Tracks – Page 8

Ich Wunsche Dir Zeit

Thursday, March 17, 2022

Zeit (Time)

As the Sun Sets Spreading Colours Across the Sky and Land

How Much More Will God Gift To Our Enemies?

How Much To Us?

Deuteronomy 8:2

Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments.

Matthew 11:29

Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

Words of Grace For Today

To experience that time when we find rest for our souls … rest for our souls, what a promise,

and a blessing so familiar

and so impossible to achieve for ourselves.

Time.

Time is precious.

Ich wunsche dir Zeit … (I wish you the time …)

and God provides us the time …

All kinds of time.

Time in the wilderness, so that God can humble us,

time filled with wonder, so that we can know God’s presence,

time filled with love, so that we fulfill God’s purpose for us.

So much of our time we walk with a different yoke taking our efforts and making something other than God’s will to be.

Patient, kind, and loving still, always Jesus calls us to take his yoke of being God’s unconditional love for others, for this is Jesus, gentle and humble of heart, guiding us to live

exactly as God created us to live,

with time,

all kinds of time,

time to remember,

time to celebrate,

and time to hope for those who are beyond hope.

From Siegfried Feitz aus dem Stephansdom in Wien

Ich wünsche dir Zeit

Elli Michler

Ich wünsche dir nicht alle möglichen Gaben.
Ich wünsche dir nur, was die meisten nicht haben:
Ich wünsche dir Zeit, dich zu freun und zu lachen,
und wenn du sie nützt, kannst du etwas draus machen.

Ich wünsche dir Zeit für dein Tun und dein Denken,
nicht nur für dich selbst, sondern auch zum Verschenken.
Ich wünsche dir Zeit – nicht zum Hasten und Rennen,
sondern die Zeit zum Zufriedenseinkönnen.

Ich wünsche dir Zeit – nicht nur so zum Vertreiben.
Ich wünsche, sie möge dir übrig bleiben
als Zeit für das Staunen und Zeit für Vertraun,
anstatt nach der Zeit auf der Uhr nur zu schaun.

Ich wünsche dir Zeit, nach den Sternen zu greifen,
und Zeit, um zu wachsen, das heißt, um zu reifen.
Ich wünsche dir Zeit, neu zu hoffen, zu lieben.
Es hat keinen Sinn, diese Zeit zu verschieben.

Ich wünsche dir Zeit, zu dir selber zu finden,
jeden Tag, jede Stunde als Glück zu empfinden.
Ich wünsche dir Zeit, auch um Schuld zu vergeben.
Ich wünsche dir: Zeit zu haben zum Leben!

Aus: Elli Michler – Dir zugedacht -Don Bosco Verlag, München, © DonBosco Medien

I Wish You The Time

I don’t wish you all kinds of gifts.
I only wish you what most don’t have:
I wish you time to be happy and to laugh,
and if you use it, you can make something of it.

I wish you time for your actions and your thoughts,
not only for yourself, but also as a gift.
I wish you time – not to rush and run,
but the time to be content.

I wish you time – not just to drive away.
I wish it may be left to you
as a time for wonder and a time for trust,
instead of just checking the time on the clock.

I wish you time to reach for the stars
and time to grow, that is, to mature.
I wish you time to hope again, to love.
There is no point in delaying this time.

I wish you time to find yourself
feel every day, every hour as happiness.
I wish you time to forgive guilt.
I wish you: to have time to live!

Trying to Contain God?

Wednesday, March 16, 2022

The Glory of God Is Everywhere

To Be Noticed,

No Finding Needed,

It Found Us

Ages Ago!

1 Chronicles 28:9

And you, my son Solomon, know the God of your father, and serve him with single mind and willing heart; for the Lord searches every mind, and understands every plan and thought. If you seek him, he will be found by you; but if you forsake him, he will abandon you for ever.

Hebrews 3:20-21

Now may the God of peace, who brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, make you complete in everything good so that you may do his will, working among us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory for ever and ever. Amen.

Words of Grace For Today

How do you tell the successor to the kingdom on earth that he has nothing at all to do with whether or not God blesses him and the kingdom?

How do you tell your successor that when you yourself are famous for taking charge and making the kingdom great?!?

How do you tell your successor to the kingdom you have built that he must surrender his will to God’s will, and trust that God will guide him, even in ways that he may not understand or willingly follow, especially when you are infamous for taking your own will into your own hands in order to build this kingdom that your son will inherit from you?

