Grace – Page 41

Rich Feasts or Terror at the Truth Getting Out?

Wednesday, June 23, 2021

Everything

With Grace

Makes for Our Celebrating and Giving Thanks!

Psalm 63:5

My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast, and my mouth praises you with joyful lips.

Colossians 1:11-12

May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light.

Words of Grace For Today

Life is tough, even cruel, and overpoweringly challenging to one’s own sanity, soul, and spirit.

What God gives us, freely, more than overcomes all that, easily, if we but recognize reality as it is.

These days it is a bit more than normal, after a Trump presidency more noticeably than otherwise, to make up whatever one wants to, to spin reality inside out and upside down, or just make a clean departure from it, all the while claiming to speak only the truth.

Wonderful way to live, making it up as you go, in whatever way you think will be most beneficial to you; to hell with all the people that you hurt or destroy along the way.

Feasting on God’s reality is much easier. One gets to admit everything about life and how it is, the good and the bad … and the very bad. After all God forgives it all and gives us new life each day.

Which gives us an unending source of strength to face how cruel and tough and overpoweringly challenging life is to our sanity, soul, and spirit. The promise that pulls us through it all, keeps us moving forward in Grace is that God sees us as another inheritor as God’s own children with all the saints in light.

The company is made up of great sinners all, and great God-made saints. No need to make up falsehoods to get through anything. We get to feast each day on the bread of life and drink the living water. Nothing compares.

Meanwhile our enemies live in fear that the truth will catch up with them, that their lies will be exposed, and that they will be found out to be fakes. The truth causes them real terror. Which is a horrible way to live.

We, meanwhile, are able, no matter what happens around us, to sing God’s praises in thanks for the grace upon grace that God pours over our lives without end all day long, every day! We have strength that comes from God’s glorious power, making us prepared to endure everything with patience. Life does not get better!

Blessings in All Things!

Tuesday, June 22, 2021

The Blessing of Winter is there are no Mosquitoes

The Blessing of Summer is …

You can say what you will about summer.

I’d say, it is that

winter will come again

so there will be no heat (except in the furnace)

and no mosquitoes!

Psalm 103:15-16-17

As for mortals, their days are like grass; they flourish like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more. But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him, and his righteousness to children’s children.

Romans 5:2

Our Lord Jesus Christ is through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.

Words of Grace For Today

We always like to think we are more than we are.

It’s almost built into our DNA.

We strive to achieve more, to become our own godlets, to no avail.

We are but like grass, here one day for a short season, and blown down, mowed to nothing, overtaken by weeds, eaten up by even vegetarians, and the gone, just gone with only a few people who perhaps remember us to live on after us.

Short and brutish … that’s how life is described by poets and philosophers and even wise theologians and priests … though the last along with other wise people do not stop there.

They also go on to give God thanks for the greatness of creation we are privileged to participate in, and especially God’s Grace which gives us more than meets the eye, or rather just as can meet the eye of a faithful mystic, one who looks and sees God at work in the most common things of every day life.

Jesus brings us the story that tells us this Grace is ours to live in, to enjoy, to trust … and to share.

It is this steadfast love of God that gives us breath even when we should not be still alive at all. It is God’s steadfast love that promises that everyday common and usual events and things are much, much more … and we can see them as works of God’s steadfast love.

As we fear and love God, God is able to show us that we live in, work from, and can prodigiously share God’s steadfast love with all people.

Hot long daylight days, short ferocious loud and destructive storms, and cool calm after the heat of the day … all are blessings from God.

I’m not sure about the mosquitoes that just devoured me while I was outside for a few minutes … okay even they are blessings from God. I was driven back in to write and give God thanks.

This is God’s blessing – that we know how, can, and do give God thanks for all things … so much so that we pray for our enemies unceasing, that they may be a part of a double victory for Christ.

Let the storms come, let the heat come … even let the mosquitoes come in droves. There is calm after the storm, there is cool after the heat … and there is ammonia based glass cleaner to dry out the itchy poison the mosquitoes inject to get blood to flow to their bite. Itch, itch, itch. Itch to distraction, endless itch .. until the ammonia works it wonder and the bites settle finally to a comparatively marvellous calm. Thankfully there is no malaria here!

And the night settles in, the day is done. The only thing to do is give thanks, wash up, and sleep deeply in God’s embrace. Tomorrow promises to be another marvellous day, all in all.

Weary? You Bet!

