our journey from the present into the next present, giving us stories of blessed lives (no matter what our enemies do to us).

Who Can Endure? Who Will Feast?

Sunday, February 13, 2022

See

and

Hear

Folded Hands in Prayer of Thanks.

Malachi 3:2

But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap.

Revelation 3:20

Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.

Words of Grace For Today

Each day, each moment of decision, we can respond to all that challenges or threatens us with our wits and strength, ready to fight for ourselves,

or we meet all challenges and threats first resigning to God’s Will.

In our resignation we can either expect the almighty God’s wrath to wipe us off our feet with a mighty cleansing fire, leaving little left of us,

OR we can resign and expect to celebrate and feast with Christ.

The choice seems simple: struggle and death or feasting and celebrating with God!

Yet we cannot on our own make the choice other than to engage our wits and strength. That requires trusting God, whom we think we cannot see, whom we know will let us suffer defeat and death for we have seen so much defeat and so many friends meeting their death.

So how is it that we can hear Jesus knocking and actually open the door? That is the question of life … or death!

It is only possible for us to hear and answer if God has given us faith to hear, faith to trust, faith to know how to resign ourselves to God’s way of unconditional love and forgiveness and blessing and gratitude and generosity and living abundantly … no matter our circumstances, no matter the challenges we face, no matter the threats made against us.

Thank God daily for the faith given to us, for we hear and see the door opened … by faith. And we feast with Christ each day.

Recklessly Love God!

Friday, February 11, 2022

Boldly Catching the Curve

Following God’s Inspiration

and Blessings

Joshua 23:11

Be very careful, therefore, to love the Lord your God.

John 14:23

Jesus answered him, ‘Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.’

Words of Grace For Today

I am not at all sure that being careful is part of loving the Lord our God.

My experience and reading tells me that loving the Lord our God requires a foolish, even reckless, boldness, fuelled by a wonderful faith (given as free gift by God to us).

There is simply no way to get through life without sinning, though one can do one’s best not to hurt others, and to do one’s best to let God inspire and lead one to be a blessing for others.

God’s promise is that we are not alone. Even in Covid isolation and staying smart about it, we do not live alone. God walks right with us and ‘makes God’s home with us!’

Being careful?

Rather be bold, being all that God created and inspires you to be!

Faith That Fights for Life!

Tuesday, February 8, 2022

Living the Life of Faith

in the Light

the Faith to Which We Are Called

And for Which We Are Created.

Isaiah 51:7

Listen to me, you who know righteousness, you people who have my teaching in your hearts; do not fear the reproach of others, and do not be dismayed when they revile you.

1 Timothy 6:12

Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life, to which you were called and for which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.

Words of Grace For Today

To fight.

To fight usually involves things like fists, rifles, drones and bombs.

Or at least it usually involves scheming, manoeuvring, ruining the other, driving them out of here into exile, leaving them homeless and landless, or setting them up to die an early death.

To fight.

To fight the good fight of the faith to which we are called …

well that is an entirely different kind of fight.

It is a battle again evil.

It is a battle against evil first of all in ourselves, and then in those around us.

It is a battle that we can barely begin to fight … unless ….

Unless God brings us to be holy…

holy saints,

holy saints equipped to bring Grace to bear on condemnation, bold forgiveness to douse reproach and destorying, kindness to undo all violence, and truth to outshine all deceits.

This is the battle of the universe, of which God created us, for which God created us, not that we might die in the battle or bear the burden of the war, doch …

doch (rather) that we might be vessels carrying hearts transformed to know God’s presence with us, God’s righteousness permeating us, no matter what may come.

Shine, Jesus Shine.

Otherwise it is so dark in here!

Shine, with all the candle power the universe has ever known,

Shine in this darkness, and transform those who would destory and destroy us.

Shine, Jesus, Shine!

Sing, Children of God, Sing!

Let there be Light, and let there be jubilation, in every corner of creation, in every darkness of evil, and in every heart.

God’s Compassion

Sunday, February 6, 2022

To Whom Among the ‘lords’

God Will Extend Compassion

Is Not For Us to Say or Know.

Ours is, amid the darkness, to bask in

The Golden Light of Christ.

Micah 5:3

Therefore he shall give them up until the time when she who is in labour has brought forth; then the rest of his kindred shall return to the people of Israel.

Matthew 9:36

When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.

Words of Grace For Today

The great masses of humanity have always lived subjected to those with power and the ability to lord it over them. There’s never been a shortage of those lining up to take on the place of power and privilege and comfort … and lording it over others to have all that.