How can you tell your son to submit to God’s will when you are about to instruct your son to build God a temple, which, in the middle of your eager plans to start construction of a magnificent temple, God has told you that God does not need or want any kind of temple?

(David is and remains blessed by God, not because David earns it, but because God so chooses.)

David, faced with these challenges, does not instruct Solomon to submit to God’s will. Instead David reverts to a simple and common perversion of God’s will for us humans: If Solomon does right, then God will bless him. If Solomon does not do right then God will forsake him forever. Solomon must then find and follow God.

But that is not possible because God’s Kingdom does not work this way, though there are plenty of humans to tell you it does, and plenty of humans live that way on earth their entire lives.

God’s Kingdom rather begins with love, ends with love, and everything inbetween is God graciously forgiving, renewing and equipping us to be God’s loving grace for all other people. We earn nothing. We keep nothing. We give God everything. And we live lives abundant … in God’s Kingdom.

This is Jesus’ story for us: God comes and gives everything to save us, forgive us, renew life in us, and send us out into the world to follow Jesus’ example: surrendering everything we are and have so that God can work through us to bless other people.

And that is to live a blessed life, as one of the God-made saints.

No need to find God! God is right there with you! No need to earn God’s Grace, it’s long ago been enacted for you, for each day and each moment of your life.

Breathe

Sing

Dance

and Love Unconditionally.

A Voice That Cannot Be Taken From Us!

Monday, March 14, 2022

Even Those Clouds Know the Voice That Calls Us,

And Sends Us Out in Joy!

Isaiah 55:12

For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

John 10:3

The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.

Words of Grace For Today

When we give up trying to come in first in the ‘game’ of life, and we allow God to come in first, then we find life is full of celebrations, little ones each day as God wins (bringing grace to bear on our lives) and big celebrations less often as God wins again (bringing grace to bear on our enemies’ lives).

Whether we live or whether we die is not so important. What is important is how we live and who we follow.

When Jesus calls, we like even stupid sheep, know how to follow Jesus’ voice, for Jesus calls us by name and leads us out …

out into a world that cannot accept Jesus’ way, God’s forgiveness (for that requires admitting one needs forgiveness!), and the wonderful life we have as the Spirit guides us each year, day and moment, to be less for ourselves and more for God.

We do not celebrate alone, for the saints in light who have gone before us, are over joyed at our following their footsteps as they followed Christ. Even the hills and mountains, the clouds and the birds, the fish and the whales, the planets and stars, sing and rejoice with us, for we are a small part of the universe,

and the universe is all God’s.

Breath

Saturday, March 12, 2022

All Things Living

Breathe

As God Breathes in and through Them

Psalm 33:6

By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth.

Acts 17:25

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

Poor Delilah. A middle child and ignored by her parents before and after her mother drover her father to kill himself, she came to worse and worse experiences, though she could barely measure them.

Her step-father, honest and kind, was her refuge for a few short years before everything began to fall apart around her.

Manipulated by her older sister and mother, she was driven to report the sexual contact her mother had with her. But she lied. She told teachers, friends, and eventually police that it was her step-father. When the police pursued him, recruiting and creating more and more lies about her step-father she was lost, so lost. When her older sister and mother paid more and more attention to her, when the school councillors spent more and more time with her to help her through her abuse, and when the prosecutor against her step-father paid more and more attention to her, she finally felt she was someone, someone important enough to be noticed and cared about. It did not compute for her as she watched the courts send her loving step-father to jail for crimes he did not commit, based on the lies told by her mother and herself. She had trouble sleeping. The counsellor at school, and the therapist paid for by her mother spent more time with her. Her mother, with her millions, rewarded her with a brand new iPhone, and then a new MacBook, and new clothes and all the cosmetics she wanted.

Yet the breath she had spent to lie could not be taken back, could not be inhaled, could not ever be denied in her heart of hearts. And her breath became short, her mind frazzled out on her more often than not, and her body grew as she tried to fill the emptiness at her core with food.

Breath, once wasted on lies, especially lies that destroy other people, never is found again, until God forgives, one accepts the forgiveness and confesses one’s terrible sins.

God, the one who spoke a word to create the universe, whose breath created all living things, who needs nothing of service from humans … though God craves people to love, to love one another, and to love God … this God does not leave any of us without forgiveness, unconditional love and God’s full attention. God offered this to Delilah, as God offers this to each of us.