Monday, June 21, 2021

Rest, at Sunset, In the Calm

That Christ Offers

Isaiah 12:3

With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.

Matthew 11:28

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.

Words of Grace For Today

Like no other words these are so welcome …

now after 15 months plus of Covid 19 restrictions and unknowns,

when my enemies pile on more lies and destruction, take more money I will never have piling debt on debt, and when it seems there are too few people who know who I a really am. Because I certainly am not the person reported to and by the RCMP, or testified about in the courts, or convicted and labelled a vexatious litigant by judges who care not for the actual truth,

when illness and disabling arthritis and injury combine to keep me from doing what I had planned to do to keep healthy, busy, and keep the mosquitoes at bay: mow, mow, and again mow,

when the death of a loved one rips the foundation of life out from underneath us,

when the darkness of the Evil One convinces us that the world is always going to be dark, even when the sun shines longer today than any other day in a year, and that evil will always win the day,

…

What we thirst for at those times, and now, is a place to rest in safety and

Jesus calls to us:

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.

Once again God works to convince us, to reassure us with hope beyond hope, that

With joy we will today draw water from the wells of salvation.

There are no better words that these:

Come you who are weary and I will give you rest, so that with joy you will draw living water from the wells of salvation!

When we have rested, and washed ourselves and souls once again clean, when we have drunk our fill, then Christ calls us to share these words, these opportunities to rest and be renewed, and this living water. Christ calls us because there are so many people weary, carrying heavy burdens, who lose themselves as if they were separated from the love of God.

These words, these offers, this living water is all we have, it’s all we need to be able to share, it is all that anyone needs from life.

What joy comes when God calls us out of our weariness, and we share it all with others!

Seek or See?

Sunday, June 20, 2021

God’s Light

Brightens Even an Old Stump

As It Falls Apart

Isaiah 55:6

Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near.

Colossians 2:9

For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.

Words of Grace For Today

God is never too far.

Too often we know that God is near, nearer than we are comfortable acknowledging since we would like to think we are getting off scott-free for the sins we commit, the evil we perpetrate on others, and for all the lack of kindness and absence of goodness we share with others.

God is here. More than near, God walks with us, always.

There is something to ‘seeking’ God, for if we do not open our eyes to notice, like so much of God’s goodness and Grace that is all around us each day, we will miss the best in life.

Sometimes it is easier to think of God as some far off, great and powerful, disinterested deity. God is no such thing. God comes a Jesus, lives as one of us, eats and cries like one of us, laughs and prays like one of us, and dies like one of us … well, hopefully dies like no one need ever again die, innocent yet falsely convicted by those ‘righteous ones’ in power, who fear for their own survival if the truth is told far and wide. God could not be nearer.

God is fully embodied in the same life we live.

God desires that we live as well as Jesus did, that we not scapegoat anyone (Jesus was the scapegoat to demonstrate that God does not need more scapegoats, or any other false, sacrificial sacrifices), and that we learn to serve others (all others) just as Jesus did.

That’s a tough road to navigate when the expectation is that we must prove ourselves, either so pure and good that God will accept us, or so evilly successful in this life that we need not care about God’s blessings. God accepts neither option for us, and instead forgives us once again each day, and sets us off in a renewed life, able to serve others … so that more and more people will enjoy an abundant life.

It’s a challenge, more than seeking God, it’s a challenge of finding ways to give life to other people, many who do not want anything to do with God or a healthy, abundant life.

Everyone gets to choose, to turn away from God, or to acknowledge that God is right here with us.

The sun shines long these days. God’s Light shines brighter, longer each day, and through each dark night. Seeking is less required or helpful, than being alert, noticing, and giving God thanks.

Responding to Wickedness with Grace

Saturday, June 19, 2021

In The Darkness

Christ’s Light Shines

For All,

Even Liars, Bullies and Tyrants

Micah 2:1

Alas for those who devise wickedness and evil deeds on their beds! When the morning dawns, they perform it, because it is in their power.

Matthew 20:25-26

Jesus called them to him and said, ‘You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.’

Words of Grace For Today

There is evil planned and done … simply because people can. Words of tyrants and bullies – I do this (evil to others) because I can.

Jesus provided a life-giving example for us: we give our lives ‘as ransom’ for others, so that they may live.

One of the many times I was falsely arrested Constable Jones stood across the counter from me after I was processed and she alone remained in the room with me. She boasted, “Lofstrom, do you know why I do this?”

