Issues – Page 18

May Day Morning Reflections

Sunday, May 2, 2021

A Little Spring Ice

Is Sprung from the Water

by a ‘Little’ Wind

Deuteronomy 32:46-47

Take to heart all the words that I am giving in witness against you today; give them as a command to your children, so that they may diligently observe all the words of this law. This is no trifling matter for you, but rather your very life; through it you may live long in the land that you are crossing over the Jordan to possess.

John 6:63

It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.

Words of Grace For Today

May Day

God has spoken, commanded, given wisdom so that we may live long in the Promised Land.

God’s Word gives us life, renews our spirit, revives the body, and calls us to live abundantly.

God’s Word created this wondrous world we live in and are working so hard to destroy in order to provide ourselves comforts and luxuries un-dreamed of by most of all our ancestors.

Yet, on this first day of May, God’s Word comes alive, as it often does for those who care to listen, breathe, and respond to the call to live, and live abundantly.

What a marvellous thing to wake up, without having had to have a fire going to keep things from freezing, to light the fire laid last night, and walk about under the trees down to the lake, in the sun and in the shade absorbing warmth in the just above freezing fresh air and the cool breeze from the ice piled on the shore from yesterday’s westerlies.

What a wonder that the air moved as wind is powerful enough to move the weight of the ice against itself and pile it up four and six feet high on to the shore, exposing crystals formed last fall to the open air and camera lens.

What a wonder it is that these tall trees (tall for Alberta at 40+ feet) can stand against gravity and those winds, until they do not. In the recent high winds (the new norm) more than a few have had their tops snapped off falling to the forest floor they are so weighted. Old trees have been knocked clear out of the ground, broken at the root. One green and budding 50+ foot poplar is snapped clean off just above the ground, falling through everything on it’s way to bounce not at all off the ground, around 1000 lbs of tree become dead become wood at the onslaught of one last wind. Other trees in the nearby woods similarly have taken it ‘on the cheek’, or rather ‘off the root’.

It is a glorious morning time, before the noise of the day, of human activity and campers’ abuse of the woods, of oil industry traffic dimming in the distance to be replaced by the dull roar of the plants processing heavy bitumen into heavy oil, thinned enough to pump through pipe networks to gas plants and shipping ports.

For now all is still here near the lake and far into the woods, until the birds sing and flit about, the birds on the ice screech and geese honk, the owl hoots a few last times before the day’s rest. Shadows from the sun reaching past the bare tree trunks reach the grass and leaves on the brown and green grass, striping it with stark lines pointing toward the water.

The one huge pain of this tree budding season lays in wait ready to ambush my body’s immune system, overloading it, scratching at my eyes, piercing my sinus with pain, running fluid into my throat and into my lungs. Allergies will sap more than half my energy as my body fights an invisible, unknown, unassailable opponent for more than the 60^th season, giving it everything and losing it all to not even a tie-breaker. Medicine will relieve the losses, day by day, and take days off the end of my life, even now leading to infections in my lungs, bronchitis which robs me of my breath, and occasionally pneumonia laying flat on my back inches from needing a hospital’s oxygen to survive.

This is a glorious morning, with it’s inherent promise of surviving another -30⁰ and colder winter that will still come my way, God willing and ‘the creek not rising’, and it’s twinges in my nostrils and scratches in my eyes that foreshadow the battles to be fought and lost yet again against an invisible, unknown and unnecessary foe.

This is a glorious morning, a blessing provided by God’s unending Grace.

This is a glorious morning, which I will enjoy and be profoundly grateful for, for God has rescued me so that I can survive the lies, the scapegoating, the gaslighting, the false testimonies and affidavits, the injustice, the false convictions, and the cruel rulings that benefit no one, especially not the children.

Breathe.

This is a glorious morning in and by which God continues to bless me.

Breathe.

And prepare for the days’ hard labours, which keep this aging body able to move against arthritis, decay, gaslighting, and cruel injustices.

Breathe.

…

God has spoken, commanded, given wisdom so that we may live long in the Promised Land.