With a word, a word of truth, God renewed Delilah, and Delilah set the record straight, though too late for her step-father, who died in poverty, it set the record straight and exposed the police, the lawyers, and the courts who used her lies and so many other people’s lies to destroy people, almost as a past-time. For the amount of destruction Putin barely registers in comparision.

So God breathes … for each of us, for each of the Ukrainians and Russians, and all the others met by Putin’s unjust, cruel invasions, and for each person destroyed by a word that is a lie, breathed which spreads and corrupts the basis of life.

So God breathes … and so we live, as a gift, undeserved and abundantly blessed.

So we breathe so that others may live, making our words count.

Power, Manipulation, and Spans of Life

Friday, March 11, 2022

We Dominate Much, Fracking for Oil, Destroying Fresh Water

Never Can We Change the Light of Christ

That Gives People Life, Blessed Life

Ecclesiastes 8:8

No one has power over the wind to restrain the wind, or power over the day of death; there is no discharge from the battle, nor does wickedness deliver those who practise it.

Matthew 6:27

Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?

Words of Grace For Today

As a young girl, Garcia quickly learned (brilliant as she was) that her world was populated by those who got whatever they wanted, and those who had very little. More significantly she learned that she could manipulate almost anyone into giving her what she wanted. She just had to make them think they could get from her what they wanted.

Her parents worked long hours. Her father as a pastor, her mother as a nurse. They were seldom at home with their five children, so she would get her siblings to fight among themselves and she would somehow always walk away with what she wanted, a bigger portion of breakfast, the best part of the fish for supper, two oranges at Christmas time (a treat that was so rare they only had oranges five times while she was growing up.)

As a teenager, when her parents could not provide her money to buy the special things she knew she deserved, she sought out the men who could make almost anything happen for her. All she had to do was report what her parents and their friends said in quiet whispers about the national socialist government … and they had plenty to whisper about as friends and other church leaders were arrested and jailed … or simply disappeared. The church was the only place anyone dared protest against the government, yet the leaders were throttled and threatened without mercy.

When her brother ended up in the hospital with a broken arm, cracked ribs and a broken collar bone after a fight with her, she visited him often because she was fascinated with everything at the hospital. She decided she wanted to work there. She asked her ‘friends’, to whom she reported on her parents and siblings, and everyone else she could, what she had to do to become a doctor. They, knowing full well how bright she was, said it would not be a problem. They would make sure she would get into the program at the University after her Abitur.

True to God’s promises, though, wickedness deliver those who practise it and she graduated a half year after those ‘friends’ were no longer anyone, since their government had fallen into ashes. Everyone in that government or aiding it ran for cover, hiding from their past realities, the better to benefit from the new reality, a democratic government. No one was concerned for Garcia’s future. When she applied for medical school, they knew she had been an informer and they denied her application without hesitation. She applied to be a nurse. They denied her application. She asked what she could train for to be able to work in a hospital and she was offered training as a nurses aide. Later she would falsify her resume and claim to be a registered nurse, take an exam in her new country of opportunity, and with almost no actual training start working in a hospital in an operating room. Being brilliant had it’s benefits as did her ability to manipulate almost anyone she met.

No one has power over the wind to restrain the wind, or power over the day of death.

Jesus asks, ‘Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?’

Garcia had no idea about adding hours to her own life, but she knew from her experience that she could manipulate other people to subtracting every future hour from their lives. When she saw no advantage to her husband, except his two life insurance policies, she got what she wanted.

He was not the first, nor the last. Garcia lived a life of wealth and privilege and comfort … though she did not know it. She always wanted more, more, more. She worried and fretted about others who had more. She lived in terror that her life would fall apart as she had helped so many other’s lives fall apart, in her home country and in her adopted country.

God patiently waited for her to ‘wake up and smell the roses’ of God’s great blessings and grace. She came close a few times but walked right back into her well worn habits of destroying others to make her way in life.

When she died it was poetic justice; she gave up all her future hours during one of the increasingly debilitating terror episodes that haunted her.

No matter what power we think we have, the winds of God’s Holy Spirit, along with the ferocious winds of climate change, blow in ways we cannot predict. For all of us there is no discharge from the battle, nor does wickedness deliver those who practise it.

Today we pray for all the men who now spend time in jail for crimes they certainly did not come close to committing, as all the Garcia-s out there who manipulate reality, getting eager police to join in with false reports and judges who relish their power to cruelly ‘punish’ men for being good, honest, law abiding, and gracious people.

No one has power over the wind to restrain the wind, or power over the day of death.

God does have the power to give us, not everything we want, but everything we need in this life to live blessed to be a blessing for others.