Now I had not yet figured out the extent of the lies told about me, and her involvement in recruiting false reports from other people, even the lay pastor of the church I attended, Anne Zimmerman. Nor had I figured out that there would be no real trial, no truth provided by anyone except me and my words would be rejected and the lies accepted as evidence. I had not figured out, nor could I anticipate what storm of gaslighting was undertaken to get me charged, nor the lies that even the judges would tell in their decisions to convict me and deny my appeals. So many of the lies were little but the decisions relied on them, and materially on the judges’ own lies in order to convict or deny me.

I had not yet figured out the extent that this was standard procedure, easily done, building blocks of lies into bigger lies until the whole process was not even at all about what I had or had not done, said, or written. I had not figured out that the process was not about me at all. It was about the people who lied, being able to lie and get away with it, and being able to make a decent, honest, and kind man suffer an injustice of their making. I had not figured out any of this. I had respected the police all my life. Now turned on me, I was caught in a kafkaesque nightmare. It seemed I’d woken up in a twilight zone. I was silent, hurt, and scared witless.

Jones answered her own question, “Because I can!”

Micah writes, “Alas for those who devise wickedness.” Indeed one needs pity Jones, Zimmerman, and all the many others who devised this wickedness of lies against me, especially the judges. If one lies so easily, so profusely, so readily and so finally against decent, innocent, kind people, that means that their hearts are so twisted from reality around them, and so twisted from God’s goodness for them that they live in a self-made hell from which their is no escape …

except by God’s Grace.

We are not called to live by lies, certainly not to exercise them against innocent others simply ‘because we can!’

Christ exercises Grace for us, giving us renewed life each day. So we take that Grace, so prodigiously poured out on us undeserving sinners, and we direct it’s flow towards those around us. We follow Christ’s example and serve others, striving not to be ‘first’ or to rule over others. Instead we give all we have and are so that others will see the Light of Christ shining for them.

In the darkness of night, we know the Light of Christ shines for us, so that our deepest fears need not rule over us. At the dawn of each new day, we know the Light of Christ shines for us, so that we can live free of fears that cripple us, so that we can be as generous with Grace for others as God is generous with Grace for us.

We say we do this, not because we can, but because Jesus shows us that this is how we can live abundantly, and the Holy Spirit makes us able.

Working Against the Evil One?

Friday, June 18, 2021

It’s A Long Haul

in the Darkness.

How Can We Stay Afloat?

Or Will We All Go Loony?

Psalm 60:13

With God we shall do valiantly; it is he who will tread down our foes.

2 Thessalonians 3:3

The Lord is faithful; he will strengthen you and guard you from the evil one.

Words of Grace For Today

Covid 19 (and the restrictions placed on us in order that fewer people get sick and suffer the resulting long term disabling consequences or even death) have shown us once again that we must work diligently as God’s people to protect not only ourselves but all people from all evil.

Much of that work seems impossible. How does one protect those who live around a covidiot who when she/he lies dying of Covid 19, barely able to breathe, still insists that Covid 19 is a conspiracy to take away people’s freedoms? How does one protect the hundreds of covidiot-young adults who gather at a bush party where hundreds of people mill about in packs, drinking, smoking, and doing drugs, with no thought to physical distancing or masks or safety? How does one protect people from leaders who refuse to recognize that restrictions are needed and must be followed or thousands more people will die and even more will suffer long-haul Covid disabling complications?

How does one protect oneself? The best science shows that hand washing or sanitizing and physical distancing are only very superficial protections against becoming infected, that masks (that we have available to us) do little to protect us and only somewhat help protect others around us, and that even vaccines (as good as they may be) are never a 100% protection against becoming infected with or even dying from Covid 19!

The best science shows that hand washing or sanitizing, physical distancing, masks, and vaccines are all together great deterrents to the spread of Covid 19 in all its variants. Common sense is that this is what we can do, and therefore must do.

Still, like so much we have to deal with in life, this is not enough to provide a guarantee that we will survive and live well.

It is all too easy to throw caution to the wind, toss off the masks, and join the crowds of covidiots (pretending that life continues ‘normally’ as before) eating and drinking and making merry. Life is short no matter what. Everyone will die. Why not live it up while one can?!

Instead, God remains faithful and trustworthy. The Lord is faithful; God will strengthen us and guard us from the evil one. God promises to walk with us, and to face every challenge with us, even Covid 19, even if we or those we love become sick, suffer long-Covid, or lose our breath and life to it. No matter what happens God remains faithful and trustworthy.

