Category: Climate Change

Dear To Christ, Always

Saturday, October 23, 2021

Dear Me Dear,

It’s Deer

Meat

Before Breakfast

Walking in the Meadow!

Deuteronomy 8:10

You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord your God for the good land that he has given you.

1 Corinthians 10:31

So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God.

Words of Grace For Today

I had guests for breakfast today, well actually before breakfast and … well they would have made a good lunch or 20 as venison, not so sure about breakfast.

They came, four of them did, a yearling playfully jumping about it’s doe, another doe, and a two prong buck. They came the did, to graze, to eat, and to enjoy the grass on the meadow. The grass used to be a barnyard so the ground is soft and spongy with old hay and manure deep below. The grass grows different, which means it must be a favourite for the deer come visiting quite often, and to visit now at this time of year, during hunting season when the wood smoke fills the air and there is every sign that a human is about, must mean the prefer this grass over other.

This is the land that the Lord has guided me to, as a refuge. I eat well enough here, and many animals do as well. A rabbit is often seen hopping about. Coyotes visit in the night. Bear come snooping around too often. Mice run in the grass and a bald eagle, a brown eagle, and an owl hunt here. The other day a moose and calf came tumbling through the underbrush as they are wont to do, making a great racket. I won’t mention the ants and wasps and flies and mosquitoes in such great numbers but there are dragon flies that hunt them, the robins that eat the worms, and the bats that come feasting on the plenty.

Then there are the Hornets and F-18s, and helicopters and troop transports, that fill the sky with their presents, which is more a deafening sound barrier broken (on departure) or afterburner (burning off and wasting fuel on approach) and thought stopping punch to the brain through the ears.

Canada really does need to upgrade to stealth fighter, stealth in sound, and maybe in the meantime (25 years or so it seems) conserve fuel by not burning it off on approach … for practice and climate change friendly habits, eh?

While the world busily turns about around me, with oil workers roaring their Ram diesels out of the stop sign, or the trucks pound the pavement steadily for hours each morning and evening as the workers in the oil installations around the corner northward progress like army ants to their allotted jobs, and the quiet neighbourhood cross-overs and SUVs head out to work in town, the drunks show up to drink, the addicts to buy and take a hit, and the randy show up for a shag in the bush, and the partiers show up in droves to break Covid restrictions and have a good old fashion bush drinking, drugs, loud noise they call music, and sex party (and then fill the ICUs in two weeks time) …

my work is all blessed by God’s walking with me. The relative quiet of the chainsaw, the gathering, cutting, splitting, and stacking of wood, the maintenance of the stove and chimney, the building in preparation for the cold of winter, the cooking of meals, the canoeing on the quiet lake, the walks in the woods fill my days after they start with celebrating the Eucharist, remembering how Jesus was betrayed, falsely accused, killed, and buried … and how God resurrected Jesus to give us Jesus’ story of how God forgives and loves and gives life abundant to us all … so that we can share it with others!

With this beginning every day is a blessing, a gift to enjoy.

Hard work or pleasant walks or quiet canoeing or writing or taking photos … all my time is blessed and a witness to all of God’s great glory, known to us all in God’s Grace … that gives us all we need starting with each breath.

Atem tief. Gottes Barmherzigkeit durchdringt tief in und aus allem.

Devil’s Spin and Chaos … Or God’s Grace.

Thursday, October 14, 2021

Heating with Wood Helps One Engage in Reality, no ‘spin’

because

the wood must be fed into the stove regularly in order to stay warm, and to cook food.

There is no pretending one stoked the fire, if one did not.

There is no pretending one gathered, cut and split the wood, if one did not.

There is no pretending one maintained the stove, if smoke does not ascend the chimney.

Psalm 146:5

Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God,

Luke 21:19

By your endurance you will gain your souls.

Words of Grace For Today

This verse from Luke out of context seems to encourage us to work hard, to endure all suffering that comes our way, so that we will save ourselves and gain our souls. This is perhaps an idea behind the writer of Acts-Luke, for often enough that writer turns Grace on it’s head. Instead of Jesus saving us though we deserve nothing, the writer encourages us, now that Jesus has shown us the way, to serve others and to endure suffering, so that Jesus will acknowledge us, be gracious to us, forgive us, and give us life abundant, life eternal.

Ah, so tempting this interpretation of God’s Grace is, though a complete denial of Grace it is. It perverts Grace into something that gives us an ability to earn God’s approval and our salvation, through Jesus the great inter-mediator, saviour, and Judge!