God’s Word gives us life, renews our spirit, revives the body, and calls us to live abundantly.

God’s Word created this wondrous world we live in and are working so hard to destroy in order to provide ourselves comforts and luxuries un-dreamed of by most of all our ancestors.

Yet, on this first day of May, God’s Word comes alive, as it often does for those who care to listen, breathe, and respond to the call to live, and live abundantly.

Breathe even, and especially, in these times of new normals.

Adversity and True Strength

Wednesday, April 21, 2021

Life is a series of reflections

on us.

What have we,

What will we,

for others to enjoy an abundant life?

Isaiah 48:10

See, I have refined you, but not like silver; I have tested you in the furnace of adversity.

Luke 6:22-23

Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

Words of Grace For Today

This life may be terrible and even horrendous, but it will be all right in heaven, so this is all right, too, right?

What doesn’t kill you, makes you strong, right?

Too often these rather stupid simplifications of valid ideas are used as excuses to allow psychological or physical violence and abuse to continue. The truth is there are scars from many things that do not make one stronger.

Perhaps the worse use of these is to justify that some people can enjoy great wealth, privilege, and comfort, while others struggle to stay alive, and others die very ignoble deaths, all in order to make the ‘chosen’ few able to be wealthy, privileged, and comfortable.

God did not make creation for us to live in a while and then escape from it’s injustices to heaven. God made all of creation, saw the accomplished work of creating, and said, “It is Good!”

Life for all people is designed to be GOOD!

GOOD does not mean without pain or suffering evil, for then there is also no possibility to love and experience joy. Pain and suffering – and – love and joy are part and parcel of the kind of life God created us for.

We live and love and experience joy. Some day the people we love will suffer and die. We will then also suffer and experience pain.

And it is all Good.

It is true that those who enjoy wealth, privilege, and comforts now at the expense of others being able to live abundant lives will, for eternity, suffer their choices to be blind and deaf to what they do to others.

It is also true that those who suffer and know only pain, will for eternity be released from that horrible kind of experience and they will know joy forever.

Our lives here and now are not to simply accept all suffering and pain as necessary. It is to work as hard as we can to mitigate and minimize all pain and suffering, to provide an abundant life for everyone!

That’s a life full and long of hard, dedicated work of love, not the sentimental kind of love, the real kind of love that puts one into action and pulls one to sacrifice so that others can live well.

What makes us strong, truly strong, is to know that even as we suffer and are in pain God walks with us, still creating, still seeing all that God does through us, and God says, “It is Good.”

Therefore we know that already today all will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well.

Don’t celebrate? Or …

Wednesday, April 14, 2021

Now Matter How We See The Wonders of Creation

and Our Work in It,

All That Is Good

Flows from God.

Ezra 6:22

With joy they celebrated the festival of unleavened bread for seven days; for the Lord had made them joyful, and had turned the heart of the king of Assyria to them, so that he aided them in the work on the house of God, the God of Israel.

Luke 10:20

Nevertheless, do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.

Words of Grace For Today

There is great reason to be joyful when those who rule over you turn their hearts to you and aid you in your nearly impossible, but necessary work, whether that work is to provide a house for the Lord where people can gather (after Covid 19) or to provide a home for a new family (like a refugee family or a new couple) without a home or to provide a home for a homeless person.

The disciples nearly impossible work is to cast out demons, to renew the ill people’s spirits, to give life. As they work the ‘spirits submit to them’ and they are able to give life to many people. We are to follow suit today, bringing renewed life, full life, abundant life to as many people as we can.

So the people of Israel celebrated the festival of unleavened bread (the Passover?) for seven days.

We have great reasons to celebrate our festivals as well. Usually we merely take a break, a pause, and focus on our own enjoyment, or gathering our families – or we used to before Covid 19.

All this, Jesus reminds the disciples and us, is barely cause to celebrate.

