The Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down; the Lord loves the righteous.
Ephesians 1:18
With the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints.
Words of Grace For Today
Amid the pandemic that threatens our livelihoods and our very lives, we pray that God will cure us of the blindness that allows us to live unaware of God’s presence in, with, and among us.
Through all generations God has lifted up people who have been able to provide witness to God’s presence in, with, and among us , for the many people who remain blind to God’s presence. These are the saints in light, the Light of Christ.
The Light of Christ, the reality of God’s creation as blessed, shines through the saints, so that even the blind may know what they could see if they allowed God to heal them of their blindness.
This light shines as clear as the morning sun on a clear, blue-sky day. This light shines in all the dark corners where people would hide their sins and evil deeds.
This light shines clearly on the Covidiots, the Antivaxers, and those who intentionally spread false science. They spread the lies to create fear, for out of fear they are able to promise false solutions, and with false hopes they lead people into dark places from which they are able to be lead, giving their leaders power, dark power, power that would destroy faster than it heals or gives life.
Christ’s Light shines even today, especially today. For there is no shortage of saints, God-made-saints who see God in creation and give clear witness to God’s presence, and God’s guidance that would lead us all to life, and life abundant. For when we live, knowing that God is with us, we receive a hope that is beyond compare. This hope shines for us like a brilliant light through all the darkness of evil and sin in this world. This hope shines for us pulling us through the darkness of these days to a better future, a future that is blessed by God, where we can breathe clear, clean, uninfected air … even as we stand shoulder to shoulder with our sisters and brothers on earth.
This hope shines brightly for us each day so that we are able to pray (even mid the pandemic that threatens our livelihoods and our very lives) that God will cure us all of the blindness that allows us to live unaware of God’s presence in, with, and among us.
Do not go after other gods to serve and worship them, and do not provoke me to anger with the work of your hands. Then I will do you no harm.
Acts 17:24-25
The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.
Words of Grace For Today
A pre-peer review study about the rate of inflammation of the heart following Covid-19 vaccination published a huge error in that rate, having begun with a hugely smaller number of vaccinations considered (25,000 instead of the correct 800,000). The inflammation is treatable without hospitalizations, and the correct rate is significantly smaller than the rate of the inflammation as a result of being infected by Covid-19.
The error was quickly caught by peer reviewers and immediately accepted by the authors, with apologies, and the study was withdrawn.
There are people who do not respect the order that God created, and the ability God gives us humans to explore, discover, and organize our knowledge of God’s order. Remember that science was possible only because of the religious faith that accepted God created an order that could and should be explored and better understood! So much for the simply stupid old antagonism between ‘science’ and ‘faith’. Both, pursued correctly, must depend substantially on the other!
In the midst of a pandemic (no it’s not over and able to be dealt with as an endemic, Premier Kenney, no matter what your supporters wish were so) science done correctly will always produce errors that need to be corrected. This study into the rate of inflammation of the heart after vaccination is one such. The process to correct the errors was pursued well by all involved.
So what’s the problem?
There are many, disingenuous people, who promote false ‘science’ in order to sustain a powerful and large enough antivax portion of the population. This error in this study has been spread like wildfire around the internet. There the correction has not been made. The error, honestly corrected by the authors, is intentionally left as if it were truth. This false science is spread as if it were true and people who have disconnected themselves from reality (wishing it were something it is not and will not ever be) are stupidly convinced to refuse to be vaccinated. The problem is that enough people refuse to be vaccinated so that the pandemic continues.
The same people who claim the pandemic is not real, that vaccines do not work, keep the vaccines from being used in enough people … and they make the pandemic continue. The poor, stupid people who wish there were no pandemic and who behave as if there were no pandemic, by refusing to be vaccinated, are exactly the people that allow Covid-19 to continue as a pandemic.
And the people who intentionally spread false science to promote these stupid opinions and actions know full well that they are a significant factor in continuing the pandemic. What kind of evil runs rampant in them?
These people have certainly gone after other gods to serve and worship them, and brought God’s anger down on themselves … and unfortunately on all of us, as the health care system is at a breaking point, running out of ICU beds, converting other beds (and the real and needed health care they would provide to ill people) to Covid-19 care beds.
