Covid19 – Page 14

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – December 6

Sunday, December 6, 2020

Second Sunday of Advent

Saint Nicholas Day, Remembering the Bringer of Gifts

Like Tracks in the Snow Disappearing Toward the Light,

The Signs and Wonders of God’s Work for Us All

Are All Around Us.

Daniel 4:2

The signs and wonders that the Most High God has worked for me I am pleased to recount.

1 John 1:2

This life [the word of life that Jesus brings to us] was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us.

Words of Grace For Today

Signs and wonders … the word of life revealed, eternal life even today for us.

These are everywhere to be encountered, seen, heard, touched, inwardly experienced.

The sun rises in the cold morning, light spreading and pushing back the darkness until a clear burst of light is visible through the trees near the horizon. The Light of the world is here, as a blessed sign that God is with us.

The periodic drone of fisher’s ice augers rumbles like bumble bees across the snow covered lake and through the trees. There are fish in this lake, stocked as it is, which provide food for many, except in the shoulder seasons when the ice forms or melts and is not safe enough to support a fisher. When the water is open boats bring fishers to all corners and bays of this lake. Then the ice is solid, on foot, by quad and side-by-side and snowmobile, or by truck, fishers spread across the lake to harvest for their families sustenance, signs of God’s blessings unceasingly flowing for us all.

After more than seven years with various people seeking my destruction, death and/or exile based on lies and greed, and a mental illness perverted view of life, fuelled by misandry and hate-based, perverted faith, I wake each morning, here, alive, accepting my life as blessed, though I am financially so far in debt I will likely never emerge, though my reputation among corrupt people of power will likely never be restored, though I work desperately hard to survive the challenges of living rough: cold requires lots of work but it is constant and properly conquered with care; moisture, heat, and bugs are the most difficult, fickle, and most dangerous. Each day I still breath is a gift from God, a sign of the wonders God works sustaining my life though it is under constant attack by so many, and so powerful.

This is eternal life, for today. (Yes, eternal life has already begun. We do not wait until after death!) For the Word of life, Jesus Christ, has come, is here, and will return.

Advent, these precious few days of blue hope, suspending us in waiting, holding us alert in watching, guiding us with Light into the darkness of winter … Advent is filled with signs and wonders of God working for us. We only need take a breath, pause, reflect, … and notice all that God does for us each day.

This day there are millions of people who through terrible injustice and cruelty do not have clean air, clean water, nourishing food, adequate clothing, sufficient shelter. Many, many people will die this day across the face of the earth … and it need not be so.

So many more millions have those basics of life, but lack the other two that keep us give us resilience to face the challenges and evil that would rob us of our hearts, minds and strength: meaningful labour and love (both being able to love others and to be loved by others).

Facing Covid 19 and our feeble efforts to slow it’s progress through the populations, if we do not have an ever-renewing reserve of resilience, we can lose our hearts, minds and strength to face each day. We can instead forego all precautions and put others at great risk, we can gather as if we thought that would help (participating in a super-spreader event, killing and maiming many downstream), or we can join the insane protests with no masks or physical distance (also participating in a super-spreader event, killing and maiming many downstream).

What will we do this day, if seemingly small, to reach out with the Word of life, to all? What will we do reaching out to others, for therein we build our own resilience?

The Word of Life works signs and wonders for us all.

Stay alert, lest we do not notice, or hear, or see Christ in our midst, calling us to be Christ’s signs and wonders for us all.

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – December 5

Saturday, December 5, 2020

Dark Advent

Blue Hope

Psalm 68:6-7

God gives the desolate a home to live in; he leads out the prisoners to prosperity, but the rebellious live in a parched land. O God, when you went out before your people, when you marched through the wilderness, Selah

Mark 1:32-34

That evening, at sunset, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. And the whole city was gathered around the door. And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.

Words of Grace For Today

Stories contain our identity. We ignore and lose our ancestors’ stories at our own peril, for then we not only find ourselves foreigners in our own land, we separate ourselves from reality: we think and behave as if we could separate ourselves from God.

… O God, when you went out before your people, when you marched through the wilderness, Selah.