At first glance we do have to shake our heads, trying to clear them of some unknown cobwebs as we try to make sense of Jesus’ words. Certainly bringing life to others is THE reason to celebrate. Or is it that the disciples and we celebrate not bringing life to others, but rather the power they and we are able to exercise in order to accomplish our tasks?

That power is not ours. We have no right to claim it, nor to celebrate as if it were ours. That power remains God’s and God’s alone. We exercise it for others, doch it is God would exercises it for us for them.

God exercises that power, like many other life-giving powers at work in the world around us, along with our efforts, because God has written our names in heaven as God’s holy workers.

Therefore our celebrations are most life-giving for us, when we celebrate not that we ‘have’ power or can ‘exercise’ power. Our celebrations are most life-giving for us and all people when we celebrate what God has done for us miserable beggars and sinners: God has written our names in heaven, claiming us a God’s holy people.

Choosing to Be ‘in Love’

Sunday, April 11, 2021

no matter how long the shadows

old age or illness cast across our paths

God intends for us to remain ‘in love’

with God, God’s people, and God’s creation.

Psalm 62:11

Once God has spoken; twice have I heard this: that power belongs to God.

Matthew 6:21

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Words of Grace For Today

I never understood young men who spent so much time working on their old trucks or muscle cars, fixing, tweaking, and adding 8 track tapes and speakers to them. (That dates me if nothing else does!)

I had to get old to read that whatever one spends a great deal of effort and time at, one falls in love with. So those young men, who invested so much time in their vehicles, fell in love with them, which brought them to spend even more time with them, until they did things that were not reasonable or logical or purposeful. They were continuing beyond all that into the realm of love.

Who would of thunk?

Thus it is that we humans assign value to things in our lives, which in and of themselves have no more than utilitarian value, if that, simply because we invest time working on them.

I can only imagine that someone who spends a lot of time accumulating wealth, power, or fame ‘falls in love’ with that as well.

What we treasure, owns our hearts, and brings us to do things that are not reasonable or logical or purposeful.

So it is in God’s creation. We humans, like the rest of the universe, operate on the principals of love.

This is God’s love permeating through the entire universe.

There is no power equal to the power of love, to heal, to give life, to give hope, to sustain life.

Once God has spoken God’s love to us and we have heard it once or twice we come to know and trust that power belongs to God, the real power that holds the universe together and gives us our very life and breath.

We can also, by investing our time and effort into things and projects and ideas that do not give life to us and others, ‘fall in love’ with evil and destructive forces that rob us and the world around us of life.

God intends, though, that we invest our lives (every bit of time and energy we have) into providing God’s care and unconditional love to other people. Thus we ‘fall in love’ with God’s creation and God’s people.

Then our hearts are found invested in the treasure that God created for us to live for: people, and people of all kinds.

When we live for other people, life never gets dull or boring, and we remain ‘in love’ with God and God’s creation, no matter how old we get. No matter how old or tired, or ill, we remain fully alive and in love.

What a life!

Threats and ‘Paddles’

Friday, April 9, 2021

We may think we are up a creek without a paddle,

Doch,

God provides all the ‘paddle’ we need:

God’s blessings and claim that we are God’s own

Isaiah 43:1

Thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.

Romans 8:31

What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us?

Words of Grace For Today

The challenges of our days can overwhelm us.

The challenges of Covid 19 can overwhelm us.

Other people’s lack of compliance with restrictions in place to protect us all from Covid 19 and it’s debilitating long term effects can not overwhelm us, it can maim us for life, or kill us.

What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us?

We may be terribly afraid of what can happen to us, or what others will try to do to us, even when we have done nothing to warrant such threats to ourselves.

While we may seek security in all sorts of manners and means, there is only one real source of security, no matter our circumstances, no matter how luxurious our ‘boat’ through the waters of life and Covid 19 may appear to be: Our only true security is God’s blessing and claiming us.

What does God say?

Thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.

We can relax, think clearly, plan and work as best we can, be thankful and generous with all we have, even our lives … for we can trust that we are in God’s hands.

The Day of the Lord

Monday, March 29, 2021

The Glory of the Lord

is not only a ‘some day’ hope.