At this time, when reality becomes worse because some people want it to be worse, and others refuse to accept that it is as bad as it is already, we need to remember that God is not contained in our shrines (of ‘small religion’ or false realities) doch, God gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.
God walks with us, even in these days when our very lives and livelihoods are threatened by Covid-19 and other more common diseases (from heart disease, strokes, cancer, and even the out of season cold and flu). God created us and all of creation with order which (because we are created in God’s image) we can discover with fertile, inquisitive minds working in reality within the capacity to organize our knowledge. God does not abandon us in this marvellous universe. God accompanies us, and gives us a history full of stories of how God has been present with people through all time. Jesus’ story is the most clear, as God became human, lived among us and healed our illnesses.
We pray, may God cure us of Covidiocies that prolong the pandemic and put us all at risk. May God protect us from the fools who hold Covid parties, sharing air and food with people with Covid in order to contract the disease intentionally, falsely hoping that they will have some immunity thereby – when what they do is fill up ICU beds and add to the death toll … and overburden the health care system with long-Covid symptoms for decades to come.
When we think we stand above others in righteousness
It is only because we’ve lost a sound perspective
on God’s reality.
Proverbs 10:28
The hope of the righteous ends in gladness, but the expectation of the wicked comes to nothing.
Hebrews 6:12
May you not become sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.
Words of Grace For Today
We would like to think and trust that if we are righteous, all will be well and we will live happily ever after.
It is hardly so.
We would like to think and trust that those other people who are wicked, since they do evil things they will suffer greatly and never find happiness.
It is hardly so.
Job says it succinctly and correctly after losing all his property and his children, and after being inflicted with sores over his entire body: Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?
Matthew 5:45 puts it: God makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.
What benefit do we receive from striving to be righteous then? Why not simply succumb to all wickedness and be happy?
The complete passage from Matthew 5 reads: ‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax-collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
To that many theologians (Paul, Augustine, Luther among them) have added: it is impossible for any human to be perfect!
Where does that leave us?
It leaves us where we’ve always been: entirely at the mercy of God: God’s Grace, Mercy, and steadfast love. Fully dependent upon, and grateful recipients of God’s unconditional love, then we live, not trying to earn our way into or towards righteousness, doch we live imitating Jesus by being God’s unconditional love for others. We strive to love even our enemies, not for our own reward, but as thanks for God’s love first given to us.
Our hope then ends in happiness each day, only because by God’s grace we are promised it to be so. Thus, by God’s grace alone, we breathe and live each day … and pray that wickedness may be far from our hearts and our lives.
Then once more you shall see the difference between the righteous and the wicked, between one who serves God and one who does not serve him.
Galatians 6:9
So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up.
Words of Grace For Today
It is not often that the difference between the righteous and the wicked are noticed blatantly and openly. Most often wickedness hides itself behind a deceiving appearance of ‘goodness’.
God does not allow this to continue forever.
All evil deeds will come to light.
Most come to light much sooner than the wicked deed doers would wish.
Most do not come to light as soon as their victims wish.
Our lives are not about exposing evil. It will be evident enough soon enough. Our lives are about providing all opportunities to amend evil and wicked ways so that more and more people may bask in grace, living each day with gratitude.
When the crowds found out [that, taking his disciples with him, Jesus had withdrawn privately to a city called Bethsaida], they followed him; and he welcomed them, and spoke to them about the kingdom of God, and healed those who needed to be cured.
Words of Grace For Today
There is no shortage of people today who suffer unimaginable pain, hunger, thirst, and torture. Many of the suffer so at the hands of other people.
It has been so through all time.
Many people today suffer diseases, Covid -19 only one of the many that are deadly in horrible ways. Many suffer for lack of care or recklessness of other people. Many in Alberta’s health care sector, overrun and pushed to and over the brink as they are by Covid cases, refer to the fourth wave (the worst of all of them) as the Kenney-wave, since he recklessly pushed his ‘Open for Summer’ program through, which fuelled the fourth wave to be so huge and destructive, and deadly.
Is has been so through all time.
The greatest suffering by far is not measured by physical ailments or torture. The greatest suffering is what we humans experience in our souls, or spirits, or hearts and minds.
