You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another.
1 Peter 3:8-9
Finally, all of you, have unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart, and a humble mind. Do not repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse; but, on the contrary, repay with a blessing. It is for this that you were called—that you might inherit a blessing.
Words of Grace For Today
There is much that could be done which we know is wrong, and there is much we can do that is right. We pray for the wisdom to know the difference, and the courage to follow our hearts to know what is right. Most of all to forgive ourselves and all other people when what we do is not the best we could have done.
This New Year Day and the 364 days that follow, like all of the years and days before, is an opportunity for us to consider time past, time to come … and
most of all the time that is now, the present.
We take time to make promises to ourselves in the way of New Year Resolutions, which we know …
which we know from lots of experience
we WILL try to keep
and fail to do so
and we WILL try to forget what we know about ourselves,
so that we will be able to fool ourselves in the days ahead about the reality of our own weaknesses
in order that we can on our own make our way forward or pretend to make any progress in our lives on our own.
Happy New Year.
Make the best you can of everything, there is nothing that you can make perfect, yet in trying to make things better than they are, you just might completely miss what is most important: that we are at our best when we know we can at most be humble before God.
God gives us everything we need. So there is so much to do, and so much to be thankful for, and so much to do for others, so that they may live an abundant life.
Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.
2 Corinthians 5:20
So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.
Words of Grace For Today
The pied piper led many though they knew not why or whereto.
Lemmings like sheep follow a leader who is blind to the path taken, even when it’s over a cliff to their death.
If we are ambassadors for Christ and God makes God’s appeal through us to people to be reconciled to God, and the wise shine like the daytime brightness of the sky, and those who lead others to righteousness shine forever like the stars in the dark night, then to what are we to lead people.
We confess that we cannot do anything to make ourselves righteous before God. We confess that we cannot do anything to reconcile ourselves to God.
Can we then lead other people to make themselves righteous before God? Can we lead other people to reconcile themselves to God? No, not all all.
When we try, we are as stupid as dumb sheep and lemmings leading people over a cliff of self over-importance, self-righteousness, and arrogance before God that is an attempt to be godlets, when in fact we are no more than beggars for God’s mercy and grace.
Fortunately God supplies us with both mercy and grace, along with renewed life and the old, old story of Jesus and God’s love.
This is what we can bring to people. And through us the Holy Spirit may indeed reconcile many people to God, and God may bring us to be among the saints, the people who reflect Christ’s Light to all people.
Can we do nothing, then, in relation to being reconciled to God? Yes, though we can do plenty to resist and destroy and tear down and separate ourselves from God. We do have free choice, and we each of us exercises it plenty in trying to turn away from God, to try to take over what only God can do, to try to become godlets unto ourselves, as if we created the universe and could ever control it.
Since God reconciles us to God by Grace alone, and since God shines Christ’s Light through us to the world, and since God sends us and equips us to be God’s ambassadors to Christ’s Grace, then through us the Holy Spirit can and does make wondrous things happen, signs for all to see God’s glory in Grace and Love.
10:00 am as I write this. The sunshine finally finds the snow on the lake, though not a drop has found the snow on the meadow between the trees. We likewise find ourselves in the escalating numbers of the second wave of Covid 19, as it spreads like wildfire across Alberta, the government responding with ideological priorities, so as not to offend those who hold their individual rights and freedoms must not be infringed on. The light seems to be that a vaccine will be available in a month. The reality is it will be available to only a few at first. It will likely be a half year at the earliest that everyone who wants a vaccine will receive it. The number who will refuse is likely to be so high that there will be little ‘herd vaccine protection’ and the virus will take a few years to subside … perhaps just in time for the next mutation of a coronavirus to sweep across the too densely populated earth.
In this mess and chaotic, deadly non-response to the virus, we are sent as ambassadors of Christ’ Light and Grace. Reach out to all those in need, especially the ineffective leaders, and the masses of skewed-thinking people who think it’s all a hoax, or that their individual rights and freedoms cannot be limited so as to save everyone.
And pray, for this is just one chaotic mess made by humans that only God’s Grace can set right. Carry on each day, trusting the God’s Grace is sufficient for our days.