Jesus, God’s story of God’s amazing unconditional love for all people -especially the poor and the outcasts – sees the crowds gathered to hear the Good News that he preaches, the healing that he administers and he knows their plight.

God has walked with God’s people in poverty and oppression and persecution and exile without homes. God knows everything. God knows the plight of the great majority of humans who have ever lived. God knows the corruption of those who lord it over them. God has, seemingly, abandoned God’s people at many and various times to the clutches of those oppressing, persecuting, and driving masses into poverty. God has always walked, into those times of apparent abandonment, with God’s people. And God has walked God’s people out of those times as well.

God sends the Law, the Prophets, and the Good Shepherd to guide the people out of those times that are like hell. Today God continues to send God-made saints to walk with people in all circumstances, to help them reconnect with the promises of God and to live (even in poverty and oppression and persecution and exile without homes) abundantly. So it is when we live aware that God walks with us.

There is nothing in life that is more blessed, more secure, and more rich than God’s presence and God’s promises that we, too, shall once again walk among God’s people, no longer shunned and falsely accused, but exonerated and honoured.

And those who lord it over others, driving them to poverty, into oppression, into persecution and out into exile homeless … those who lord it over others and live in comfort will face God’s judgment. Whether they too will receive God’s Grace is not for us to say. It is God’s will, which will be done. For now the ‘lords’ breathe only as a gift from God, giving them time for the amendment of life.

For the rest of us, God has compassion and demonstrates it day after day, in the simplest and most profound ways.

Thanks be to God.

Root … Taking Root

Tuesday, February 1, 2022

Taking the Route

to the Root

of Life

and

Putting Down Roots

(Even in Winter)

Brings Us to the Light of the World,

Christ.

2 Kings 19:30

The surviving remnant of the house of Judah shall again take root downwards, and bear fruit upwards.

Romans 11:16

If the part of the dough offered as first fruits is holy, then the whole batch is holy; and if the root is holy, then the branches also are holy.

Words of Grace For Today

Taking root.

That’s the event that connects us to whom God created us to be.

Taking root.

That’s the event that revives us, renews us.

Taking root.

That’s the event that requires forgiveness,

offered to those who would destroy us, and

accepted for all the sin that we ourselves have actually done.

Taking root.

That’s the event in which God shows us again that we are holy because we are connected to all that is holy in God’s good creation.

Taking root.

That’s the event that leads to us bearing fruit, good fruit.

Correction or God’s Wrath!

Tuesday, January 25, 2022

When We Skew Our Perspective On God’s Creation,

Taking Correction is Welcomed

even if it chaffs.

…

God’s Wrath

though

takes all perspective and vision and life

away from us

in all time.

Jeremiah 10:24

Correct me, O Lord, but in just measure; not in your anger, or you will bring me to nothing.

1 Thessalonians 5:9

For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Words of Grace For Today

There are many people, on earth, and who have lived on earth (and there will be plenty more in times to come), who know that they need no correction from God or anyone else for that matter. They are wrong, but there is little to be done for them. They sit in positions of power, like judges and bishops, archbishops can cardinals, who are pretty hard, if not impossible, to provide any correction to. They get away with bullying, abuses beyond imagination, and making light dark, sweet bitter, and life death. They have no fear … of anyone, especially not God.

There are many people, on earth, and who have lived on earth (and there will be plenty more in times to come), who know that they need every correction available from God or anyone else for that matter. They live humble lives, fearing and loving God, and loving other people, praying that God will have saved them (like that pastor about to retire who expressed his greatest concern to his colleagues over a game of cards and scotch – I was so young and did not understand then – ) ‘from having hurt anyone!’

God’s wrath directed at any part of creation, at any person or any people rips that part of creation with unimaginable agony out of creation. God’s wrath completely unmakes it/them, uncreates it/them, separates it/them from every having existed.

We pray we will never know God’s wrath!

God’s wrath is perhaps well directed towards those who will take no correction.

God promises are that God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.

In this promise we live, in fear of God, overwhelmed with love for God and all God’s creation and all God’s people.

It’s a good life, though we know we always need correction, and pray that God’s correction will come in ways that will not destroy us, for we breathe, and work, and pray, and struggle, and love, and hope … as God-made saints and simultaneously as sinner still.

And we pray each day that we will, above all, not hurt anyone, and, knowing that we have and cannot help but still hurt others, we pray for forgiveness each morning, noon and night.