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.
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!
Save us, O God of our salvation, and gather and rescue us from among the nations, that we may give thanks to your holy name, and glory in your praise.
John 17:11
And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.
Words of Grace For Today
We pray in many and various ways: God, come and save us and protect us. Give us a place in your glory so that we may, as a strong and feared people among the nations and among our enemies, sing your praises and give glory to your name.
The church has prayed this and sought this and achieved this in many and various ways. As a strong institution among it’s enemies, and among the nations, it has played the part of a element of life to be feared … by individuals who the church could ruin by exorcising them (making killing them legal!) or today simply by ostracizing them without due process (so that they are denounced by many based on false rumours and false charges, usually that the person is ‘mentally unstable.’ Sounds like what was done to the prophets of old!) … and by organizations and nations who the church has stripped of all power simply by denouncing them though today it takes a bit more than that so the denouncing is done by political leaders who serve the will of the church.
What we, as individuals and as a church, have failed to do is to remain humble, vulnerable, meek, servants of God, living out God’s unconditional love for all people, and loving all people with a sacrificial love that may cost us everything as it opens the possibility of life abundant to all people.
It is not surprising that the church has become less and less attractive to people struggling in a more and more secular world. That is: the church is less and less capable of engendering fear or deserving respect across huge swaths of society, and even faithful followers of Christ in ever greater numbers are disillusioned with the corruption and blatant hypocrisy of leaders and followers alike that is rampant inside the church.
In many and various efforts to regain it’s fast dwindling numbers the church has tried and still tries to reach the expressed needs of the people, serving as a secular social club (with no real Word of God permeating anything about the club) or serving up ‘fear of others’ as a basis for a made-up faith/religion or passing off a fervent self-serving piety as the basis of faith … all which garner great responses … sometimes.
Still the numbers of members and churches plummets as it has for decades.
So the books written and the ‘new’ ideas of how to make the church a success … at least number-wise.
All of it is empty of course, because it tries to gain God’s glory by plan and scheme and effort. There is no human effort that can gain God’s favour, or gifts, or blessings.
That’s God’s choice and doing.
We have so long ignored it that we simply do not understand: Our purpose is not to succeed, but to fail, and in failing God makes plain the Grace that sustains us and all the world.
Yet we pray, as a church and as individuals: God, save and protect us. Help us to be the greatest of your disciples so that we can sing your praise and give you the glory in all things. But what we mean is God save us and protect us from failure so that we can exercise our own power in this world over others, live comfortable lives, and plan for a good future (of power and influence) for our children and grandchildren and many generations to come.
What God answers is: No.
God is our salvation, but not so that we can ‘Lord it over others.’
God makes us one with the destitute, the starving, the outcasts, the ostracized, the imprisoned, the persecuted, and the failures of human history … so that we will finally better understand: it’s not at all about us and our successes or failures. It is all about sharing all that God has given us as free gifts.
So as the church declines into irrelevancy God’s Word lives as the most relevant word in a world inundated with words: God Loves us all unconditionally, and renews life for all people, and sends us (who hear the call and give thanks for the renewed life we have) to share God’s unconditional love and full life abundant with all people, especially the poor and our enemies.
But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him, and his righteousness to children’s children, to those who keep his covenant and remember to do his commandments.
Hebrews 13:8
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever.
Words of Grace For Today
The drive in here, into the meadow in the woods by the lake, from the gravel road that is maintained by the MD is nearly a kilometre long.
Most years the snow and rain make it challenging though not impossible to make the trek when needed to get supplies, food, and water.
Today that seems to have changed and to find out whether that has changed is to risk getting stuck in hard, cold, soft and freezing and hard frozen ice and snow smothered with rain over the last few hours.
Whether I can make transit that fist kilometre or not is entirely up to what I do in preparation. It is at least a two week task to try to shovel the worst parts free and clear down to the hard packed snow-ice that has developed over the last months from November on. There is no need to wish I had shovelled it regularly as the snows fell. First I had lots of other work to do to survive the winter so far, with it’s plentiful snow and it’s deep hard cold for days below -35⁰ and weeks below -25⁰. Second, the task of shovelling that kilometre once would take about a week of constant work, pushing my old body to it’s limits each day. By then the next snow would have fallen and I’d have had to start all over again … meaning I would have been shovelling snow constantly for months now and doing little else … when there is lots that has to be done to survive without a home in the woods next to a lake, even if that is all a huge blessing from God. So no regrets that I drove that kilometre as I could, dragged two logs behind to bounce a bit of the snow to the side and pack the remaining in a hardened roadway that I could drive over.