These simple words remind us of God’s rescue of God’s people, out of slavery in Egypt, through the wilderness, into the Promised Land.

… the whole city was gathered around the door. [Jesus] cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons….

These simple words remind us of Jesus’ ministry on earth, teaching, healing illnesses, casting out demons, and of the people’s flocking to listen to and be healed by Jesus.

Our God has claimed us as people, rescued us from slavery and brought us, as God had promised, into a land flowing with milk and honey. God’s Son Jesus came, taught and healed us, and cast out demons.

We understand disease, and healing. Casting out demons is not part of our worldview today, not part of our science based ordering of chaos into an understandable, ordered view of the world that can be manipulated with technology to give us ‘control’ and ‘comforts’ and ‘advancements’. Nothing is wrong with a scientific view of the universe. On the contrary science is possible (and was possible as the historical record shows) only because we believe God created an order to the universe. Science is not able to encompass all of the universe. ‘Casting out demons’ is an example. It could be clearly exemplified by what possesses Donald Trump, who with a constant flow of lies tries, unfortunately successfully in the minds of some likewise possessed people, to create a fiction about life that is not based at all in reality, just so that he can ‘succeed’.

That kind of possession is all too common: lie, lie, and lie again until one believes one’s own lies, others believe your lies, and they add more lies to confirm the resulting fiction as if it were based in any reality.

Remembering the stories of our ancestors we need not disconnect ourselves from reality. We need not hide in a bubble of like-thinking, skewed-thinking people. We can encounter all ideas and thoughts, evaluate all with our ancestors’ stories as a guide to what is real and what is fantasy or diseased or ‘demon’. Our present and future are anchored in the real past: this is God’s creation and we are God’s creatures, God’s people.

Engaging with all people, we can remain true to God’s wish for us: that we love all people unconditionally. Surrounded by, restricted by, and endangered by everything Covid 19 brings upon us, we need not panic, go bananas, or rebel with protests demanding that it is all a hoax, no matter how much we wish it were. Anchored in our ancestors’ stories of their journeys with God at their side, we can trust that God is at our side. Our hearts need not be troubled. We know that God gives the desolate a home to live in; God leads out the prisoners to prosperity, but the rebellious live in a parched land.

God gives us a calm assurance that God’s blessing still flow unceasingly over us.

With the Psalmist we can sigh with the precious blue hope of Advent: Selah!

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – December 4

Friday, December 4, 2020

The morning moon

about to set.

As we, quite late in the winter,

prepare for another day

of work to survive,

and rest to celebrate God’s endless blessings.

Psalm 127:2

It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives sleep to his beloved.

Matthew 6:8

Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

Words of Grace For Today

From our ancestors’ instincts to rise up early and go late to rest in order to be ready to catch the prey and ensure one did not become prey, we still have an instinctual drive to ‘give it our all’ and then some, to ensure our survival.

Examples abound of humans who have worked and worked and worked themselves ‘to the bone’ at the cost of any real life. The majority of humans who have ever lived were oppressed and enslaved in poverty by the rich and the powerful; they have ‘given their all’ out of necessity to provide the mere basics of life for those for whom they are responsible.

Many others through history and especially today, as the gap between rich and poor grows ever greater, and still the ‘middle class’ is larger than ever in all of history, throw themselves into perpetual work at the expense of living life, all in order to have just one more comfort, one more luxury, to possess one more thing, to pay for just one more purchase that fails to fulfill it’s promise to give life meaning.

A third category of people are those who are rich, and give everything they are and have in order to protect and grow their wealth, as if it could ever provide them life or any real security.

This second and third group are those to whom this passage is addressed.

God did not create us to continually work. God created us to work hard, and then to rest. God created us to wake each day and work hard, but then to relax and enjoy the company of other people, and to sleep content with the blessings provided to us. God created us to work hard for six days, and to rest on the seventh.

All the sciences about humans confirm sleep, companionship, and regular rest are requirements for a human to maintain long-term health. It is no surprise at all that religious wisdom is confirmed by scientific research.