It is simply not God’s Grace that is proclaimed in such a way. God saves us. We do nothing to receive it or make it effective or real for us. All we can do is acknowledge that God is gracious to us, and then live out the response we are able to live out. Since it will never be enough, we rely on God’s Grace each day, to save us again and again, to rescue us from our sin, and give us life abundant … even as we trundle down the devil’s deceptions’ paths.

Luke’s readers had already experienced the destruction of the temple, and Luke writes of it as if it were yet to come. It is a word of encouragement to the followers of The Way (as Jesus’ followers referred to it) who suffered greatly at the hands of Jews and Romans, persecuted for their faith.

May we be saved from such suffering … though it occurs all around us even in Canada. The covidiots who dismiss scientific research, vaccinations and all, open themselves to whatever they want to make up, or accept that others have made up, about the world around them. Many, many people participate in this fabrication of an unreal description of reality, hoping to secure for themselves a more comfortable, more privileged life than they otherwise would have. People have been putting a ‘spin’ on reality since the beginning of time, though that does not make their perversions any less perverse. It does mean that honest and kind people, who follow Jesus’ Way, and who do not participate in the ‘spin’ that is going on around them, will be targeted.

Supposedly good and honest and kind and righteous people will dedicate themselves (at church) to understand and help others understand, and work diligently to help the people living homeless in their city … and at the same time perpetrate lies about other people knowing these lies have driven those other people to be homeless.

Supposedly honourable judges will accept all kinds of lies as evidence, reject so many truths as evidence, and bully those who are honest to give up their rights… and if those victims, those honest and kind people speak the truth to the judges, the judges will respond with lies trying to justify their dishonourable use of their power by accusing the honest people of trying to justify themselves (as if honest followers of Jesus ever needed to justify themselves. We are justified by Christ, and by Christ alone, and we know it!)

The result is a devil’s delight of chaos, even in a country supposed so just and fair as Canada, and the people who suffer are those, as it always was, is and will be, those who have not claimed power for themselves with their own ‘spin’ on reality.

So we suffer homeless, living in the woods, living on the streets, some of us driven right mad by the injustice done to us, some of us burying our souls in addictions trying to out-drink, or out-drug ourselves ahead of the perverse reality ‘forced’ on us.

This is when we need to endure, and by endure it is not meant that we need to make ourselves good. God does that. We need to rely on God’s Grace each day. Despite the devil’s chaos that whips about strangling so much goodness, we need to, or more clearly, we get to celebrate Christ’s presence with us each day. We get to respond with honesty and kindness to each person, friend, enemy, or covidiot (or any of the other forms the devil’s agents assume). We get to respond to all that comes our way with gratitude for God’s Grace that gives us breathe for each day. And we get to respond to the challenges of each season that would kill us with hard work to create a safe place for us to live each day.

Most of all we get to be agents of God’s Grace, no matter how that Grace is received.

Self-Pity for Our ‘Little Bush’

Sunday, October 3, 2021

These Trees Will Soon Fall to Erosion by the Lakeshore

Shall We Consume Ourselves in Lament for Them?

Or

Get about Bringing Climate Change to an End?

And Pandemics?

Shall We End Them

Before They End Us?

Jonah 4:10-11

Then the Lord said, ‘You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labour and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?’

James 5:11

Indeed we call blessed those who showed endurance. You have heard of the endurance of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful.

Words of Grace For Today

We ought to be concerned (as God tells Jonah) not just for our little ‘tree’, our little corner of life. Rather we MUST be concerned for the whole nation, or rather, the whole earth.

Make that we ought to be alarmed in concern for the whole world.

Climate change is still denied by politicians, as if it would go away, as if is somehow not so clear that ‘the planet is angry at us’ as last year’s extremes are this year’s normals, and this year’s extremes are next year’s normals. Soon it will be last month’s extremes become this month’s normals … and on until we will have an impossible task of finding refuge on our own planet, anywhere.

The pandemic, Covid 19 is in it’s fourth wave in North America, and we seem to be preparing to suffer worse pandemics, perhaps even simultaneous pandemics, in the very near future … our future. No more of the ‘one pandemic in a century or so’. And we remain fully unprepared and unwilling to prepare and do what is necessary to prepare. We have leaders who ‘wish’ this Covid-19 away, and in doing so invite an even more brutal wave upon us all.

See the article in the Atlantic by Ed Yong https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/09/america-prepared-next-pandemic/620238/ if you wish to read it put even more bluntly.

We can certainly trust that God is compassionate and merciful and we can use Job’s endurance as a role model. Doch! We ought not invite such great need for God’s compassion and mercy, nor for Job-like endurance, down upon so many of the earth’s whopping 7.4 billion and growing population.

We may not have planned this population overburdening of the planet, but we certainly knew it was coming and we collectively did very little about it, least nothing effective!

