Choose – Page 5

The Devil’s Coming!

Monday, November 22, 2021

‘The Devil’s coming!’

says one loon to the other.

‘The Devil’s always coming.

Keep swimming. We have fish to catch.’

the other answers.

Nahum 2:1

A shatterer has come up against you. Guard the ramparts; watch the road; gird your loins; collect all your strength.

2 Corinthians 5:18

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.

Words of Grace For Today

How do we see the world? How do you see the world?

How one sees the world makes all the difference for life, whether one scrambles to possess, connive to have more, and manipulate others to help you get more, whether that is more power, more wealth, more possessions, more pleasure, more control, more of anything or even of people.

The Devil takes no pause in attacking in the daylight, with an incomparable force, with incomparable soldiers (people as pawns), and with shock and terror to strike fear into every heart.

The Devil also takes no pause in working in the shadows, in the hearts of people driven to have more, in the minds of even those who think they are doing the best they can do (and those who know they are doing the worst things, just because they can and it serves their wishes.)

However the Devil attacks, the only thing that is sure is that the Devil has always, does always, and will always attack at every possible moment.

So …

If you think you need to protect yourself from the Devil, and you work your lifelong trying to defeat the Devil’s ability to control, dominate, and use you to destroy and de-story others, well … well then you will always lose out to the Devil, even when you think that you have won. Your life will become (has long since already become) a shamble of self-deceit and arrogance, and you, long ago, have become a danger to everyone around you.

This is the cry to stations: A shatterer has come up against you. Guard the ramparts; watch the road; gird your loins; collect all your strength.

…

If on the other hand you know that you will always lose to the Devil and the Great Deceiver’s attacks on your body, mind and soul …

and you know that the only defence against the Devil is the one Jesus provides, the promise given at our baptisms, that God will walk with us and always protect us from the Devil … If we trust God alone to defend us from the Devil’s attacks …

and as the cry to battle stations is sounded again and again, we know that we are already working out God’s Grace in our lives, bringing good news to the oppressed, binding up the broken-hearted, proclaiming liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favour, and the day of vengeance of our God; comforting all who mourn.

We can do this even while those around attempt to defend themselves from the Devil’s attacks with all their hearts, minds and strength, because we trust the gifts and promise given to us in our baptisms and that all this is from God, who reconciled us to Godself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.

Instead of trying to defend ourselves, which is an effort doomed to fail, and effort that is needless, we live abundantly, living out Christ’ reconciliation for all people.

It’s not easy.

It’s not futile like fighting against the Devil.

It is the best life we can ever imagine.

Seeing With God’s Vision

Sunday, November 21, 2021

We may not see anything clearly

Doch

God Gives Us Vision to See

God’s Grace

For All

Proverbs 21:2

All deeds are right in the sight of the doer, but the Lord weighs the heart.

Romans 16:19

For while your obedience is known to all, so that I rejoice over you, I want you to be wise in what is good, and guileless in what is evil.

Words of Grace For Today

When we commit ourselves to an action, hopefully we know that it is a good and right thing to do. Sometimes we may be totally wrong, and our own blindness makes us think that we are right when we are actually fully wrong.

God knows.

God knows if we are doing something right or something very wrong.

When we do something that we know is terribly wrong and we do it anyway, then … well … then we serve the devil in all the devil’s horrendous and terrible ways.

Since we so often think that our terrible actions are as great as anything, we can hardly decide how to proceed in our lives doing only God’s will. In fact we never know how to evaluate what we plan to do, whether it is good or bad.

We can only confess our sins every day as a start, and then trust that God will both forgive us, and renew life in us so that we can answer God’s call, to be God’s grace in every day for everyone we meet.

We can pray that we will be wise, knowing how to be bearers of joy for ourselves and for other people, filled with gratitude for all that God provides for us, for all that is good that God brings out of us each day.

Self-help OR God’s Help

Sunday, November 14, 2021

God’s Help

Comes

Already

Each Morning, Noon, and Night

Announced by the Son’s Light.

Isaiah 58:1

Shout out, do not hold back! Lift up your voice like a trumpet! Announce to my people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins.

Galatians 4:9

Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.