The first group is addressed less by this passage than by God’s repeated promises to bring judgment and justice to earth, for all people, living and dead. To them, to us, to all people, Matthew addresses Jesus’ words about how to pray, not heaping up empty phrases, but asking for what one needs. God listens. God walks with us. God promises justice for all in the end. And God knows already what we each need … and God ensures we receive it. We need God’s blessings, no matter our circumstance. The danger to life is not the lack of necessities or the inevitable arrival of death. The real danger to live is the corruption of our hearts, minds and strength by the work of the Devil.

Pray constantly that God would deliver us from this, and that God would bless the czar (all who exercise corrupt power) and keep him from us, very far.

As we wait, prepare, and remain alert, we pray with thanks for all God gives us, every blessing. We can work hard and rest easy. Covid 19 restrictions, infections, long-haul symptoms, and even death cannot separate us from God’s unconditional love, nor our ability to exercise that unconditional love for all whom God created.

Facing Covic 19: Daily Words of Grace – December 3

Thursday, December 3, 2020

We focus on what we do not have,

which makes us think we need to strive to be better, more, something else.

God focuses us on what we have

to share.

Deuteronomy 16:17

All shall give as they are able, according to the blessing of the Lord your God that he has given you.

2 Corinthians 8:12

For if the eagerness is there, the gift is acceptable according to what one has – not according to what one does not have.

Words of Grace For Today

The world, with simplistic lessons, teaches us that IF we want to survive or IF we want to maintain our standard of living or IF we want to protect our riches, power or fame … or IF we want in any way to guarantee our own lives to be as we want them,

THEN we must take care of ourselves, hang on to whatever we have or can get by any means, and protect ourselves from others who will always try to get (by whatever means) from us what we have.

This is not how God created us to live. It is not how humans survive. It is not how civilizations provide protection from barbarism. This is how the devil works to steal life from us. This is what kills humans. This is how the thin veneer of civilized society is shredded by barbarism from within.

God created us in God’s likeness, not just our faces, or bodies, or anything else external about us. God created us like God, in that we live well when we graciously and generously share all we have with everyone we can.

Giving, not taking, is how we live abundantly. It is how we live as Christ’s voice, hands, and feet on this earth. It is how we live blessed.

Eventually 100% of us humans die. It’s not a matter of if, but of when, and how. Death is not the goal of life, nor (since God promises us eternal life through Jesus Christ’ record in place of ours on our judgment day) is it the end or terminus of life.

God gives us our lives, so that we can imitate Christ: giving to all, all we have to give; seeking justice for all, until we have nothing more with which to seek; loving unconditionally all, until we have nothing left, no breathe of life, with which to love.

Whether giving leaves us more vulnerable to death, whether pressing for justice leaves us more vulnerable to death, whether forgiving our enemies and loving everyone unconditionally leaves us more vulnerable to death – all this is simply not significant, ultimately. Our actions of giving, seeking justice, and loving unconditionally are exactly what God has done for us, given us, blessed us with.

Giving is not an exercise in trying to not hit a tree as we ski down the hills of life. Focusing on the trees we are surely going to crash into one or more. Giving is not an exercise measured by what we cannot give or do not want to give up. Giving is an exercise measured by what God has given us … until we have given away every last drop of life, breathe, hope, and love that God has given us.

While we may think, having learned the simplistic lessons of life from the world around us, that it is foolish to give everything away, to seek true justice at all costs, and to love (especially our enemies) unconditionally though it robs us of hope, this is simply, truthfully all wrong. God did not create humans to live in a zero-summed life. Much of creation around us appears to be zero-summed, that is there is a limit to the resources available and we must strive to get our portion … or more!

Doch, God created humans to live as the loaf of bread, and jar of oil, which Elijah shared with the widow and her son: they never diminished but were continually restored to fullness, in order to provide sustenance for all three people, saving their lives through the famine.

God’s blessing pour over us all our lives, overfilling us and everything around us … if we would only see God’s blessings.

Our measure of giving then is not to miss the trees, and try (in vain) to ensure our survival. Our measure of giving is God’s prodigal blessings that never end.

God walks with us, even when we suffer greatly, no matter what we do not have, no matter what injustices are aimed at us, no matter what hate is focused on us.

Giving from a never failing supply of goodness, love and blessings is a great way to live.