Sitting ‘where our bush used to give us shade,’ wallowing in our self-pity does no one any good. We need to get up and proclaim the Good News and God’s judgment for ‘Nineveh,’ whatever that will look like for us. We pray that we may see God at work as God worked through Jonah’s speaking to Nineveh!

No one would dare to venture on such a mission, without trusting God’s grace, abundant and endless, flowing for us all.

So what are we waiting for?

To Life!

Saturday, October 2, 2021

God’s Golden Carpet

Rolled Out

For

…

The Guest of Honour:

Trepidation of Winter’s Deep Freeze

or

Hearts Inspired to Gratitude

Proverbs 15:13

A glad heart makes a cheerful countenance, but by sorrow of heart the spirit is broken.

Philemon 1:7

I have indeed received much joy and encouragement from your love, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you, my brother.

Words of Grace For Today

We know that good health is boosted by a good disposition and an attitude of gratitude, as is ill-health mitigated and recovery from ill-health aided by a robust spirit of gratefulness.

These are benefits to the individual who embraces God’s promises, summarized by Julian of Norwich as “All shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well.”

These benefits multiple when one who sees God’s creation with such confident gratitude also sees others benefiting from embracing God’s promises morning, noon, and night, and can give thanks for those who inspire this assurance.

To know with all one’s heart, mind and spirit that, despite our great sinfulness and destruction we bring on each other, ourselves and the creation that supports our ability to live, that God will bring blessings to us each day, and produce saints out of us wretched, most wretched, most woeful, wretched sinners. To trust that other sinners, as well as ourselves, will be able to bring God’s grace to bear on such profound brokenness of heart, spirit, and world, is to live by Grace.

Why would we choose to live any other way?

Why would we choose to follow any other promise, especially the empty promises of corrupt leaders, fake news makers and spreaders, and other agents of the Great Deceiver?

Why would we seek solace in revenge or further destruction, or satisfaction at other’s misfortunes?

Why?

As the leaves carpet the woods and meadows, the nights reach below zero clearing out the remaining wasps and other flying bugs, and as the days are shorter, fresher, more invigorating (motivating one to prepare for the deep cold that’s coming) …

How can we live except by Grace?

Breathe. Breathe deeply. Breathe deeply of God’s goodness all around.

Humble Pie And Fishing

Monday, September 27, 2021

Looking Up

From Our Proper Lowly Places

in God’s Good Creation.

Psalm 119:67

Before I was humbled I went astray, but now I keep your word.

2 Corinthians 7:10

For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret, but worldly grief produces death.

Words of Grace For Today

To be humbled.

To be humbled is to be taken from a place one has unrightly claimed as one’s own (a place of honour, power, wealth, privilege and comfort) and to be brought down to earth.

To be humbled is to be returned from the lofty reaches of the Devil’s Deceptions to God’s Kingdom where all are equal, equally ‘nothing’s except for the value God gives us by undeserved love and grace.

To be humbled is to be as God created us, fully dependent upon God for our breath and lives.

It is an irreverently proud person who claims, though, to have been humbled and then claims to keep God’s Word. Such an accomplishment is only possible for the Holy Spirit to bring us to participate in. It is never us alone who can do such a great thing.

To repent is not a one time event for Christ’s disciples. It is a daily, even hourly, manner of living. Humbly accepting our own inability to be righteous, and relying totally on God to make of us saints who can carry God’s Word in our thoughts, spread God’s Word with our words and actions, and embody God’s Word with our love for others and our hope for our shared future.

To repent is to acknowledge one’s sins, one’s bondage to sin, and God’s promise to free us from this bondage.

It is like fishing, knowing that one will not likely catch a fish at all, but that it is a day well spent, basking in God’s creation. Should one catch a fish then it will not likely be large enough to keep. So one will return it to the lake to live and grow and reproduce. When the most unlikely occurs and one catches a fish that is large enough to keep, then it is kept, cleaned, filleted, fried, and eaten with wondrous gratitude for such a rare privilege (one to partake in seldom lest one poison’s oneself as the fish are from the fracking used to make oil possible to bring up out of the ground.)

So it is that we live each day, holding God’s Word in our hearts and minds, as the motivator of all our actions, knowing that it will be seldom that we actually become the saints who share God’s unconditional and self-sacrificial love with others. Yet we find ourselves grateful for the readiness we can participate in, and for those rare events when God uses us. We may lose much of our lives in those moments of being God’s saints, but we know that this is exactly what God created us to be and do with our lives.