With the warming to above zero and the accompanying thaw, with the rain that has drenched the snow and with the freeze coming again that will turn it all into slippery ice, that kilometre will not be ‘miraculously’ ‘fahrbar’ (drive-able). The drive-ability of that kilometre depends now almost entirely on how much I shovel, where I shovel, how far down I shovel and if I survive (no heart attack or stroke or back spasms laying me flat in the snow for days while I freeze to death, or any other of a host of ways that shovelling could put me down.)
That’s a reality that is conditional, conditional on what I do.
God’s grace, forgiveness, claim on us, and mission that we are sent back into the world to work at is not conditional at all. God’s blessings and favour are not conditional on anything we do. That God blesses us and favours us is entirely unconditional! It depends only on God’s steadfast, never changing, never failing love and grace.
We humans do not like to be so dependent on any one or thing other than ourselves. So we, along with great words of God’s grace and steadfast love, have repeatedly perverted God’s promises into being conditional on our responses to God’s grace and steadfast love. Thus Psalm that teaches (wrongly) that God’s blessings and favour for us and our children and their children and all people is conditional on us keeping his covenant and remembering to do his commandments.
That condition sets us up to strive to be and do what we cannot be or do: perfect. And it gives control of our lives over to others who interpret our being and doing as sufficiently good enough or not.
God’s grace and steadfast love are not conditional.
God sends us out to be and do that same unconditional grace and love for all people.
Are we up to the mission? It does take every bit of life we have in us, and often more.
Let your work be manifest to your servants, and your glorious power to their children.
John 1:14
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.
Words of Grace For Today
There are life altering moments for us humans. If we are blessed they will be moments that givec us life, instead of rob life from us. Astronauts, and even space tourists, say that being in space and seeing back to earth and out into the deep of space changes everything about how they see life on earth, how they see everything.
The James Webb Space Telescope is in orbit, looking further than any other telescope has been able to. And ‘further’ means it sees back in time. That is, the light that it can see has travelled light years upon light years before arriving at the telescope. That same light could come to us if we sat in space orbit with the new telescope, though we are unable to see that minuscule particle-waves of light among the brighter and closer sources of light. We can see light from galaxies about a million years back in time with our bare eyes. The Hubble telescope can see 10-15 billion light years back in time, which is back to what we believe is the beginning of light, the beginning of the universe, the big bang. The Webb Telescope is designed to be more flexible than the Hubble, and is designed to see the first million or so light years starting with the big bang. In the beginning ….
We may need telescopes to see ‘far out there’. We need no instruments to see the work, power, life, glory, grace and truth of the creator of the universe. For that we need faith, and that is always a gift, only a gift, from God.
Once we see God’s work, power, life, glory, grace and truth, life for us is never the same. That is the most fundamental, profound life-altering experience there is. We usually allow the poignancy of that experience to fade and meld into the myriad of experiences, though that altering element never quite goes away. It’s like a mark on our skin that changes and morphs over time, but never goes away. The liver spot on my wrist below my thumb appeared as a tiny, barely perceptible dot in my 20’s, grew to be more obvious in my 40’s and by my 50’s had grown to more than a half inch across. It keeps growing. Faith, the gift of faith, grows on us in quite a similar manner, unless we take rash measures to cut it out, like a surgeon’s knife excising a malignant mole.
It would not be the first effort, were we to try and build a faith-generating ‘telescope’, so that we could see back into the beginning of time to see God create this whole thing we call the universe. Humans have tried to ‘create’ or control faith since the beginning of our time. It’s always a futile effort, destroying more of life than it gives to anyone.
So we today we continue to pray: Let your work be manifest to your servants, and your glorious power to their children.
And we remember that Word that created the universe became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.
Those who mock the poor insult their Maker; those who are glad at calamity will not go unpunished.
Matthew 5:7
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Words of Grace For Today
The forecast is for -30⁰ tonight, dropping there by sunrise or an hour after.
Now, at 17:30, after the golden sun spread its butter across the trees, snow, and ice, as the sun has set only an hour ago, the thermometer sits squarely pointing at -30⁰, meaning it will get significantly colder before the ‘warming’ (or shall we say more accurately ‘the freeking-cold-mitigating’) rays of the sun start the thermometer’s climb to levels where humans can survive and machines run and breath does not freeze before it’s in one’s lungs or constantly in one’s own face.
Cold, and the challenges it presses on those living in these climes, is nothing to mock or to celebrate when others suffer it .. but you, of course, you are so privileged because you do not have to (or get to) suffer the cold.