In the midst of all kinds of suffering, God is still present providing comfort, healing, and hope.
God’s unconditional love in action provides the most essential element of life for us: hope.
Hope that our yesterdays will be blessed.
Hope that today will be blessed.
Hope that our tomorrows will be blessed.
Hope that tomorrow will be at least in some small way better than the horrific illnesses, injustice, abuse that is today’s offerings for us.
Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God, and [Jesus] heals those who need to be cured.
I shall not die, but I shall live, and recount the deeds of the Lord.
Galatians 2:20
It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Words of Grace For Today
Audrey had always had to fight to get anything. At home it was her two older brothers who made sure she had as little as they could arrange, including by stealing things from her and plain taking from her what they wanted, which was anything she showed that she treasured. She looked out for number one, and only number one. By the time high school came around she’d perfected her methods of manipulating, lying, and cheating for whatever she wanted. She had excellent grades, some of them she had even sort of earned. Most of them where given to her by teachers who were afraid of what she would report them for. She’d already laid waste to one teacher’s career and personal life with rumours of sexually abusing her.
When it came to dating she made sure she dated the boys she wanted to, and most of them were hardly aware of the trouble she’d gone to. University was a fools game for her, passing with grades she hardly earned, ruining any instructor who gave her anything less than a B+. Then she met Jacques, and for a few minutes one might have thought her ways would change. She even went to seminary to fit in with his family of pastors, a powerhouse in the church for generations. Jacques finished his degrees a year before she was done, and she could not be bothered to stay in seminary another year. Every one was too kind, naive to how the world worked. The most she got from any of them was fear or out right condemnation for her way of making it through at everyone else’s cost.
Through all her middle age adulthood she continued, as a respected (and feared) member of Jacques’s powerful family. Jacques’s kindness helped to cover up her rather crude and cruel ways of getting what she wanted. Anyone who knew her well, knew she would readily say she was ‘going to hell’ for this or that latest caper she’d pulled off at someone else’s expense. No one disagreed with her; that would be to put oneself in her sights and she never missed. The thing she never seemed to understand was that people were also sure that God had no room for Audrey, at least there was no evidence of it in her life.
In her late adult years she came down with cancer. She fought hard to survive. Most people thought she’d finally gotten what she deserved and could not cheat her way out of. When she lived a few wise, kind and gracious people said that God had given her another chance at life. They meant that God had given her a chance to see how to life life with grace, kindness and unconditional love. Most people who did not know of Audrey’s dark side sympathized with her; here was a cancer survivor after all. Audrey had, it seemed a new lease on life. The kind, gracious and faithful people saw she really did have a chance of learning something new for her: how to be honest and kind.
When a posting came vacant and the congregation could not get a pastor (since they ran through them like horsemen with swords), she volunteered. The bishop, having no other options to offer the troubled and destructive congregation, appointed her as lay pastor. People marvelled at the mysterious ways that God works, Audrey serving as a pastor in a congregation. There could hardly be someone with a life time more antithetical to Christ’s work. Still it was impossible to say anything about Audrey’s past; sympathy ran too wide for her. The congregation fell in love with Audrey, she knew exactly how to win their loyalty. It was the dirty work of destroying men that she jumped into with gusto, and soon the matriarch had what she’d thought she’d wanted for decades: a congregation run by women.
Those that looked on from the outside marvelled at how successful Audrey was as a pastor. Those who knew how she operated, those who knew her before and people that just met her, saw that her ways had a new face, but her heart was all about destroying other people in order to get her way.
Then Jacques came down if a terrible, painful, and incurable disease. Kind, gracious, faithful people saw that God offered Audrey great hardship, and also yet another chance to rest in God’s grace.
This surrender, of one’s own enjoyment of life, in order to give other’s life (the opposite of how Audrey had lived) is what Paul describes in today’s verse: It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
There is no other more poignant manner to describe this than to realize one faces death, head on. And one survives, but one’s life is not one’s own anymore. One’s own life, in large strokes and in the finest details, has become God’s life given to one to live as Christ calls us to live:
filled with truth, kindness, grace and unconditional, self-sacrificing love.