It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives sleep to his beloved.
Matthew 6:8
Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
Words of Grace For Today
From our ancestors’ instincts to rise up early and go late to rest in order to be ready to catch the prey and ensure one did not become prey, we still have an instinctual drive to ‘give it our all’ and then some, to ensure our survival.
Examples abound of humans who have worked and worked and worked themselves ‘to the bone’ at the cost of any real life. The majority of humans who have ever lived were oppressed and enslaved in poverty by the rich and the powerful; they have ‘given their all’ out of necessity to provide the mere basics of life for those for whom they are responsible.
Many others through history and especially today, as the gap between rich and poor grows ever greater, and still the ‘middle class’ is larger than ever in all of history, throw themselves into perpetual work at the expense of living life, all in order to have just one more comfort, one more luxury, to possess one more thing, to pay for just one more purchase that fails to fulfill it’s promise to give life meaning.
A third category of people are those who are rich, and give everything they are and have in order to protect and grow their wealth, as if it could ever provide them life or any real security.
This second and third group are those to whom this passage is addressed.
God did not create us to continually work. God created us to work hard, and then to rest. God created us to wake each day and work hard, but then to relax and enjoy the company of other people, and to sleep content with the blessings provided to us. God created us to work hard for six days, and to rest on the seventh.
All the sciences about humans confirm sleep, companionship, and regular rest are requirements for a human to maintain long-term health. It is no surprise at all that religious wisdom is confirmed by scientific research.
The first group is addressed less by this passage than by God’s repeated promises to bring judgment and justice to earth, for all people, living and dead. To them, to us, to all people, Matthew addresses Jesus’ words about how to pray, not heaping up empty phrases, but asking for what one needs. God listens. God walks with us. God promises justice for all in the end. And God knows already what we each need … and God ensures we receive it. We need God’s blessings, no matter our circumstance. The danger to life is not the lack of necessities or the inevitable arrival of death. The real danger to live is the corruption of our hearts, minds and strength by the work of the Devil.
Pray constantly that God would deliver us from this, and that God would bless the czar (all who exercise corrupt power) and keep him from us, very far.
As we wait, prepare, and remain alert, we pray with thanks for all God gives us, every blessing. We can work hard and rest easy. Covid 19 restrictions, infections, long-haul symptoms, and even death cannot separate us from God’s unconditional love, nor our ability to exercise that unconditional love for all whom God created.
In the Lord I take refuge; how can you say to me, ‘Flee like a bird to the mountains.’
John 14:27
Jesus spoke: Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.
Words of Grace For Today
When I am most drained, I head to the mountains. I do not flee. I head there to hike, to camp, to ski, to take photos, to write. The mountains are a place of renewal.
Mountains have long since also been a place where we humans have fled from danger to our lives, for in the mountains we are harder to find, though life there is much more challenging. The world can easily give us more than we can take, where even the renewal of the mountains or the refuge of the mountains is not enough.
I do not give to you as the world gives.
The world, filled with sinful people, gives in lots of horrendous ways.
The world gives Covid 19, generously, killing and maiming millions.
The world gives false security with power, fame, and money, but all of that can evaporate in an instant and become more of a burden than a security for the future or a freedom for one’s todays.
The world gives promises of equality, justice, and opportunity; and then oppresses the masses, knowingly judges and falsely convicts, incarcerates and ruins honest people based on falsehoods and cruelty … The world promises opportunity but offers only opportunity to be enslaved so others can exercise corrupt power.
The world provides the blessings God created it to contain: air, water, food and opportunity to produce and utilize clothing and shelter; but the people in the world ensure they have their own excessive ‘comforts’ and luxuries at the expense of others being robbed of clean air, clean water, nourishing food, adequate clothing and sufficient shelter.
The world invites the masses to work to make a living possible, and then enslaves the masses at a standard of living that is impossible to call humane.
The world comes at us when we speak out and encourage change, equity, and justice. The world comes at us, condemns us for threatening the powerful people’s privileges in order to bring justice to the masses. The world comes at us to kill us with lies and Gaslighting or drive us into exile.