Advent is our time to take time to reflect on God’s blessings and promises that we have forgotten or become blind to. Wake up, Be alert. Wait for Christ. Rest assured. Do not be afraid or troubled. Christ is already here, and will come again. Christmas celebrations can wait, until Christmas. We have more than enough to do, to give, to seek, to love, while we wait.

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – December 2

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

Pyramid Mountain Before Sunrise

God’s promise of a day of renewal

each day,

every day.

Psalm 11:1

In the Lord I take refuge; how can you say to me, ‘Flee like a bird to the mountains.’

John 14:27

Jesus spoke: Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.

Words of Grace For Today

When I am most drained, I head to the mountains. I do not flee. I head there to hike, to camp, to ski, to take photos, to write. The mountains are a place of renewal.

Mountains have long since also been a place where we humans have fled from danger to our lives, for in the mountains we are harder to find, though life there is much more challenging. The world can easily give us more than we can take, where even the renewal of the mountains or the refuge of the mountains is not enough.

I do not give to you as the world gives.

The world, filled with sinful people, gives in lots of horrendous ways.

The world gives Covid 19, generously, killing and maiming millions.

The world gives false security with power, fame, and money, but all of that can evaporate in an instant and become more of a burden than a security for the future or a freedom for one’s todays.

The world gives promises of equality, justice, and opportunity; and then oppresses the masses, knowingly judges and falsely convicts, incarcerates and ruins honest people based on falsehoods and cruelty … The world promises opportunity but offers only opportunity to be enslaved so others can exercise corrupt power.

The world provides the blessings God created it to contain: air, water, food and opportunity to produce and utilize clothing and shelter; but the people in the world ensure they have their own excessive ‘comforts’ and luxuries at the expense of others being robbed of clean air, clean water, nourishing food, adequate clothing and sufficient shelter.

The world invites the masses to work to make a living possible, and then enslaves the masses at a standard of living that is impossible to call humane.

The world comes at us when we speak out and encourage change, equity, and justice. The world comes at us, condemns us for threatening the powerful people’s privileges in order to bring justice to the masses. The world comes at us to kill us with lies and Gaslighting or drive us into exile.

This is nothing new. It’s been humanity’s inhumane manner of executing injustice from the beginning of time.

God gives in many and various ways, all of which are marvellous.

God created and creates a universe that provides enough to support each and every person’s needs to live, and to live abundantly.

God gives us free choice to love, along with the other option, to choose evil.

God frees us from our inevitable choices that are evil, forgiving us, redeeming us, and renewing us so that we can live free from the sins of our past, present and future.

God gives us abundant life, and inspires, equips and calls us to give life abundant to all those around us.

God promises to walk with us no matter what we encounter in life. God’s Word is absolutely trustworthy. God keeps promises, always.

God sends Jesus, God’s own son, to live as an example of how to live life fully, abundantly; sacrificing oneself to provide life to others, forgiving even our enemies, and fearing and loving God, loving oneself and all other people, especially one’s enemies.

Jesus gives us peace, a peace that no one and nothing can take from us.

Therefore we have no cause to be afraid and our hearts need not be troubled … by any of the chaos that churns the world around us.

We get to be the people at peace, sharing life and peace – graciously – with all.

What a life.

It is the life of living renewed, each day, as if we were in the mountains.

It is a life living as refugees, in God’s arms, protected from all the threats of this world.

What a life!

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – December 1

Tuesday, December 1, 2020

Living as Guests

in God’s good Creation,

We are all aliens,

We are all inheritors of God’s blessings.

Genesis 26:3

Reside in this land as an alien, and I will be with you, and will bless you; for to you and to your descendants I will give all these lands, and I will fulfill the oath that I swore to your father Abraham.

1 Peter 1:17

If you invoke as Father the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds, live in reverent fear during the time of your exile.

Words of Grace For Today

Are we aliens, guests on earth, in exile?

So many people on earth today are not able to live in their home land. So many people are exiled by violence or political differences with those that rule with cruelty at home.

They are aliens, in exile, yet we recognize they belong on earth, or at least we sort of recognize them as residents of earth.