Those who are poor, (and I fit rather securely in that category not to emerge before my death, other than by some inexplicable miracle – thank you liars all and corrupt officials too many to count), know the cold better than those who can afford to find comfort even at the extreme ends of the climate … expanding lower and higher and more extreme in so many ways as those extremes are now with climate change. To us poor the cold is not a simple thing or a nuisance. It is life threatening, directly. Is there enough wood ready and available to keep the fire going hot enough to avoid freezing as I try to get at least some sleep? Is the grate from the street sewer warm enough to keep my sleep tonight to be not just fitful, but also not the last sleep I get as I comfortably freeze and shake off this mortal coil? Are my blankets warm enough for another night of nightmares and cold sweats and nausea? Will I wake? And if I do will my body be as whole as it is now, or will a limb or extremity be frozen solid or frostbit beyond salvation?
These considerations may be the focus of many people’s mockery: what did you poor thing do to earn poverty, for surely you deserve it, yes? Are you not smart enough to do better? If you had only worked harder when you were younger and able OR if you would have played along with the corrupt leaders, thugs and bullies, corrupt bishops and lay leaders included! Oh, you fool, for succumbing to addictions that will kill you sooner or later, so why should we be concerned if your death is a comfortable one today, costing us nothing in health care … rather than your death at a later date after huge costs to us all as you die from your addictions. It matters not, of course, that I and many other poor people have no addictions or perversions. Instead what informs the corrupt on lookers are the rumours and false stories about us, which are told to protect the hugely guilty people who have cheated us of finances and years of good life. Then of course, many others are driven to addictions to escape the cruelty of people in their lives, or to mental instability, or to plain outright madness, by the inexplicable cruelty of bullies, weak bullies, destructive bullies, pitiful bullies.
To us poor people be God’s mercy shown, should we be so blessed. As for me and so many others baptized as saints, we have discovered God’s mercy for us and all others. Therefore we trust that God, if no others, will deal with us … and indeed does deal with us … each day of our lives with mercy, love, forgiveness, and favour.
What’s your night look like, for the coming night of cold? Is it your heart that is cold? Or just the climate outside? Have you learned to respond to others, especially us poor, with mercy, and love, and
As Long as We Continue to Ask With Cold, Hard Hearts
What Will Happen to Me If …?
Then Our World Remains Skewed
Far From Christ’ Way for Us
And We Do Not Follow Jesus.
Micah 7:14
Shepherd your people with your staff, the flock that belongs to you, which lives alone in a forest in the midst of a garden land; let them feed in Bashan and Gilead as in the days of old.
John 10:4
When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.
Words of Grace For Today
Yesterday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the US.
This snippet from
This past Monday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the USA. Hear a part of his last speech (the day before he died) as he spoke in support of 1300 sanitation workers who were striking for the right to form a Union. He introduces the parable of the Good Samaritan, and provides a number of explanations that have often been given for the Levite and priest’s passing by this man in need: that they are busy going to a church meeting, that the religious law forbade them to touch a human body 24 hours before leading a service, that they were going to organize a Jericho Road Improvement Association to deal with the root cause of the danger on the road. Then King continues:
“But I’m going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It’s possible that those men were afraid. You see, the Jericho Road is a dangerous road. (That’s right)
… “I can see why Jesus used this as the setting for his parable.” It’s a winding, meandering road. (Yes) It’s really conducive for ambushing. You start out in Jerusalem, which is about … twelve hundred feet above sea level. And by the time you get down to Jericho fifteen or twenty minutes later, you’re about twenty-two hundred feet below sea level. That’s a dangerous road. (Yes)
… you know, it’s possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. (Go ahead) Or it’s possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking (Yeah), and he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to … lure them [over] there for quick and easy seizure. (Oh yeah) And so the first question that the priest asked, the first question that the Levite asked was, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” (All right)
“But then the Good Samaritan came by, and he reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?” That’s the question before you tonight. (Yes) Not, “If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job?”… The question is not, “If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?” The question is, “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?” That’s the question. (applause)
“Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge, to make America [we add Canada, and the whole world] what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation [we add Canada a better nation, and the whole world better world for all people]. (Amen)”
…
It would be easier to keep asking ‘what will happen to us if …?’
Doch
When Jesus gathers us out of the safety of our ‘sheepfold’ and calls us to follow him, we know that all our own self interest is set aside, as Jesus set aside his, and we cannot ignore the important questions of what will happen to other people if we do not follow Jesus providing to others life, and life abundant.
Alas for those who go down to Egypt for help and who rely on horses, who trust in chariots because they are many and in horsemen because they are very strong, but do not look to the Holy One of Israel or consult the Lord!
Hebrews 2:1
Therefore we must pay greater attention to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away from it.
Words of Grace For Today
Rest.