Words of Grace For Today

Self help gurus and advice abound. Almost all include some kind of self affirmation to promote the ‘best one can be’ to emerge from one’s thoughts, words and deeds.

And it is all futile. Sometimes it produces great results in people who produce great things, BUT it’s all built on a lie and like a house of cards it is always one little whiff of reality, one puff of truth, away from collapsing under it’s own weight of falsehoods.

Some people say that building a life, a ‘successful’ life, is always about overcoming the underlying sense of being a fraud, of ‘learning to fill the shoes’ of those who have done your profession or ‘life’ before you. Some people actually do feel inadequate, or fraudulent, in their work even though they are actually well qualified. That’s a different challenge to overcome. When one builds one’s life on an ever increasing set of lies, one does not meet the qualifications at numerous steps, exams, and milestones towards qualification. Instead one cheats at each step, on many if not all exams, and is a complete fraud at the milestones, presenting oneself to be someone one has never qualified to start being. There are lost of people who do this. My ex never trained as more than a low level nurses’ aide, immigrated to Canada, applied, took the test and qualified (without further training) as a registered nurse. She continues to falsify her yearly continuing ed requirements. So many people know this and allow her to continue because there is a shortage of registered nurses and she works hard. It’s not that she’s not intelligent enough, its that she’s not capable of doing some of the things a registered nurse must be able to do.

How do so many people come to live such fraudulent lives? How do people learn that cheating pays off, that lies work better than real and hard work? How do so many people get away with it? They get away with it and learn this ‘shortcut’ to life from all those who have gone before them, also frauds. Like the STASI in East Germany, who kept files on almost everyone, filled with reports from so many sources, mostly from ordinary citizens, many who used reports to tell lies about their enemies and competitors … and anyone they were angry at. The STASI knew most of it were lies. They created their own false reports aplenty and ruined many, many good, honest people … just because they could.

Which is what Canada’s own RCMP and Justice system does because they can: from the false citizen reports solicited by the RCMP, to false reports created by RCMP, to lawyers who knowingly provide lies to the courts, and on to the many judges who make unsupported decisions and remove exonerating evidence from transcripts and knowingly allow people, even experts, to perjury themselves with impunity. All because ‘they can’.

But they cannot … they cannot just get away with it. Someone always knows, someone always speaks up, and someone always blows a puff of truth on their fraudulent ‘house of cards’ and it all comes tumbling down. Trouble is when it tumbles it takes out a lot of innocent people, even whole societies when the fraudulent systems is allowed to continue so long one cannot remember when or how it did not function fuelled by lies.

Again and again, scriptures calls God’s people to Shout out, do not hold back! Lift up your voice like a trumpet! Announce to my people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins.

So lift your voice, tell the truth, expose the lies, blow the one card out that you know is a complete fraud, and let the ‘house’ fall before it takes out the whole country.

It is not that anyone of us does not participate in at least some small way to this ‘house of cards’ and for that every single one of us needs to start each day with confession of our sins. Only having confessed our own sin to God, and breathing each moment only because God is gracious to us forgiving us and renewing life in us, are we then able to ‘announce to our people their rebellion and sin against God.

All will not be lost, no matter the challenges our enemies may work against us for telling the truth, for the power [of Christ] at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine … both saving us from our enemies and saving our enemies from their own lies and fraudulent lives.

Soon and very soon, come Lord Jesus and accomplish the work of bringing ordinary citizens, RCMP, lawyers and even judges to speak the truth in the face of so many lies.

Soon and very soon, come Lord Jesus and accomplish this work, so that our whole society does not collapse because of one puff of truth.

Soon and very soon, come Lord Jesus!

Dream, Dream Away

Saturday, November 13, 2021

Dream, Dream

While the Northern Lights Dance

in the Darkness.

God’s Promise for Our Future

Is So Much Greater a Dance

Spectacular!

Isaiah 45:15

Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Saviour.

Ephesians 3:20-21

Words of Grace For Today

Be careful what you pray for, and what you wish for;

God has ways of accomplishing more than we can imagine

and calling us to lives that we never imagined possible

working with, for, or because of people we never thought God would make us suffer.

People are full of shtako.

People are full of blessings.