It is evident every day

in the simplest ways.

Zechariah 14:9

The Lord will become king over all the earth; on that day the Lord will be one and his name one.

Revelation 22:3-4

Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.

Words of Grace For Today

The Day of the Lord has many names. It is the day when all the wrong, sin, and evil that humans have perpetrated against each other and against creation and against God will cease and the after-effects will cease as well.

In human terms the rule of unjust humans over others will cease, and God will be king over all the earth and over all people; justice and truth, mercy and compassion, forgiveness and life-giving love will be the way humans will interact with each other.

In divine terms, all that is accursed will no longer exist. The city of God, the New Jerusalem, will be founded (or revealed to us). Jesus is the sacrificial lamb, given to convince us in terms we understand, that God forgives and loves us unconditionally – and that there is no limit to the lengths God will go to to forgive us and more, to convince us we are forgiven. Except God will not violate our freewill as beings capable of love. God will love us, forgive us, walk with us, stand by us, care for us, guide us … but God will not take away our ability to love ourselves, each other, all creation, and God.

This Jesus will no longer be a sacrificial lamb. He will be raised to the most exalted position, to sit on God’s throne, ruling with sacrificial love, over all the universe.

The Day of the Lord has many names and many images and many hopes expressed in them.

The Day of the Lord is the day when all that is wrong will be set right.

Those who benefit from the wrong that is now perpetrated and live lives of comfort will cease to live in comfort. They rightly fear and deny that the Day of the Lord will ever come.

The great majority of humans who have ever lived, and the great majority of those who live on earth now, will no longer suffer the ignominy of being forced to provide comforts and luxuries for others at the expense of the basic necessities of life, and even their lives. For the great majority of humans the Day of the Lord is the expression of hope that provides the little comfort available to them; on that day all will be set right, and those responsible and blithely benefiting from the wrong will no longer exist.

The Day of the Lord has been anticipated for generation upon generation … and is yet to come to be. Still we do not give up hope that God will set right all the wrongs that are done against us. We do not give up hope that God will set right the little wrongs (and not so little) that we do to each other.

Freedom. Hope. Life based solely on forgiveness and love.

We are not yet at the Day of the Lord.

For now, our sins give witness to God’s response to our failings: God forgives and loves and renews us.

For now, we get to be bearers of the Good News that God has placed before us in many and various ways, and in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection: namely that the substance of life is love, and the glue that holds it together, and the lubricant that makes it still move is unconditional forgiveness and love.

For now we have quite the life to live and to live that life in the full expectation of the Day of the Lord pulling us forward through each day’s challenges (including all that Covid 19 makes more obvious.)

When we have eaten our fill …

Saturday, March 27, 2021

No Matter How Luxurious Our Homes

Remember with Thanks

That God Provides Everything Good for Us

Deuteronomy 8:12-14

When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

1 Thessalonians 5:18

Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

Words of Grace For Today

When one lives in ones own land, owns a home, has possessions that provide food security and financial security (or the appearance thereof), and has seen increases from generation to generation then…

then it is all too easy to forget one’s past.

It is all too easy to forget one’s sins.

It is all too easy to forget God’s great miracles that have and still do deliver us all daily, because it may appear to us that we are captains of our own fate and that we have delivered ourselves and worked hard to earn all we have.

All possessions, position and power, security and safety can disappear in a minute.

There is no real life that forgets one’s past, one’s ancestors’ past, and God’s good works in the past … and in the present.

The only real life that is worth a moment’s participation is to live filled with gratitude for all God provides.

Breathe.

Breathe again.

Breathe deeply and slowly … and again.

That is God’s gift most basic: that we can breathe and their is air that sustains life. Everything else that sustains our lives are also gifts from God.

Real living is wonderfully experienced as God’s overly generous gifts for us, though we deserve none of it, and only because God finds that we are precious.

God finds all other people precious, and in our thanks for all God gives us, God asks us to be the conduits of God’s demonstrating to all others how precious they are.