We are not in this alone, even when being alone is the safest precaution we can take against Covid 19, though the riskiest to our ability to maintain resilience, to maintain good mental health, to stay healthy on so many other fronts. The truth is we often spend far too little time alone, with ourselves, facing the reality of our own lives and sins, and being ever so thankful for God’s Grace that gives us renewed life each day.

Even as we face Covid 19, the grief of lost loved ones, the loss of resilience with the rise of languishing … and our inability to do anything about all that, with God we shall do valiantly; it is God who will tread down our foes.

With God we shall do valiantly; it is God who will tread down our foes.

Rich Storehouse

Thursday, June 17, 2021

The Golden Light

God’s Promises of Renewed Life

Brightens Everything

Deuteronomy 28:12

The Lord will open for you his rich storehouse, the heavens, to give the rain of your land in its season and to bless all your undertakings. You will lend to many nations, but you will not borrow.

1 Peter 2:3

Indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.

Words of Grace For Today

The promise God gives us is sure: God will open for us God’s rich storehouse.

We might conclude that God’s blessings can be measured in the rain that falls in season on our land, so that we do not need to borrow from anyone, but have plenty to lend to many people of many nations.

We might conclude that if the rain does not fall on our land we are not blessed by God at all.

God’s goodness and God’s blessings cannot be equated to the material things that we are able to enjoy in this life, or that we do not have in this life.

When we experience God’s Grace, bought for us by Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, then we come to know that we have tasted that the Lord is good …

and we come to know that God’s goodness comes not as material things, not merely spiritual things disconnected from the material world, nor anything that we can control.

God’s goodness is that when we (every last one of us) deserves nothing less than condemnation, disconnection from creation and all in it, and removal from the timeline of life on earth, God instead redeems us,forgives us, and gives us new life … not just once, but continually through our sinful lives (which they continue to be as long as we breathe.)

Once we are given renewed life, then we come to know that God’s goodness is everything that we are able to give to others so that they can enjoy life, and life abundant.

Sunscreen or Sonscreen?

Wednesday, June9, 2021

The Golden Light of Christ

Shines in Every Darkness

Bringing Breath

and

Life Abundant

Isaiah 60:17

Instead of bronze I will bring gold, instead of iron I will bring silver; instead of wood, bronze, instead of stones, iron. I will appoint Peace as your overseer and Righteousness as your taskmaster.

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

Isaiah 60 begins:

Arise, shine; for your light has come,
   and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.
For darkness shall cover the earth,
   and thick darkness the peoples;
but the Lord will arise upon you,
   and his glory will appear over you.
Nations shall come to your light,
   and kings to the brightness of your dawn.

That is the context of the advancement that God will provide to the people, no longer merely stones, doch God will provide also iron. No longer merely iron, doch God will provide also silver. No longer merely wood, doch God will provide also bronze. No longer merely bronze, doch God will also provide gold.

The story continues through history as God provides more and more materials, until alloys, plastics, composites, rare metals, and oil abound in our lives.

We want more and more. By our wanting more and more, using and burning more and more oil for example, we will bring upon ourselves the darkness that will cover the earth.

Isaiah could not have foreseen what we would do, though Isaiah saw clearly what people are capable of. The story of God’s people was and is and always will be that the people are blessed by God with an abundance beyond our basic needs, we exploit the blessings, perverting it into all that is against God and God’s creation – and against the people, even God’s people, us! So we turn from God. We lose God’s blessings and end up in exile, ruled by others who are perverse and evil.

God does not leave us there. God’s love is steadfast, even if, and especially when, our love of God and God’s creation is so fickle. God comes to forgive us.

That is the message of Isaiah. The people are in exile, ruled and exploited and assimilated by other people of other power.

They hear Isaiah’s words.

The darkness is coming over all the earth, doch God will bring light to God’s people and all the people of the earth will search for, and come to bask in, that light. For it is the Light of life.

Again and again God’s Word sets God’s people free, as the Word of Life, Jesus the Christ did for those who believed in him in those early generations after his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. So also Jesus frees us that we may live abundantly.

We need no more than the very bare basics of life. Sometimes we live more abundantly with no extras, no luxuries, none of the usual comforts that so many see as ‘givens’ for life today in the western world. Without the extras we must focus on the necessities, and we soon learn that while the physical requirements to stay alive are significantly important (especially to the billions who do not have them), the requirement of life abundant is not more and more and more.