Which will you be today?

Which do you wish or pray for today?

Remember God may fill your wish and a prayer with something more challenging than you can imagine possible!

So are we to simply stop wishing, praying, dreaming, and hoping!?!

Not really, eh!

Just get ready for the ride: living as God’s saints, deliverers and agents of Grace is the wildest ride possible!

Hang on tight to the only thing that is actually secure enough to stand the stresses coming our way: God’s promises, grace, and love.

…

‘Caught’ch’ya dreaming!’

Knowing Love … Being Love

Wednesday, November 10, 2021

One Last Canoe Ride

Before the Snow Blows In.

A Long Autumn,

Climate Change Again.

Jeremiah 18:14-15

Does the snow of Lebanon leave the crags of Sirion? Do the mountain waters run dry, the cold flowing streams? But my people have forgotten me, they burn offerings to a delusion; they have stumbled in their ways, in the ancient roads, and have gone into bypaths, not the highway.

John 15:9

As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.

Words of Grace For Today

The snow today, which has collected as glaciers for hundreds of years, now does melt away, faster and faster. We, with our carbon footprint so huge, have discombobulated nature’s way. The mountain waters do run dry where they have not in memory done so before.

Just as we have messed with nature’s balances, so we have imbalanced our own lives, living as slaves of delusions, voluntarily enslaving ourselves to wealth, power, status, and the illusion that we are better than others whom we ruin on our way through life.

There is another way to live.

As God loves Jesus, so Jesus loves us. When we humbly accept that there is nothing else so important in life as being loved by God, and returning that love (by sharing God’s love with all other people) then we live as we are created to live and we contribute to the balance of nature. We do not just lower our carbon footprint. We drastically change how we live and what we expect from life in order to drastically lower our carbon footprint, and we reach as many people as we can to inspire them to do the same.

Maybe some people think that all those who enslave themselves to wealth, power, status and delusions will respond to messages of the impending doom we are creating for ourselves. It rarely works, for their closed looped thought processes cannot calculate how to serve their chosen masters and respond to the impending doom for us all. Instead they ramp up their delusions to accumulate more wealth, power, status, and their favourite delusion in order to convince themselves that the impending doom will not impact them. It will, but deluded they believe it will not, just as Covidiots and Covid deniers and antivaxxers who lay dying of Covid still refuse to believe they have Covid or that they can be dying. They die a painful death, and an avoidable death, leaving so many Covidiots and Covid deniers and antivaxxers ready to carry on in their footsteps.

This is not a good life, and certainly not a good death.

Knowing God loves us, knowing that God knows us completely and blesses us by walking with us, and knowing the Holy Spirit makes us able to love others and walk with them through life’s challenges, rewards, and losses … knowing God’s love gives us hope. And hope gives us life renewed each morning.

For this we can give God endless thanks and praise … and we can be filled with joy, no matter what our enemies do to us. It does not get better.

I Hear You, I See You, I Know You

Monday, November 8, 2021

God Knows Every Blade of Grass

Whether Buried by Snow or Standing in the Chilly Air.

So Also God Knows Every Last Minutia of Us,

And …

Psalm 63:7

You have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy.

1 Corinthians 13:12

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.

Words of Grace For Today

It is a terrible thing to not be seen at all, to have others look right past you and never notice that you exist. It is a terrible thing to be reduced to a thing that can be manipulated and used, everything extracted from and then tossed out with the garbage (as has been done to me). It is a terrible thing to go asking for help from those certified and paid to help, and to be ignored, as if it were okay that one be left to die unnoticed (as the doctors, nurses, and staff have done to me with lies about what I supposedly did to justify their lies and abuse.) It is more horrendous to be the ones who abdicate their privilege and responsibility to provide help, to see and to work to heal. For by choosing to refuse help and care to those in need, they become instead of privileged, they become cursed by their own lies and hard hearts. While there is a cure for many diseases and ailments, and while God promises to heal us of every disease of our hearts, minds and strength; there is no cure for these kinds of lies and hard hearts, not without God intervening … but they refuse to hear God’s promises and they refuse to acknowledge their lies and hard hearts, and in so doing they refuse the only help that could save them, God’s Grace.