WORD and CREATOR for US

Sunday, March 21, 2021

The Journey Forward

is on

Word-calmed Waters.

Paddle Onward Without Fear.

Isaiah 48:13

My hand laid the foundation of the earth, and my right hand spread out the heavens; when I summon them, they stand at attention.

John 1:1-3

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.

Words of Grace For Today

God, who comes to our rescue, who delivers us again and again, who sanctifies us making us holy and thus wholly capable of bearing the Good News of Grace to all people … God, who loves us, is the One who spoke a Word in the beginning before anything including time, spread out a right hand to create the heavens, laid the foundation of the earth.

The universe was not created by some godlet. Nor is our God some inconsequential being, to be ignored or dismissed.

It’s more than ‘turtles all the way down’ that the earth is founded on; it is founded on unconditional love.

In the beginning was the Word. We later came to know this Word as Jesus, the communication from God in a human life; the language we can understand.

The heavens and earth may come to attention when God summons them. God did not create us so bound to God’s Word. We get to really mess up terribly, ignoring the Creator and the Word if we so choose … which we humans do all too often.

The Word came to communicate that God accounted for our rebellion and sin and evil. God forgives us our rebellion and sin and evil, and sets us right with God our Creator and Sustainer. Thus we may forge ahead each day, each minute, not hounded and horrified by the depth and breadth of our past rebellion and sin and evil. We may live free of that, and bind ourselves anew to receiving God’s blessings in such an abundance that they spill off us to those around us; they flow through us to others even emptying us … purifying us and taking the life right out of us as we become the bearers of God’s Good News of Grace to all people: God loves us!

Now with God standing with us, why would not the hoards of armies surrender to us making noise? Why would the walls of Jericho not crumble at our trumpets’ calls? Why would the chaos of un-creation void (the ocean waters) and the storms of chaos breaking in through the heavens not obey the Word spoken: ‘Be still!’

May our hearts be also stilled this and each day, from the chaos of fear, false pride, jealousy, and greed, so that we can calmly face the challenges of each day, even if it is one day among many of a pandemic.

Breathe deeply

Relax

Meet the challenges with patience and assurance that God is with us, saving us, guiding us, inspiring us to do holy things for all peoples.

God! Where ARE YOU?!

Saturday, March 20, 2021

W hen the dark storms of evil threaten …

Judges 6:13

Gideon answered him, ‘But sir, if the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us? And where are all his wonderful deeds that our ancestors recounted to us, saying, “Did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt?” But now the Lord has cast us off, and given us into the hand of Midian.’

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

Why is this happening to us?

Where is God?

Does God not care?

When unjust judges take life from us …

When the one who said, ‘I love you. Marry me?’, turns on you with physical violence or worse (because it is unseen) psychological gaslighting, lying to police and to church and to courts, destroying your reputation, leaving you so far in debt you will never get out, and your health plummets into pain and disarray …

When friends, bishops, and seemingly good people join the gaslighting as if you were a social pariah or dangerous sexual deviant, scapegoating you instead of dealing with their own failings to deal with reality and truth …

When there are no friends left to stand by you …

When flood waters wash away your home and life and hope …

When wildfires rage wiping out your home and life and hope …

When petty warlords churn your homeland into a war-wasted horror of death, bombs, night raids and killings, rape, torture, and dread of your neighbour falsely (or rightly) betraying you bringing death squads to your door to take you away never to be seen again …

When powers turn on your way of life, destroy it, and work to extract resources and power from your home land, leaving masses of your people without the necessities of life …

…

When you have lived in the wilderness for years, eking out a living of a kind, and you read of the wondrous deeds of God, as God saved our ancestors from these, similar and other worse assaults on their lives,

Then you and we will rightly ask, “God! Where are You!?! Do you not care for us!? Will you not save us, NOW! Before it is too late!”

Gideon asked this for his people. In time, as God instructed him, ((his ‘army’ blew the trumpets marching around Jericho, bringing down it’s walls, delivering it and then the rest of the Promised Land into their hands. — That was not Gideon. That was God delivering Joshua and the people. God did this so many times.))