Nothing Else

Thursday, March 10, 2022

The Dark Powers Of Deception and The Devil’s Minions

Cannot Conquer or Stop the Light Of Christ In Creation

and

In Us

Isaiah 51:16

I have put my words in your mouth, and hidden you in the shadow of my hand, stretching out the heavens and laying the foundations of the earth, and saying to Zion, ‘You are my people.’

Revelation 3:8

I know your works. Look, I have set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut. I know that you have but little power, and yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.

Words of Grace For Today

God creates all people. In us all God sees that we have little real power in creation (despite our great efforts to take dominion over it all, which lead to our own ruin.)

Yet in us God gives us God’s own words in our mouths, minds and hearts, hides us in the shadow of God’s own hand, and claims us as God’s own people.

We, with great hubris, have claimed that our powers are without limit, or nearly so; that we have wisdom like none other in the universe, unless we at times imagine a more ‘advanced’ alien species; that we protect ourselves from all dangers, until the danger takes us down and then we blame others or God or whatever we can imagine; and that we are special, better, more ‘advanced’ among all people since God claims us as God’s own people, until others use this argument for ethnic cleansing and genocide like the Nazis and so many others, so that we have to tone down our claims to be more worthwhile as a peculiar race, colour, creed, etc. of humans.

More destructive than anything else to life for ourselves and those around us, around the world, and for those generations to come is our claim that we are own ‘god’, godlets of dubious power, potential and knowledge (yet alone wisdom, grace, and love.)

All that we can actually claim is that we … well, we can claim next to nothing on our own. We receive forgiveness by God’s unconditional love, forgiveness and grace. We receive renewed life, though we deserve anything but. We receive a mission – not to conquer or dominate or power our way forward through time but – to be the vessels of God’s unconditional love, forgiveness and grace for other people. This is the open door that God sets before us, a door that no one can close, not even the Devil.

In this mission to which God sends us out into our daily lives, we remain hidden in the shadow of God’s hand, God’s loving hand, God’s hand of Grace, God’s unconditional loving hand.

So we live, by grace alone … and need nothing else. Our enemies are in for surprise after surprise at the power of God’s unconditional love, forgiveness and grace given to us.

So we live, by grace alone … and need nothing else.

Nothing else indeed.

The Gardener and Helpers

Saturday, March 5, 2022

Plants

and

People

Need

Water

and

Light

Living Water, and the Light of the World

Psalm 65:9

You visit the earth and water it, you greatly enrich it; the river of God is full of water; you provide the people with grain, for so you have prepared it.

Luke 8:1

Soon afterwards he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. The twelve were with him.

Words of Grace For Today

God visits the earth and waters it.

I see the gardener (not me for sure) with her water can in hand, sprinkling water on the vegetables and flowers planted and weeded and left out in the sun to grow, for when the rains are not regular, as they seldom are, the plants still need water to grow healthily to produce nutritious foods and splendid flowers.

There are many times in our lives when there is hardly enough rain, and we dry up, parched deep inside, thirsting for a good word to revive our souls.

There are many times in our lives when there is hardly enough light, and we shrivel up like whitened plants so promising just days before at the bounty of their produce, the beauty of their blossoms, and then the plants hang nearly dead, beaten by the lack of sun and blown by the winds.

We thirst for water, living water. We stumble, fall and shrivel up in the dark when we have no sunlight, no Son light, the light of the living world, of the living word for the world.

So Christ comes even today, borne up by the many successors to the 12 who accompanied Jesus as he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God.

Perhaps you are one of these, who is gifted, able to bring words that inspire many to walk wet (baptized) every day as those who receive the living water (even in times of the worst droughts) and who see the light that shines in every darkness.

No matter who you are, God calls for you also to be one who carries the Good News, to be a servant of God serving as of a great throng of angels who save others from dry droughts and hard darkness.

Do Not Leave Me Defenceless

Friday, March 4, 2022

It is one thing to have the time of age lean in on one, as death looms.

It is an entirely other thing to have other people work to advance the arrival of one’s death.

God save us from such people.

Psalm 141:8

My eyes are turned towards you, O God, my Lord; in you I seek refuge; do not leave me defenceless.

John 14:19

In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.

Words of Grace For Today

Lots of people are dying from ‘natural’ causes, some of the ‘natural’ causes are induced by other people, so the causes are not that natural, rather homicidal. Lots of other people are trying to kill even more people, forget about inducing natural causes, these efforts run the gamut from open violence to secretive schemes, and all of them are the work of the Devil and people cooperating with the Devil. Lots of people will die because others are trying to kill them. Lots of people die because of the Devil and his followers.