This is nothing new. It’s been humanity’s inhumane manner of executing injustice from the beginning of time.
God gives in many and various ways, all of which are marvellous.
God created and creates a universe that provides enough to support each and every person’s needs to live, and to live abundantly.
God gives us free choice to love, along with the other option, to choose evil.
God frees us from our inevitable choices that are evil, forgiving us, redeeming us, and renewing us so that we can live free from the sins of our past, present and future.
God gives us abundant life, and inspires, equips and calls us to give life abundant to all those around us.
God promises to walk with us no matter what we encounter in life. God’s Word is absolutely trustworthy. God keeps promises, always.
God sends Jesus, God’s own son, to live as an example of how to live life fully, abundantly; sacrificing oneself to provide life to others, forgiving even our enemies, and fearing and loving God, loving oneself and all other people, especially one’s enemies.
Jesus gives us peace, a peace that no one and nothing can take from us.
Therefore we have no cause to be afraid and our hearts need not be troubled … by any of the chaos that churns the world around us.
We get to be the people at peace, sharing life and peace – graciously – with all.
What a life.
It is the life of living renewed, each day, as if we were in the mountains.
It is a life living as refugees, in God’s arms, protected from all the threats of this world.
The Lord will inherit Judah as his portion in the holy land, and will again choose Jerusalem.
Romans 8:33
Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies.
Words of Grace For Today
Our Apostle’s Confession of Faith reads as the word concluding the second article about our faith in Jesus, Son of God, “from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.”
It is common to imagine God’s judgment as a terrible day. Jesus, sitting at God’s right hand, judging all people, living and dead, may seem a bit less daunting to those who have received faith in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God. For Jesus came to preach and teach, comfort and heal, and bring truth and salvation to all who believe in him.
That judgment may seem a long way off, sometime in the distant future, in some distant millennium when the earth comes to an end, perhaps when the sun collapses into itself and the explodes into a supernova consuming everything in the solar system.
As we enter Advent, with integrity as faithful Christians, waiting, preparing ourselves, waiting, yearning (as opposed to starting the Christmas celebrations already – early), we take time in this reflective, sombre, anticipatory and hope-filled time to notice how God already walks with us each day, how Jesus is present in all creation, and how the Holy Spirit guides and empowers us to be God’s children each day in new and surprising ways.
We notice also that there is nothing we can do to make ourselves right before God. God justifies us, and God alone. There is also no human (or devil’s being) who can bring a valid charge against us, God’s chosen, elect, forgiven, justified, and sanctified children.
Oh, the world and many people in it will try, driven by the Devil’s evil ways, to charge God’s people. Corrupt courts will even try, convict and imprison innocent people, all in an attempt to exercise their corruption of power, as if it were absolute or final.
These corrupt people can only place themselves under God’s judgment, even in these days. They can do all sorts of damage to our lives on this earth, harm greatly a great number of people, especially the most vulnerable including children, and make many people’s lives miserable in many ways. They can attack the integrity of society, even the integrity of God’s earth. They cannot actually harm us before God. They cannot separate us from God’s love and blessings. They cannot do anything that God does not allow them to do, all in order that we humans are capable of loving one another.
(For love requires that it is chosen by the one who loves, which requires free choice. Therefore there must be something besides love that we can choose, which requires in turn that hate, sin and all sorts of evil be on the menu for us to choose from … and to suffer as we and others choose other than to love as God loves us, unconditionally.)
We can, in these blue days of Advent, know that God walks with us, and is for us in all ways; God justifies us! Nothing can separate us from God’s love; not Covid 19, injustice of any kind, or lack of the necessities of life.
Because God justifies us, we can be the people who reach out to administer to those in need, to heal the sick, and to share the power of the Holy Spirit with all people.
That power is not the power of force or might; it is as Jesus lived for us, the power of self-sacrificing love.
That brings us to each day, no matter how dark or bleak, sure that our future is in God’s gracious hands, driven to be God’s Grace for all we encounter.