In time, as God instructed him, Gideon with just a small army, drove out a great army and captured it’s kings … using surprise and loud noise making.

The disciples asked this as the storm of un-creation on the sea tossed their small boat about at whim between the tall waves and battered it with wind. They knew their deaths into the deep of the void (what was before creation) was imminent. Jesus wakes and speaks only a word. The un-creation void of the deep waters and winds of the storm settle into the fresh breeze and calm waters on which life was sustainable as the fishers knew so well.

God may not resolve the danger that threatens our lives. God is not a puppeteer, interrupting our freewill and others’ freewill as we choose our ragged paths forward in life through creation and human-made un-creation as we go (which we and others must then try to survive if it possible at all!)

God loves us.

God stands with us.

God suffers and weeps with us … at the loss of any of creation and any of God’s creatures … for God loves creation and all in it, and created it GOOD!

God does give us, sometimes, the possibilities to struggle against the evil that threatens us and to survive. If we live, God is with us. If we die, God is with us and gathers us home … home at last.

So whether we live or whether we die, we are God’s beloveds, blessed and grateful for whatever life we get to live in this miracle of creation!

God does not ever abandon us. Not ever. Not even during a pandemic. The stories of God rescuing our ancestors provides us witness to God’s love and care.

Thus, no matter how great the waves of evil pound over us, we do not lose hope.

As we live, we are God’s people who stand with others as the great waves of evil pound over them.

This is love. This is grateful, hope-filled living.

This is life abundant.

Furnace or Grace, What Do You Say Today?

Monday, March 15, 2021

God Speaks Clearly.

what do you say with your life today:

‘Into the furnace!’

‘Welcome to the Light of Christ!’

Daniel 3:17-18

If our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire and out of your hand, O king, let him deliver us. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods and we will not worship the golden statue that you have set up.

Acts 4:20

For we cannot keep from speaking about what we have seen and heard.

Words of Grace For Today

When God speaks, there is no one who ….

Well, that cannot be true, because people react on the full spectrum from loving worship to full our rejection that God exists, yet alone speaks clearly to people … for people to hear.

God is not a puppeteer, pulling the strings of control over humans, or any part of creation. Yet when some people hear God speaking, clearly, lovingly, they and we cannot keep from speaking about what we have seen and heard. That is the life of a sacramental mystic, who encounters God talking at every turn in creation, even in and among those most dangerous of animals, the two-legged kind that speak every kind of word on the spectrum from life-giving truth to life-robbing, evil lies.

What kind of word do you speak this day?

Amidst a pandemic, do you speak truth that supports, enhances, and inspired people to life healthily and abundantly, blessed by God.

Or are you off worshipping another kind of godlet, one who demands strict adherence to reality denying lies, controlled thoughts and expressions, and (like the king who is ready to throw Daniel and his companions into the furnace), the painful death of anyone who will not ‘fall into line’ worshipping your life-sucking godlet.

The powerful king who demanded Daniel worship his godlet, had not encountered God, Daniel’s God, who may or may not deliver Daniel (and us) from the fiery furnace of destruction (the actual fires of burning or the fire of lies that destroy our reputations.) Whether God chooses to deliver us does not deter us from remaining faithful. For we will not begin to worship a godlet who takes life from so many people, promising the greatest life, and delivering it’s followers into a long life more painfully greedy and selfish than death in a fiery furnace ever could be.

We have seen. We have heard. We have known. God is gracious, unconditionally loving, and prodigiously generous. We need nothing more than God’s blessings and opportunities to worship and serve God … with every word and breath … even if it be our last.

On the spectrum from life-giving, self-sacrificial, unconditionally loving (reflecting God’s Grace for us all) to the Devil’s empty promised, self-made life at the expense of others’ lives:

What kind of word do you speak this day?

From the outcast homeless poverty captured person to the most powerful ruler or judge of the day, God allows a simple question to sit before us each day:

What kind of word do you speak this day?