To be seen, to be helped, to help others, and to heal one another in body, mind and heart; this is what God created us for. This is a marvellous way to live; being saved and forgiven and healed by God so that we can be that same Grace for others.

It is a terrible thing to be silenced (as I have been), told you are someone you are not (as I have been) and told you have done things you did not do (as I have been). It is to be gaslit, and then silenced, to have your reality and voice stolen from you (as was done to me – by so many people including the courts – and most of the people who did this to me did not do it by accident or negligence or by error – they did it with eyes wide open intention). While it is horrendous for the person silenced, it is long term more devastating for the people who gaslight and silence others, for their reality is based on lies, a whole pack of lies, and they will never escape the horrors they create for themselves until they seek, find, and admit the truth of what they have done … and that is so unlikely to happen. Instead they create more and more lies, creating a bubble of completely falsehoods from the bottom, to the top, to all sides around them. They separate themselves from reality and reality is not for them, but against them in every way.

Those who are silenced know well what the Psalmist writes of ‘You have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy’ for God comes to help us, save us, and give us new life.

Those who gaslight and silence others cannot know God’s saving hand, can they! God reaches out to them, promises them forgiveness (as God does for all people), yet they refuse to acknowledge their lies and in refusing to recognize what they do they refuse God’s promises, help, forgiveness, and renewed life. What a waste of life!

To be heard: that is a precious thing. To be able to speak the truth and have people listen and respond: this is what God gave us eats, minds, and tongues for.

To be un-seen, and un-heard are terrible things.

To be seen and heard is precious and needed for life.

To be known … that is yet another infinite degree of precious, for it is beyond most people’s ability to know others well and even less so to know themselves. Paul describes this inability we share as ‘seeing dimly through a mirror’ and a very imperfect, misty mirror at that. But for another to know us, down to the last detail … and to love us in spite of it all … well that is something that only God can do.

And knowing that God promises to know us, all our past, present and future, the good, bad and the ugly about us, … and for God to promise to still forgive us, heal and renew us, and to send us out into the world to be that same forgiveness, healing, and renewing for others … well there is nothing so spectacular in all the universe and …

and this is the life God created us to live!

Obedience to Earn Healing? Doch!

Saturday, October 30, 2021

As Winter Cold Approaches

We Trust God’s Promises

To Heal Us Graciously

And Give Us New Life

With Christ’ Marvellous Touch

Exodus 15:26

He said, ‘If you will listen carefully to the voice of the Lord your God, and do what is right in his sight, and give heed to his commandments and keep all his statutes, I will not bring upon you any of the diseases that I brought upon the Egyptians; for I am the Lord who heals you.’

Luke 4:40

As the sun was setting, all those who had any who were sick with various kinds of diseases brought them to him; and he laid his hands on each of them and cured them.

Words of Grace For Today

If we are obedient to God, then God will not strike us with diseases, but will heal us. So reads the text from Exodus.

Any and all came with those who were sick with various diseases, and Jesus laid hands on them and cured them. So reads the Gospel from Luke.

God’s promises are always given as a statement of God’s stance towards humans, both righteous and waywardly sinful and evil humans. Jesus’ story is God’s communication to us of God’s stance towards us, which is in a word Grace. That is God saves us from our sin while we are yet sinful, not because or in response to what we have done right, but rather as a response to what we have done that is sinful! God not only saves us from our sins, but God cures us of our every illness, renews life in us, and then sends us back out into the world, that wretched place of evil and sin and corruption and greed and lies and destruction …. God sends us back out into the world, that wonderful place of God’s good creation, of beauty, Grace, love and hope. God sends us out to be, in the midst of all that evil, the one’s who embody God’s Grace, beauty, love, and hope for all people.

So why the conditional given in Exodus and so many other places in the Bible, both Old and New Testaments? Simply because Grace is such a difficult reality for arrogant humans to swallow that we turn it around, pervert it, into to something we can earn. That is the story we are accustom to living with and it is comfortable even in the extreme as we recognize that it is the ultimate illness and disease by which we will die, by which we are dying, by which we have died and yet still walk as shells of humans on earth.