In all our lives there are times, like Advent, that are not times for themselves, but times of waiting or of transition, when we anticipate with great expectations that things will be different, better. We anticipate that we will eventually no longer just be aliens, but that this will be our land, our home land, our place and time that God promises us and all people will recognize that it is ours, by God’s Grace alone.

Covid 19 is in a second wave, much worse than the first, still ineptly dealt with by so many governments, like at home in Alberta where the government, ideologically, holds that the economy is more important than the individual lives of the residents in this province. Restrictions are finally set in place weeks too late and multitudes of degrees too slack. Trying to protect the economy the government sacrifices health care for almost everyone, making room for Covid cases in the hospitals. The government sacrifices lives of people who die from the infection. The government sacrifices the long term health of so many people who suffer debilitating organ damage though they survive the virus’s first attack.

The government does this because it’s political base is not in the cities, which are harder hit than the rural areas where it’s support is strongest.

The government does this because it’s political base is the business owners, not the workers. The government does this because it does not value essential workers like doctors and health care workers (who they have fought against to drastically cut their compensation over the last few years.) The government does this because it supports big business and oil industry. The small people, the scientific evidence, the best real path forward is not important. Instead of the best path forward, science and prevention and providing health care for everyone does not matter. What matters is the political moves that can be made in the confusion of Covid 19. Well, we got what the majority chose: a government that is unto itself and lies to maintain it’s power. We’ve got what we deserve.

Thankfully God does not leave it there.

God walks with us, in a foreign land, and in our home land. We are God’s people, all of us God’s creatures.

We may be in exile at home with a government that does not have our interests, yet alone survival, in mind. God will soon enough deliver us. We can wait, patiently, and prepare ourselves to receive God’s Son, as he was born millennia ago, and as he comes each day, and to await for his return.

We can wait to celebrate Christmas until Christmas proper. We can take to heart Advent as the time of waiting in wonder that it is.

Blue with hope, that’s the children of God …

for now, for these four weeks.

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – November 30

Monday, November 30, 2020

As the sun rises

some trees stand between us and the light.

What will darken our view of God’s light?

Zechariah 2:12

The Lord will inherit Judah as his portion in the holy land, and will again choose Jerusalem.

Romans 8:33

Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies.

Words of Grace For Today

Our Apostle’s Confession of Faith reads as the word concluding the second article about our faith in Jesus, Son of God, “from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.”

It is common to imagine God’s judgment as a terrible day. Jesus, sitting at God’s right hand, judging all people, living and dead, may seem a bit less daunting to those who have received faith in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God. For Jesus came to preach and teach, comfort and heal, and bring truth and salvation to all who believe in him.

That judgment may seem a long way off, sometime in the distant future, in some distant millennium when the earth comes to an end, perhaps when the sun collapses into itself and the explodes into a supernova consuming everything in the solar system.

As we enter Advent, with integrity as faithful Christians, waiting, preparing ourselves, waiting, yearning (as opposed to starting the Christmas celebrations already – early), we take time in this reflective, sombre, anticipatory and hope-filled time to notice how God already walks with us each day, how Jesus is present in all creation, and how the Holy Spirit guides and empowers us to be God’s children each day in new and surprising ways.

We notice also that there is nothing we can do to make ourselves right before God. God justifies us, and God alone. There is also no human (or devil’s being) who can bring a valid charge against us, God’s chosen, elect, forgiven, justified, and sanctified children.

Oh, the world and many people in it will try, driven by the Devil’s evil ways, to charge God’s people. Corrupt courts will even try, convict and imprison innocent people, all in an attempt to exercise their corruption of power, as if it were absolute or final.

These corrupt people can only place themselves under God’s judgment, even in these days. They can do all sorts of damage to our lives on this earth, harm greatly a great number of people, especially the most vulnerable including children, and make many people’s lives miserable in many ways. They can attack the integrity of society, even the integrity of God’s earth. They cannot actually harm us before God. They cannot separate us from God’s love and blessings. They cannot do anything that God does not allow them to do, all in order that we humans are capable of loving one another.

(For love requires that it is chosen by the one who loves, which requires free choice. Therefore there must be something besides love that we can choose, which requires in turn that hate, sin and all sorts of evil be on the menu for us to choose from … and to suffer as we and others choose other than to love as God loves us, unconditionally.)