No Shortage of Covid Deaths

Sunday, September 19, 2021

People walk on Friday through an exhibition of white flags representing Americans who have died of COVID-19 that have been placed over eight hectares of the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The U.S. has recorded more than 660,000 official coronavirus deaths. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)

Psalm 37:8

Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath. Do not fret—it leads only to evil.

James 3:5-6

So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell.

Words of Grace For Today

Covid 19 has claimed so many lives, and so many of these deaths would have been avoidable if ….

There is no purpose or gain from being angry about this, or to be consumed by wrath at the Covidiots who multiplied the death count. There is no good in even fretting about it all.

We have seen how the tongue is capable of setting ablaze many things that should not be burned, like truth, reality, and common sense protections.

It is also where, we’ve come to know, the Covid 19 virus passes to enter the air as aerosols that linger in the air like fragrances of meals well prepared, cigarettes smoked in no smoking areas, and flatulence let loose in the milk cooler corner of a grocery store, as a silent, and deadly smelling protest against the mask and shield worn as a safety precaution (when the mask mandate was foolishly lifted in Alberta!) That little virus that finds it’s way into a body through inhaling such aerosols, is spread swiftly and effectively, when an infected body exhales, silently or with speaking (putting that little, yet powerful tongue in play.)

There are good uses for our breath, for our tongues, and for our concerns and responses to foolishness that costs people their lives: it is to speak the truth!

It is to speak the truth clearly.

It is to speak the truth clearly, and with grace.

It is to speak the truth clearly, with grace, and with compassion.

For it is only by the Grace of God that our failings have not resulted in a multiplication of unnecessary deaths. We pray may God save us from ever being party to such foolishness.

We pray, in thanks, for all the goodness of life, that which we enjoy still today, and the lives of so many who have avoidably died, surrendering their breath to Covid-19.

Not On Our Own!

Monday, September 13, 2021

All that Grows

Grows as God’s Blessing

for All

Isaiah 45:8

Shower, O heavens, from above, and let the skies rain down righteousness; let the earth open, that salvation may spring up, and let it cause righteousness to sprout up also; I the Lord have created it.

2 Corinthians 9:10

He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness.

Words of Grace For Today

After a cold hard-frozen winter, the thaw of spring arrives giving respite for hearts and bodies. As the cool spring days lengthen melting the snow pack, the ground thaws and seeds await the soft May rains and warm sun to germinate, we anticipate the new growth of wild and cultured seeds into plants to provide food for the many creatures of the earth, including us humans.

We trust that God will provide, in these days, throughout the whole earth, enough warmth, sun, and soft rain to feed the 7.4 billion humans who inhabit the earth. Climate change challenges the growth of enough to feed us all, though even in the many years when there is enough to feed everyone, we fail to distribute the food to all so that no one goes hungry. Indeed millions starve each year!

Food to eat is essential to life.

As we see each day, food is not enough. Food is not even the most essential thing for life. Much more essential is that we live in God’s blessings and respond to God’s Grace with justice based on truth, loving words and actions based on righteousness, and unconditional love for all people (a love that reflects God’s grace for us sinners).

Often our work, on Christ’s behalf in this world, is often described with images of seeds sprouting, growing, and producing a harvest to feed all people.

So it is that, while we give our greatest will and efforts towards fulfilling Christ’s call to reflect God’s love for us in our efforts for all people, we know that we cannot complete this work on our own. In fact, just as the seeds do not exist, nor can they begin to germinate, until God provides warm sun and sufficient moisture (not to mention that in previous years the harvest must have produced enough to provide seeds for the new spring.)

So we pray, God, creator of all that is, plant in us the seeds of righteousness, that with the warmth of Christ’s Light and the moisture in the Holy Spirit’s breathing into us, your Word may grow in us, and that our lives (our thoughts, words and actions) may reflect what we cannot even see on our own, namely your love and grace for all people.

Run or Fight … … Or Be At Home?

Saturday, September 11, 2021

Even as the Evenings

Turn Blood Red into the Dark,

God With Us is a promise of an evening of great delight!

All is Well, All is Well , All Manner of things are Well.

Isaiah 52:12

For you shall not go out in haste, and you shall not go in flight; for the Lord will go before you, and the God of Israel will be your rearguard.

John 14:3

And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.

Words of Grace For Today

There are many reasons to run.

There are many reasons to run away.

There are many reasons to run for one’s life …

and to run fast, as fast as one can run.

When God promises to be with us, the reasons to run do not disappear, though we can be a whole lot less stressed, and have a whole lot less panic in us that rises into our throats, which panic leaves us only a choice to fight, flee, or freeze.

Instead when God promises to be with us, when God promises to be our rearguard, we can think clearly, without haste, for we can trust that God leads us in paths of righteousness.