Today instead of looking to ‘Egypt of might and horses many and chariots strong’, not even when these things of might, many and strength in our lives are carried by so many and various ways of working, of securing money, favour, and power, of being our own people, today
yes
today
we rest.
We rest in the Promises of God,
The Gifts of God,
The Saints of God,
The Forgiveness of God,
The Grace of God,
The Generosity of God,
The Love of God,
The Faith given to us by God,
and
The hope, that
…
that all things will be well, all things will be well, all manner of things will be well,
because,
All manner of things are already, today, by God’s Word that Creates, Sustains, and Renews,
by God’s Will, all things are already today well, quite well,
whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s
Deuteronomy 32:39
See now that I, even I, am he; there is no god besides me. I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and no one can deliver from my hand.
Romans 14:8
If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.
Words of Grace For Today
When the jellyfish came up out of the lake, crawling on all 10 feet, it posed a question that deserves our attention:
What will you do about the rats’ snot that collects on the lower branches of the olive trees, making the collection of sap from the neighbouring maples impossible until fall and then it’s too late, for the time for the amendment of life will have passed us by in the wrong lane?
It’s not a simple question, not like ‘what are we to do with the nuclear wastes from our personal nuclear power pockets that we all carry on our backs to propel us through time and space as we are wont and as we will at the time – or place – that used to be when-where we were?’
That waste … well we can either feed that waste back into our personal reactor for another go at atomizing-chaos-reordering, or we can simply make a quick visit to the nearest sun, deposit our waste in that reaction and then get out so quick it does not consume us for all time in all of space the size of one Adam.
The snotty question of the jelly fish is really the same question that keeps coming up again and again, which we find so hard to state as it is, because .. well we find it so hard because the obvious answer is that we’ve warped the time-space continuum so completely out of whack from it’s original bends and turns that the extreme cases of mist-ordered events and consequences from last year keep getting dwarfed by new extreme event-consequences this year. After a century or two of these it’s pretty hard to catch where the mist is coming from and how the events are consequences or vice versa. It’s just that three orders of species, of the twenty that remain, rely on maple syrup for proper nurturing. And the projections of the best scientists-artists are that any fewer than twenty orders of species and the whole ecosystem of all the various iterations of earth will simply dissolve. It’s like the warnings that no one heeded about climate change and the ice melt of Greenland and Antarctica. But that was centuries ago, or yesterday, depending on where in time one lands or begins.
The only sure thing in this mess we seem to have made of the universe is that God did create it, and whether we live or die we are Christ’s own people, so totally flawed and living by Grace alone.
It’s that Grace that gives us a reference point, the only available reference point in the messed-warped time-place continuum. What is done is done. What is coming will still come. We have now, and only in our now can we make choices, and pray that, also dealing with rat snot, they will reflect God’s Will to give life and heal, and not harm and kill even if it seems it is all impossible to cure of evil.
I cry to God Most High, to God who fulfils his purpose for me.
John 1:16
From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.
Words of Grace For Today
This year I am going to keep my New Year’s Resolution. I’m so tired of always making the same resolution only to fail to keep it sooner than I care to admit.
…
I would prefer to:
One – be reliable, for myself anyway, and always be able to do what I say I am going to do.
Two – make the best decisions possible, given the circumstances and all I know at the time, and then not be remorseful at all even if things turn out completely terrible for me. After all I would have done the best I could, and no one has any right to demand more from anyone, especially not someone of themselves.
Three – always tell the truth, no matter the cost, because God knows no one else is telling the truth, so I might as well get the best from it all that I can.
Four – be able to find the best in every situation and share that with as many people as possible.
Five – be wealthy enough to have my own airplane, fly when and where I want, travel to take photos, and share them with anyone who would enjoy them, have enough land to live in quiet privacy near a lake, travel to the mountains often, visit with family and friends (I’l like a few good reliable friends),
Six – visit and take photos of the seven wonders of the world, whether they are A: the Egyptian Pyramids, the Grand Canyon, the Eifel Tower, the Amazon forest, the Great Wall of China, Mount Everest, K2, a ride into space, the Antarctic, Australia’s Outback, Canada’s Tundra, the fall leaves of the East Coast, Tibet’s mountains, … OR B: touch, sight, taste, smell, delight, joy, trust, love and hope.
Seven – take a ride into space for a day or at least a few hours, with a good camera and fly by the International Space Station.
Or at least
Eight – I’d prefer the beauty of the day to be visible to my heart and mind each minute.
So this year again I will make my New Year’s Resolution that I will not make a New Year’s Resolution. It’s one I can always keep and fail at merely in the making of it.
It is in keeping with the reality that I already do One, Two, Three, Four, SixB, and Eight. The others are good dreams to hold on to, but not worth sacrificing the others.