It is to give, to give, to give to God and God’s people.

It is to serve, to serve, to serve God and God’s people.

It is to love, to love, to love God and God’s people.

It is to forgive, to forgive, to forgive, and to forgive even more all of God’s people.

It is a true blessing from God when we are able to remain fully cognizant of that, even while we are so easily distracted struggling for the basics of life, or more fully distracted by the false promises of a ‘good life’ achieved by having more and more and more.

So we pray that we will give greater and greater attention to what we have heard of the old, old story of Jesus and his love, so that we do not drift away from being the ones who share that Good News with all people, bringing the Light of Life into the darkness that has descended upon so many people in so many places, in so many hearts consuming so many minds. We are to revive those hearts lost to darkness, those minds consumed by the dark.

The Light of Life is here. See it. Receive it. Share it. Bask it in. No sonscreen is needed.

Listen & Trust

Tuesday, June 7, 2021

Our Path

Is All in All

Embodied and Spirit

Psalm 143:8

Let me hear of your steadfast love in the morning, for in you I put my trust. Teach me the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul.

Romans 14:17

For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.

Words of Grace For Today

One would think from the bare Romans passage that Paul (and also much of Christendom since) would hold that God cares not for our physical life in creation, rather that our souls are God’s only concern. That errant belief in many and various ways presents itself through history, always to the detriment of those who hold it and those upon whom they burden it.

God created creation and called it good. God intended that we live in creation, that we live fully in creation. It is an error, and a dismissal of God’s good will to create us in creation to live here fully, if we hold that God would have us separate ourselves from creation. That is a futile effort anyway. We are creatures and wholly part of creation.

It is also an error, and a dismissal of God’s good will to create us in creation to live here fully, if we live as if the pleasures of being alive, limited to the body-pleasures, were all that God created us to live for and to live from. Food and drink, and sex of course, and a variety of other body-related pleasures are not the extent of being alive. To live so is to deny the best parts of being alive, of being able to reflect God’s love for other people and for all of creation. To live just for the body pleasures is to deny that God created us to be able to be inquisitive, to think, probe, learn, and organize seeming chaos into an understanding of how creation works so that we can live well in creation. It is also to deny that God created us in God’s image, able to be aware of more than the physical world. We are, in a word, able to be aware of spirits, in us, in creation, and God’s self: God the Holy Spirit is not a random ‘add-on’ to the Parent-Child persons of the one Godhead.

We are in a word so much more than just bodies, yet never to be disconnected from our bodies.

Even Paul, good Hebraic understanding that he had, understood that, and though he disclaimed any precise knowledge of life eternal after death, he asserted that we were resurrected to new life, bodies and all.

In the morning then, we not only enjoy a good cup of hot coffee with breakfast after Eucharist. We also enjoy the prayers and the Eucharist, reminding us that we are God’s, fully able to live out God’s Grace, not on our own, but by God’s blessings of Grace poured unending on us.

No matter the challenges we face each day, we put our trust in God, and look to God for guidance in the way we should live also this specific day. We give God for the provisions for our body in this world, and for God’s Spirit that awakens in us our spirit so that we can enjoy God’s righteousness and peace and joy.

As we find our way this day, we lift up our spirits to God, give God thanks for our food and drink, and look to God’s history with us and all of God’s people, God’s history of steadfast love. In this love we put our trust, for it is that which holds the whole of creation in all time in it’s own order, and our places in it.

Whatever the Challenges of Our Days …

Monday, May 31, 2021

God’s Deliverance

Awaits Us

Each Day

Isaiah 56:1

Thus says the Lord: Maintain justice, and do what is right, for soon my salvation will come, and my deliverance be revealed.

2 Corinthians 6:2

For he says, ‘At an acceptable time I have listened to you, and on a day of salvation I have helped you.’ See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!

Words of Grace For Today

We’ve waited, waited, and waited …

and now is the day of salvation.

Except it is not that our enemies are eliminated,

It is that we are redeemed and set free from our sins.

We still will struggle to maintain justice, to do what is right, and to be gracious with people who are not just, who do wrong, and who are everything except gracious.

What is new, and is new each time we recognize that the Kingdom of God is at hand, is that we know that God has and continually delivers us.

That is the basis for living in grace, living out grace for others, and finding hope, joy, and peace in each moment whether it’s a challenge or not we are in the middle of.