When everything goes belly up, when the proverbial stuff hits the fan, we can trust that God has our backs. More than that we can be assured that when it seems that God leaves us, in fact God prepares a place for us, a place to call home, where God’s plan for us is always sure, even when we lose track of how God is with us.

Home, with God at our side, before us, behind us, promising to walk every step with us. Home, where our hearts are loved unconditionally by God.

Then, we can be at home where God brings us. No one can chase us away, and our enemies will be dealt with by God. We walk calmly through every hour, knowing that justice will be done by God. No lies, no deceit, no gaslighting, no false reports, no false arrests, no false testimony, no false convictions, no cover up. God sees everything, knows everything. For God a lie is seen and always remains a lie. For God the truth is always known and it always remains the truth.

Home, safe in God’s hands. Home where truth and beauty bring breath and life no matter the challenge. Home. Home in the wondrous creation God created for us to enjoy. Home safe and sound. Home where no one can chase us away and no evil can rule over us. Home.

It does not get better.

Singing and Dancing

Thursday, August 19, 2021

Every Step In Life

Leads Us to Sing and Dance

For God Is With Us

Always.

1 Chronicles 13:8

David and all Israel were dancing before God with all their might, with song and lyres and harps and tambourines and cymbals and trumpets.

Philippians 4:4-5

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near.

Words of Grace For Today

When one surveys through memory how God has exercised great grace and steadfast love for our ancestors and for us in this time and place, there is only one response that we can engage in:

We sing and dance before God with all our might.

And we work each day to let our gentleness be the mode of our lives, gentleness that is born of enduring great suffering, and still receiving great grace and deliverance by God’s hand, for God is always near.

So we sing with all our hearts, minds, and strength, singing the old, old story of Jesus and his love.

This is the dance that celebrates everything that is good in creation: God’s grace and love for us all. There is nothing better possible than this in all our lives.

De-story-ing OR God’s Story

Saturday, July 24, 2021

The Blood Red Sun Sets

Through the Smoke

Telling Us, If We Listen

That There Is a Cost

As We Try to Breathe

For Ignoring Climate Change Warnings for Decades

Genesis 50:21

Have no fear; I myself will provide for you and your little ones.

Ephesians 4:29

Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear.

Words of Grace For Today

There is too much to fear these days:

The Covid19 delta variant and other more transmissible and deadly variants that will come out of unvaccinated populations where Covid still runs rampant threaten us all.

Climate change disasters like crop failures, disasters for the farmers and for the people who depend on that food (at a cost that can be afforded), floods that destroy homes, businesses, industries, and kill people (putting the future habitability of so much land in doubt), fires that destroy homes, businesses and forestry industries and kill people (putting the future habitability of so much land in doubt, and drive even higher the cost of building lumber – so that it is out of reach for so many people), and wildfires that put so much smoke in every direction into the air that for thousands of miles people have trouble breathing.

Barbaric fabrication of reality (by spouses and children, police and pastors, lawyers and judges) in order to gain a fast diminishing advantage (money, power, and/or status) over good and honest people, falsifying science results or ignoring science’s best results (by politicians who lead us into destroying the very things that we need to live on earth, and by Covidiots and others who put every life at risk with their unsupported insistence that they can be right with their foolishness), and the accumulation of power by people who have driven fear into huge portions of our populations so that they are willing to surrender their freedoms in exchange for false promises that their fears will be dealt with. Instead more and more of their freedoms are taken and hate based decisions by despots destroy the lives of many good people. All which disconnects us from reality, the basic reality that God walks with us, and blesses us with many things in order that we can share them with all other people.

How are we to respond to these very real causes of fear in and among us?

First we listen as we have listened for years, for decades, and for generations to God’s promises.

Have no fear; I myself will provide for you and your little ones.

Second we learn how and practise daily to be the people who live past fear in the Grace that God provides, so that we can share that Grace with others.

We let no evil talk come out of our mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that our words may give grace to those who hear.

If that sounds simple, it is, and it is impossible for us. Doch with God all things are possible and God calls us to live exactly this way. Living beyond fear, filled with Grace and sharing Grace with others, with our words and our actions, is exactly how God created us to live in the world.

There is too much to fear these days, just as there always has been for every generation. We can get lost in that fear, destroying (and de-story-ing) ourselves and others in the process … OR

We can remember and live in the story that God has for us: God makes us saints who share the Light of Christ with the whole world and all the people in it.

We cannot help but to fear and destroy and de-story ourselves and others.

Doch by God’s Grace we are saved and can be part of God’s work of saving everyone of all time.

Not so small a deal, when we think about it and remember how much God has done for us through the generations.