Joseph said to Potiphar’s wife, who wanted to seduce him: ‘Potiphar is not greater in this house than I am, nor has he kept back anything from me except yourself, because you are his wife. How then could I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?‘
2 Timothy 2:1
You then, my child, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.
Words of Grace For Today
Potiphar’s wife covets Joseph, and badgers him to sleep with her. He refuses. This is the right thing for Joseph to do, out of respect for all Potiphar has done for him, buying him as a slave and elevating him to be overseer and in charge of everything Potiphar has.
Potiphar’s wife eventually tries to force Joseph, grabs his robe, and he runs away leaving his robe behind, which she uses to accuse him of trying to rape her.
False allegations by women have cost men their lives since the beginning of time. It is still the case today. My financial and reputation lays in ruin because a woman lied, and then more women lied, and then those with authority lied, a lay pastor, lawyers, prosecutors, and judges.
It’s a common corruption that eats at the social contract that keeps barbarism at bay. It is the tip of the spear of barbarism that tears civilization to shreds.
It is a good example that Joseph sets for us, to resist overtures for evil’s pleasure. Temptations are everywhere. Resisting does not guarantee you will have a good life, only that you will lived blessed with the free conscience. Setting good examples and doing the right things can get you buried in jail and left there to rot like Joseph, and or driven into ruin like me (as millions before me and millions after). Right is still right. Lies are still wrong.
There are many things that tempt us, evil pleasures are but one.
We are not to give in to evil temptations,knowing that Jesus brings God’s grace to bear on all our sins, as if our gleefully sinning gave witness to God’s grace.
We are to live, unafraid of our sins, for God’s grace does save us continually.
We can, and we can expect others, to live righteously. And when we fail, we can and can expect others to forgive, trusting God has already forgiven … us and others.
Evil will persist, false allegations and convictions will continue, civilization will crumble into barbarism. Only God’s Grace saves us.
Pray it comes to bear before it is too late for those who bear false witness, and bring the curse of evil persistent in their lives.
Pray God’s Grace comes to bear before it is too late for each of us.
Evil is powerful, temptation is overwhelming, and we cannot resist, doch our strength is not our own, it is God’s who walks with us always. As the air that is blown in the wind, God is always with us blessing us. And God is always with those who choose to destroy us with lies and injustice, revealing their sins against the backdrop of Christ’s Grace.
There is nothing boring about this life that God brings us to live, unless we are like Potiphar’s wife, always adding more evil to our accumulated sins, so much that nothing is enough for us. Life remains boring for we try to be our own purpose; God has more than enough purpose for us.
Is your life boring or is it full of God’s blessings? Choose whom you serve and it has consequences … hardly those you expect or we expect. God’s forgiveness keeps reshaping the world we try to make sense of … into something new, re-newed, re-created. A miracle.
It is a miracle that we can be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.
Those who worship vain idols forsake their true loyalty.
Hebrews 6:12
For God is not unjust; he will not overlook your work and the love that you showed for his sake in serving the saints, as you still do. And we want each one of you to show the same diligence, so as to realize the full assurance of hope to the very end, so that you may not become sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.
Words of Grace For Today
While this passage of Hebrews descends again into the If we but do, think, or believe; Then God will reward us kind of thinking that perverts the Gospel of Jesus, namely that God saves us freely, through Grace, though we deserve only condemnation. True to Jesus’ way we hold up always as the measure of all things: Because God saves us, makes us God’s children, and equips us to be Christ’s feet, hands, and voice in the world, Therefore we can be grateful and active every day in every way to be just that.
It is always tempting to revert to IF, THEN theology. It appears to place us in ‘control’, instead of being always ‘beggars’ for God’s Grace and Mercy. It does no such thing for us. It is a deception of the Great Deceiver.
This is one of those vain idols that God’s people so often worship, which corrupts their hearts, minds and strength.
We all turn to worship vain idols, pursue corrupt and futile dreams, and turn from those around us that need our love, empathy and compassionate justice to reflect Christ’s sacrifice to save us all.
God remains true, walks with us even into the Hell that we create for ourselves and those around us, and guides us to keep walking back out into the Light of Christ, once again saving us from perdition.