That’s the way with humans. It’s terrible. It’s worse if you are one of the people induced or openly or secretively sought to be killed by others, the Devil’s sacrifices in an attempt to supplant God’s rule over all creation and all beyond the universe we know or imagine.

So we, the people who others seek to kill … we pray: My eyes are turned towards you, O God, my Lord; in you I seek refuge; do not leave me defenceless.

We trust, no matter whether we live or whether we die, whether by natural or very not natural causes, we live and we die with Christ at our side.

As Jesus lives, even though Rome crucified him at the behest of his own religions leaders, so also we, no matter who seeks our deaths or how, we too shall live, and not just another day or week or year, but for all eternity.

The truths that guided our living will live into eternity.

The lies told by those that seek to kill us, will be remembered as lies for all of eternity.

We are not defenceless, though we die. For our God is our rock and our shield, a mighty fortress against all the works of the Devil.

So we sing: In Him there is no darkness at all, The night and the day are both alike.

And

Von guten Mächten wunderbar geborgen, erwarten wir getrost, was kommen mag.
Gott ist bei uns am Abend und am Morgen und ganz gewiß an jedem neuen Tag.

(Sheltered wonderfully by God’s loving powers We look forward confidently to what may come.
God is with us in the evening and in the morning and surely on every new day.)

Among the Lions

Thursday, March 3, 2022

Deeper Than the Extreme Snows of Winter

(which will be next year’s normal)

God’s Blessings Pour Down Over

Us God-Made Saints

and even over God’s and our enemies alike.

God’s Gift to Us is That We Notice

and Share Blessings with All.

Psalm 57:4

I lie down among lions that greedily devour human prey; their teeth are spears and arrows, their tongues sharp swords.

Acts 14:17

God has not left Godself without a witness in doing good—giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, and filling you with food and your hearts with joy.

Words of Grace For Today

There are signs everywhere, signs of God’s good blessings pouring over us,

if we only open our eyes and

ears and

hearts

to see, hear and know.

Even as our enemies drive us into the wilderness where we must sleep among all that is there and we must lie down among lions that greedily devour human prey; their teeth are spears and arrows, their tongues sharp swords …

even then the goodness of God surrounds us, for there are many witnesses of God’s people, accompanied by God, who have been fed to the lions, and

…

the lions became docile, uninterested in devouring God along with God’s people.

Such works of God’s great works are not just the stories of our ancestors,

these stories are our stories, for

again and again God has delivered us from our enemies so

that we have lived yet another day, and

another week, and

another year,

…

while God’s blessings pour down over us.

Thanks be to God.

Receiving Generous Gifts

Tuesday, March 01, 2022

Creation Gives God Thanks for Us,

Even If We Forget

To Thank God

for Everything

Psalm 40:17

As for me, I am poor and needy, but the Lord takes thought for me. You are my help and my deliverer; do not delay, O my God.

Acts 2:46-47

Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

Words of Grace For Today

That the Lord takes thought of any of us is … well it is no less than incomprehensible. More so when we consider all that God provides to us. These are not what we call ‘success’ or ‘accomplishments’ in life. The wonders that God does for us are simple: God gives us life, breath, minds that think, and hearts that can love (or hate if we choose to waste life.)

There is not a single one of us humans who can do anything before we are born to deserve such gifts. Nor can we do anything to deserve these gifts after we are born.

…

And then we screw up the ‘paradise of Eden’ with our selfish greed, deceptions, and lusts so badly that we put life on the skids for ourselves and so many people around us.

What is God to do with us then?

We, for sure, each in our own way, perhaps not so reverently or faithfully, pray that God will come and save us from ourselves. We pray do not delay, for we understand the accumulative destructiveness of our sins for those around us and for ourselves … and we know we cannot survive our own mess indefinitely.

Yet …

…

Yet …

God forgives us, gives us renewed life, breath, minds that can think and hearts that can love unconditionally again.

What are we to do other than eat the bread God provides for us with glad and generous hearts?

Wonders of wonders, God is with us, yet again … and then we sin and screw it all up and …

God forgives us, gives us renewed life, breath, minds that can think and hearts that can love unconditionally again.

And we screw it up again and …

God always walks with us and after each sin God forgives us, gives us renewed life, breath, minds that can think and hearts that can love unconditionally again.