It is also the religious story, so commonly used in so many traditions, by the ‘priests’ or those who pretend to lead others, in order to control their followers. It is exactly the means the Devil uses to corrupt and pervert us and live all around us.

Jesus comes to heal us and to live a story we can understand … so we can understand and trust (amidst all the sick evil around and in us) that:

Grace still abounds, as does beauty, love, and hope.

Thankfully these abound for all the children who have grown up by those so perverted they cannot see Grace at all, yet alone beauty, love or hope.

Thanks be to God.

What Measure?

Friday, October 29, 2021

How do we measure

all we see

and experience

and know?

What is the colour of the sunset?

It’s true measure is only Grace.

1 Chronicles 29:11

Yours, O Lord, are the greatness, the power, the glory, the victory, and the majesty; for all that is in the heavens and on the earth is yours; yours is the kingdom, O Lord, and you are exalted as head above all.

Hebrews 4:16

Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

Words of Grace For Today

How do we measure all that we measure?

How do we measure what angle the sun is at, so that the solar panels produce most efficiently through all the year (helping reduce our carbon footprint for everyone’s benefit, especially future generations), or so that we know when to wake up to be outside before dawn breaks to take photos of the magnificence of creation (to share and inspire others, who cannot see this beauty in person, to celebrate God’s blessings), or so that we know when to start our work for the most efficient use of our bodies’ capabilities since the warmth of the sun protects against injury and further degeneration of ‘this limited resource’ we each have?

How do we measure the wealth that we possess, or the wealth that others have, or the wealth that governments control (and waste through bungling and favouritism and fraud), or the wealth that is needed to deal with the challenges we personally, or collectively (in our local area, our country, or together in this whole wide world), face this day and can anticipate we will face in the coming days, weeks, months and decades (of climate change, breakdown of global supply lines, on-going pandemics)?

How do we measure the needs of our stomachs, our minds, our hearts, and our spirits?

We can choose many different ‘yard sticks’: our or other’s bank accounts as our/their worthiness of living and living in comfort; scientific facts and theories that inform us of creation and how it ‘works’; the needs (real and addiction created or imagined) we feel each day or each minute allowing them to dictate what we do to satisfy our ‘hungers’.

There is no measure that will give us life other than placing the universe or rather our perspective of it in order at the very beginning of each of our considerations:

As Martin Luther wrote in the Catechisms again and again: We are to love and fear God so that ….

It is in that fear and love as the beginning point that all other measures make sense of life being blessed for us and for all other people.

There will be no end of need, dire need, on our part; our stomachs, our minds, our hearts, and our spirits all have needs that need be met for life to continue well for us. There is no end of evil and sin that permeates the world, disrupting the meeting of those needs for us and for all people. There is no end of hungry stomachs, minds, hearts and spirits; desperately hunger grips more of us than not at any moment!

Knowing that God rules over all though our best efforts, our best measures, our best science, our best collaborations, and our greatest wealth will be demanded of us to meet the hunger that grips all people. None of that will do much good, though, if we try to go it alone, and working with others requires something of us that we can barely generate on our own: cooperation with those so different than us. Before we begin then we needs must therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

Grace, that is God’s attitude towards us and all people that has the power to overcome all challenges we will ever face. It can be our attitude on God’s behalf towards all people that we work with and for whom we work each day, ourselves, families and friends, our neighbours, strangers and aliens far from us, and even our enemies. God’s grace is sufficient for all people. And God equips us God-made saints to be those who spread it liberally everywhere, to all people.

As the sun continues it’s dance with the darkness and the moon do-si-do-s around the earth, all motion of bodies celestial and corporeal, all minds great and small, all hearts generous and restrained, all spirits of every colour … all motion of everything is a dance of Grace, a dance of Grace started by God at creation and continued each day as God creates new time and reality for us all.

Delusions Abound, Blessings Abound Even More!

Thursday, October 28, 2021

This is the true beauty

of Life lived

for Christ

In response to God’s gifts.

Jeremiah 3:23

Truly the hills are a delusion, the orgies on the mountains. Truly in the Lord our God is the salvation of Israel.

Matthew 15:35-36

Then ordering the crowd to sit down on the ground, he took the seven loaves and the fish; and after giving thanks he broke them and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds.