God is just, merciful, and steadfast in love … for us and all creation. God does not overlook anything. God cannot reward us for the good we do … there is none, not without God being the agent that brings us to do the good that comes out of us poor miserable wretched sinners.
God rewards us for the record that Jesus places before God on our behalf, Jesus’ own unblemished record.
Now that’s some record, and some reward, considering everything about us! Our response, when we realize again what Jesus has done for us, is nothing short of more gratitude than we could have imagined ever possible for anything … and a re-dedication to reflect Christ to each person we deal with each day, and to reach out to and provide the basics of life and God’s Grace to the outcasts, the forgotten, the homeless, the disadvantaged, the ill, especially the mentally ill.
The evils of injustices, abuses, and perversions destroy people constantly everyday.
Our reflecting God’s Grace, love, and compassionate justice make the world a wonderful place to live, for they counter evil at every turn, providing hope based not on our fickle promises and actions, doch on God’s steadfastness.
What a reality to notice everyday! It makes this quite a miraculous place to live!
They have all gone astray, they are all alike perverse;there is no one who does good,no, not one.
Romans 3:22-24
The righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.
Words of Grace For Today
They have all gone astray …
We would like to think that these are other people of whom it is spoken, because the truth is frightening indeed. While many gaslight others (as they have me), and falsely accuse and convict them of terrible things (which are simply not true at all, not at all) before God we are all the ones who have gone astray.
Before God, only through the justification of Christ given to us as a pure gift are we redeemed, and made worthy of anything before God. We are not just made something. God makes us pure and righteous, though we deserve nothing but extreme condemnation. We are made holy saints, God’s own children.
Gift has a new meaning for us after we realize once again how costly a gift this is that God gives us: both how much it cost God to give it to us, and how precious it is for us.
We should never live, and yet we live abundantly.
Now what are we going to do with this gift? Will we pretend we have earned our place in life, the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat to survive yet another day? Or will we pretend that we have made it this far without God? Or will we pretend that we are powerful enough to beat God in a game of life, when all we’ve done is sell our souls to the Devil thinking we can get away with doing evil to others in order to ‘get ahead’? No, thinking we can live without God’s grace is trying to live without a head. A chicken can appear to live without a head for a short while, but we vanish into the folds of time never to emerge again …
Doch God’s children life in peace and prosperity of spirit, until the day God gathers us in and gives us an everlasting home.
Meanwhile we children have the work of God on earth to be about, sharing Grace with all, and being the bearers of Good News.
Breathe, for God loves you! God loves us, poor wretched sinners, all of us who have gone astray…. Only Christ makes anything good come of us, for Christ shows us how to see and share the beauty of creation, astounding as it is as it is to be loved, unconditionally.
Breathe. Rest. Live courageously, share the Good News, and trust that God walks with us.
For six days you shall work, but on the seventh day you shall rest; even in ploughing time and in harvest time you shall rest.
1 Timothy 4:16
Pay close attention to yourself and to your teaching; continue in these things, for in doing this you will save both yourself and your hearers.
Words of Grace For Today
The earth was made in six days and finished on the seventh. According to the contract it should have been the eleventh. But the painters wouldn’t paint and the workers wouldn’t work, Soooo The quickest thing to do was to fill it up with dirt.
Creation according to the Old Norske Sunday School.
The dirt refers to humans, but that is the upper level of the Sunday School curriculum.
Even so God gave us the model, picked up by the priests (or was it made up by the priests?) that we need to work like mad on six days so that we can rest on the seventh.
Like all religious rules there is a bit, and here quite a bit, of wisdom in this rule.
Working flat out to survive … robs one of the life one tries who hard to sustain.
We humans were made to work like the dickens, and God made us so that after working flat out, we need to rest.
It’s not just a muscle thing. It’s everything about our biology, physiology and psychology … and spirit.
If we do not rest, we work ourselves, literally to death.