This life then is not our story, it is not that we live to be our own story. Instead we live to tell (with everything in our lives – thoughts, words, and deeds) of God’s great deeds, to tell Jesus’ story, and to tell the stories of the saints who have gone before us … so that the next generations will learn the stories, and learn to live them, and live them well.
There is in this new life lived as not one’s own, the greatest freedom and peace … as God intended us to live.
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.
The Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you.
John 20:21
Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’
Words of Grace For Today
Waking to -2⁰, the first freeze of the autumn, was anticipated eagerly … until it followed a day of chilly, blustery wind and rain that tore at everything with a dogged vengeance soaking even the best protections against such moisture.
It’s great to freeze. Part of the great of it is, is that wet disappears as water freezes into snow and ice and frost, all which can be removed with either effort or with preparation to avoid their accumulation where they are not wanted, like covers at night keeping frost off the solar panels.
This morning, the Aaronic blessing that: God will make God’s face shine on me, is more than welcome. It is desperately needed. Bring on the sun. Give me a few more days to get the insulated tarps in place, the ropes to hold them, the tape to seal them, so that (after the yearly repairs are completed) that monster in the insulated tarp shelter can be fed once again all the wood it wants, just as long as it produces HEAT, DRY HEAT!
In the chill of this morning, I am reminded, as seems needed so nearly every morning, that the challenges and pains of each morning are signs of being alive in the world that requires labour of me in order that I survive – all part of engaging as a creature in God’s good creation – and …
that the challenges and pains of each morning are not to be given too much due, for the reality is that this IS God’s good creation, that God walks with me, and that this is a holy hermitage, made so by God’s choice to put me here to see it as the place of beauty, wonder, and majesty that it is (all clear indications that God is here in each moment and through each change of season)
and thus
that the challenges and pains of each morning, in the context of God’s many blessings, are also signs of God’s peace, and Christ’s call; that Christ has sent me also here, circuitous and curious as the weaving way has been to arrive, and knowing this is only another (one of many) blessed waypoint on the path home.
May the Lord bless us and keep us; the Lord make God’s face to shine upon us, and be gracious to us; the Lord lift up God’s countenance upon us, and give us peace.
May the shine of the Son and the sun reach our hearts this day, that we may be saints through whom the light of Christ reaches many, many people, bringing God’s unconditional love, amazing grace and unparalleled peace.
Bless the Lord, all his works, in all places of his dominion. Bless the Lord, O my soul.
Luke 13:29
Then people will come from east and west, from north and south, and will eat in the kingdom of God.
Words of Grace For Today
Cold autumn rains fell, ferocious through the night, and then steady with only a light wind pushing them across the horizon. Still the winds, with wet furry, had torn apart Tina’s camp.
It took the morning to patch up most of the damage, and set her mind busy with plans, imagined and then reworked and reworked, to brunt the blast of damaging winds. Ideal would be a solid wall, though that was not possible. Perhaps some kind of wall made of the available recycled items collected in the past summer from garbage which she was allowed to pick and choose from.
There was no protection possible from the ferocious winds of false rumours that people used as excuses to ignore, deprive, and outright attack her. There was no wall to be built. Only God’s grace kept her safe, protected, alive, and filled with awe and hope.
There are works of humans that are impressive in their majesty, though where humans excel is in their ability to destroy each other. Arnold had tapped into this method of getting ahead when he was still young, informing on his family to the secret police. It had brought him apparent success even as he watched his family disintegrate before his teenage eyes. He’d gone on to become a multimillionaire on the backs of many people. Tina was only one of many left in his wake of destruction. The police had used this corrupt power to bring false charges against Tina. The courts had used this power of destruction to falsely convicting her. It seemed as if there would be no end. But their destructive power, if not already, soon will come full circle to rest in their lives again and again, leaving them each and all desperate for relief, for rescue, and for salvation. Only God knows if they will be brought to an end by their own destruction, or whether God will redeem them and claim them as saints. So it is will all who use the destructive power at which humans excel so well to construct their lives of deceit and greed.