Words of Grace For Today

There are always tempting-terrible ways for humans to try to make sense of the world so perverted by our attempts to live without God. In the hills the people gather to fill their senses to overfilling. It is their attempt to try to fill the void in their lives that living separate from God leaves. There is nothing that can be filled by the void of living a lie, telling lies to get ahead, and destroying others with lies.

Where did we go so wrong with the gift of life that God gives us? Wherever it is, it is an oft trod path. So people do stupid things, like gathering for ‘orgies in the mountains’! Mountains are a great place to retreat to celebrate life, but orgies! Sacrificing one’s soul to pleasure in order to fill a void that cannot be filled with anything other than God’s Grace, makes a very bad ending to life! Celebrating God’s Grace on the mountains makes for a blessed life and a blessed end to life, when Jesus gathers us in to a home with many rooms, and room for all. Mountains are for celebrating life. The plains are where life is lived with all its challenges and dangers.

The crowds have followed Jesus to the plain to listen to him, to be healed by him. When it is time to eat, they are afraid, afraid to bring out the little food they have brought with them. The fear is real and reasonable. There are a lot of poor people, hungry people gathered in that crowd.

In the face of this rightful anxiety (for food is required for life to continue) Jesus exercises boundless generosity with a mere seven loaves and a few pieces of fish. Jesus’ little demonstration overcomes the crowd’s collective fears (now that is a miracle!) and as the seven loaves and fish pass from one person to the next each person brings out their little supper to eat and to pass the extras along for the others to take from or contribute to … and everyone eats their fill.

This is the meal that fills the void in our souls. The food fills the crowd’s stomachs, and their sharing transforms the meal into a great blessed celebration. This is the feast of eternity that God provides for us whenever we are souls are hungry. This is the feast that results when we share the great blessings God has given us with each other.

What will we, what will you choose this day and each day you breath: ‘Orgies in the hills’ [our own ways of trying to fill our hungry souls], OR feasting with Jesus [humbly accepting the Grace and life that Jesus offers us]: there are many choices we make each day and they lead us to a greater void in our lives, or to thanking God for all the blessings of life

…

by sharing it with those who have less than we have.

What a wondrous life God gives us each day.

Trouble, Trouble, Double Trouble

Monday, October 18, 2021

Looming Clouds Above,

Threatening Shadows Below.

Everywhere Trouble Awaits

For Minds Caught in Anxiety.

Cast Your Anxiety On Christ

and

See the Beauty!

Psalm 50:15

Call on me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.

1 Peter 5:7

Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you.

Words of Grace For Today

DO NOT WORRY!

Which makes one focus all the more on one’s worries.

Cast all your you anxiety on Jesus!

Now that’s a great collection of words that can foundationally change one’s life for the better. For we know that anxiety drives one into a survival, pre-rational thought option pattern of responding to the world (or at least to one’s imagined threats in the world.)

Those choices are not that helpful in most situations, and the likelihood that we imagine a threat that is not real at all or at least not as threatening as we perceive it is … well … it is so likely we can say it is the standard for most of life. This fear based reactions to life makes us vulnerable to those many evil people who use fear in others to control them, to move them to make decisions not at all in their best interests, but to the advantage of the one controlling them! It’s sop for despotic political leaders taking and maintaining power; after all democracy (or any form thereof that responds to the public needs and best interests) is not very efficient, or preferential to those who have or want to have position, power, and privilege.

So to be able to cast away our anxieties, not declaring them unreal (even if most are) sets us free from being controlled by fear. Then we are able to proceed through our days, using our God-given brains to think clearly and make choices that will benefit those around us.

The latest examples are all those people who read the fake reports about vaccine dangers and decided to not get vaccinated, or to wait. So they did not get vaccinated. Now they populate the ICU’s and hospitals and after that drain on our too-limited health resources, they live the rest of their lives with health compromises no one would choose, unless the other choice is death by Covid suffocation.

After we’ve cast all our anxiety on Jesus, then we are able to give God praise and thanks.

What a life God offers us, a life that responds to reality, instead of fabricated fears used to control us, destabilize our lives and the community life around us, and eventually the national security of our country and many other countries in the world.