Dr. Prausnitz will live on as the example that is clearest for me, in the negative. He taught English, had an office in the library next to Dr. Christenson’s, the philosophy department head. I worked nights in the library as a supervisor, and had an invitation from both professors to use their offices at night if I wished to study late. Occasionally I did, but rarely in Prausnitz’s office. Prausnitz worked through every second night, working, writing and teaching at least 36 hours straight and sleeping every other night. Shortly after I graduated he had a massive fatal heart attack ‘out of the blue’.
That’s what working too hard will do to you! One must rest. Got it? Got it!
Just so, the human needs to have care. Love is as essential to life as water and food, and self-care is a huge ingredient of that required love.
So even at planting time and in harvest, the 7th day is for rest.
…
Except Walt actually never had a fatal heart attack. He lived and worked for many more years, contributing to the learning of so many students, far beyond Concordia College.
I’ve been known to take great care for ‘rest’ on the 7th day.
Most often that is at least some kind of alternate to normal life and it’s regular work-rest routines.
Occasionally I’ve understood that ‘rest’ is the rest of the work that remains to be done to meet a pressing deadline.
Rules, health, wisdom, heart attacks as warnings (better someone else’s – even if it never was as one heard, fatal, which makes for the best kind of lesson!)
There is a reason why they are called ‘dead’lines.
Live long and prosper, and mostly enjoy the abundant life God created us to enjoy, no matter the power of evil to rob many coveted things from us.
Walt Prausnitz, October 2, 1924 – September 17, 2005, ….
many years after I graduated from Concordia in 1979.
Beauty and Kindness, faith, hope and love … these are some of the things ‘deadlines’, evil, and the twin destroyers (ignorance and apathy) cannot steal from us … if we trust God to carry us even when we are too tired to carry on.
When the Courts take everything ensuring your death, though you’ve done nothing wrong, the social contract disintegrates … further.
When Someone is peels away your protection from harm,
is it evil or good?
It is evil … and it is God’s blessing.
Ecclesiastes 7:14
On the day of prosperity be joyful, and on the day of adversity consider; God has made the one as well as the other, so that mortals may not find out anything that will come after them.
Romans 8:28
We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.
Words of Grace For Today
There are all sorts of explanations for why evil exists.
Prosperity is easy for humans to explain; we worked hard for our success and deserve the privilege and comforts afforded by our prosperity.
Adversity is also easy for humans to explain, as long as it is not their own adversity; they did not work hard but were lazy, or made mistakes because they were not smart, or were corrupt (like everyone else) and got caught, or took risks and had bad luck and were caught out … or … and on go the explanations.
Neither are right, necessarily nor primarily, nor are sufficiently correct to stand long on their own. The beginning of the real explanation for prosperity is that God blesses creation with some success. The beginning of the real explanation for adversity is that God blesses creation with some failure.
From there, why we and others enjoy prosperity or adversity, is a complicated mix of circumstances of time and environment and agency – a bit of our own, but mostly others’ agency.
Ecclesiastes’ explanation is interesting: God makes prosperity and adversity so that we do not know what will come in the future. That may well be. It teaches us that ONLY God can be trusted, not adversity (for example of our enemies) nor prosperity.
Paul in many and various ways points us to rely on God alone. Here he provides the reassurance that all things work for good … (which is blatantly not true, but he qualifies it with) for those who love God. Which is blatantly not true, for example all the martyrs through the generations, and all those Christians who have suffered at the cruel hands of others.
Paul is right though in a more profound sense: while the circumstances and suffering of our lives may not seem like they are worked out for good, ours or anyone else’s, God works in marvellous ways to bring blessings from evil. In the end God always will win, and therefore even when we suffer not, God will bring good out of it for us and for all others. In this way Paul is most certainly right. God works all things for good! for everyone.
Even our most evil, cruel enemies.
God is creator and always the victor. We are blessed to be God’s children, adopted by the sacrifice of Jesus.
There is a story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbours came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically. “May be,” the farmer replied.
The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbours exclaimed. “May be,” replied the old man.
The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbours again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. “May be,” answered the farmer.
The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbours congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. “May be,” said the farmer.
We can answer with the farmer, “Maybe.” With Christ we can answer to both prosperity and adversity: “It is God’s blessings, no maybe about it.”