God’s kingdom is constructed differently, without the need for walls to protect oneself from the ugly blasts of destructive deceptions and schemes to gain advantage at other’s cost. God’s kingdom is built on God’s works of mercy, steadfast love, and wonder. There are no words, actions, or direct assaults which can diminish God’s works. God’s mercy is forever, God’s steadfast love is unfailing, and God’s wonders are unassailable and omnipresent.
Here people from all lands, east, west, north, and south gather together to feast under God’s protection that cannot be compromised. Together they give testimonies, true and wondrous, of God’s great works through which God has blessed all people.
Cold autumn rains fell, ferocious through the night, and then steady with only a light wind pushing them across the horizon. Nothing in God’s kingdom was changed one iota, and Tina feasted in solitude with the hermit saints of all times, with the people of the earth from all places and all times. As God blessed Tina, and all the saints of all time, together with Tina they all blessed God with thanks.
For all that is, comes from God, and all is well, all is well, all manner of things are well.
How precious is your steadfast love, O God! All people may take refuge in the shadow of your wings.
Matthew 6:26
Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?
Words of Grace For Today
Take refuge in the shadow of God’s wings, in the safety of God’s steadfast love. All other ‘security’ is an illusion, a deception, and a departure from God’s kingdom into the Devil’s realms. Under God’s wings, like that of a great bird of the sky soaring at will, God brings us to adventures we would not imagine, to places and understandings where life is abundant, and to challenges and work that fulfill all our yearning to participate in creation.
As autumn sets firmly in on the land, giving great respite from the bugs, the heat, and the huge influx of 2-legged animals in the wilderness (only some who are dangerous or greatly destructive to the land, scarring it with tire ruts, garbage strewn about, feces and toilet paper in the woods, and all sorts of materials half burned in the fire circles that sterilize the soil beneath and pollute the air above) …
As autumn sets firmly in on the land, we breathe easier.
As autumn sets firmly in on the land, great flocks of geese of 100s and 1000s, make a distant chorus, moving in V’s for days to traverse 1000s of miles from the waters of the north to the temperate winters in the south.
As autumn sets firmly in on the land, birds of prey, great hawks, owls, and bald eagles screech high as they circle for hours seeking their prey. Song birds like my neighbours the robins spend all hours out in the meadow hunting worms and bugs for food.
Whether autumn sets firmly in on the land or not, in all seasons and times, one has to wonder about these words of Jesus. For as God provides for the birds without their sowing or reaping into barns, first: their lives seem to be wholly directed toward finding food and avoiding being food; second: there are and were also in Jesus day so many people who neither sow nor reap and they worry most about what they will eat and what they will wear, for their choices are so many it is only as ignorant shame that they indulge such luxury as most of the world suffers without enough food, clothing, shelter … and now fresh water and clean air, yet alone meaningful work and people to love and be loved by.
The point is clear from Jesus’ words: our attention and concern should be less on all the required labour needed to survive (or luxuriate in over abundance.) Our attention and concern is better spent on understanding the mystery, freedom and peace that is available to us when we, our lives long, learn to seek refuge, meaning, and purpose in God’s steadfast love. For there, comforted, protected, and challenged, we can see life with clarity.
What we see with clarity is that our lives were designed by God and given to each of us by God in order that we can extend God’s steadfast love to others.
We simply cannot do that if our primary concern is providing for ourselves, for then we turn inward and bend reality from God’s great creation to our own insatiable appetites. We become instead of caretakers of creation, destroyers of creation. We become incapable of seeing others as Christ sees them: broken people in need of God’s love.
God help us when we make that turn away from God’s steadfast love as our only sure refuge.
Thank God, God always calls us, welcomes us, and renews us so that we can return to God (… home in God’s kingdom to be the ones who exercise God’s unconditional, steadfast love for all people) so that we can take refuge in the shadow of God’s wings, in the safety of God’s steadfast love. All other ‘security’ is an illusion, a deception, and a departure from God’s kingdom into the Devil’s realms. Under God’s wings, like that of a great bird of the sky soaring at will, God brings us to adventures we would not imagine, to places and understandings where life is abundant, and to challenges and work that fulfill all our yearning to participate in creation. … home in God’s kingdom we are the saints who exercise God’s unconditional, steadfast love for all people.