We can, in these blue days of Advent, know that God walks with us, and is for us in all ways; God justifies us! Nothing can separate us from God’s love; not Covid 19, injustice of any kind, or lack of the necessities of life.

Because God justifies us, we can be the people who reach out to administer to those in need, to heal the sick, and to share the power of the Holy Spirit with all people.

That power is not the power of force or might; it is as Jesus lived for us, the power of self-sacrificing love.

That brings us to each day, no matter how dark or bleak, sure that our future is in God’s gracious hands, driven to be God’s Grace for all we encounter.

What a wondrous future!

What a life!

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – November 29

Sunday, November 29, 2020

Golden Colours

A small band of the rainbow of God’s Blessings

for All

Psalm 115:14

May the Lord give you increase, both you and your children.

Luke 1:50

His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.

Words of Grace For Today

The future that we anticipate

Colours our todays.

Trusting

that God may choose to give us and our descendants increase, and that God is merciful to we who fear God, not only today, but from generation to generation

gives us a future of greater and greater blessings and mercy from God’s hand,

which colours our todays

with all the colours of the rainbow and more!

Such is the beauty of life as God’s children.

Breathe in the blessings. Share the blessings, which never cease to overflow our lives.

Face Covid 19 with courage, extreme caution, and compassion for all other people.

God is with us and our descendants from all our yesterdays to all our tomorrows in all our todays.

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – November 28

Saturday, November 28, 2020

Does Our World Seem Off Kilter?

Especially Then

God Walks with Us

and Comforts Us

with Truth

Isaiah 66:13

As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.

John 14:18-19

‘I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. 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

When we are born, we are helpless infants. We require that someone provide care for us. A mother or replacement nursemaid can nurse us and give us nourishment. Today we have formula that can replace a mother’s milk, or some of it. Immunity cannot be received from formula.

A mother breast feeding a child is called nursing the child, or comforting the child. As demanding as breast feeding at all hours is, as a child grows fathers and mothers spend a good portion of their days providing for the child, well into adolescence so that they survive. Much of this care is comforting a child and good fathers are sometimes better at this than mothers, even good mothers. Fathers, even poor fathers are better at providing comfort than mothers who are a narcissists or a personality disordered persons.

Comfort is good, Fathers can be good, Mothers can be good. And all but the mentally ill can, but do not necessarily, provide comfort.

In our baptisms God adopts us as children. Jesus adopted the disciples as they joined his motley crew that travelled, taught, and healed the crowds of people. When Jesus is about to leave them, after being resurrected from the dead, he promises that he is not abandoning them.

More than enough people are totally messed up due to abandonment issues. Jesus does not do this to the disciples, nor to us. Jesus must leave, but he lives and he lives in and among us, God’s children. Jesus also promises to return.

We still wait, expectantly, for his return.

Advent is a special time when we should practice waiting for the Christ to return as we celebrate his upcoming birth. We jump right into pre-celebrating Christ’s birth and the hoopla of Christmas, all so that we can avoid remembering we still wait for Jesus to return!

We are an impatient people. We suffer greatly because of it. We forego the healing practice of waiting, waiting, and more waiting … with grateful hearts. We wait for Jesus to return, for Christmas to come. We do not claim we ‘possess’ Jesus; like ‘I’ve got Jesus in my heart’ or anywhere else. Jesus has got us, thank God; or there would be no way through even a day of the evil that people make for each other on earth.

Waiting, we remember how Jesus is with us, how Jesus has always got us, and has always gotten us.

That’s the comfort of God. The comfort of God is that God-Jesus-Holy Spirit is with us always, guiding, teaching, leading, healing us.

Parents can comfort us so much, even long after we’ve grown to be adults. As any parent of adult children can tell you, the parenting job does not get easier with time as the children age, rather it gets more complicated, more significant, and it requires wisdom.

Thankfully, with the fear and love of God as our beginning each day, we receive wisdom, slowly and sometimes we think insufficiently for the challenges. Yet God uses us to deliver God’s comfort, to our children, and to all of God’s children.

Comfort, comfort, comfort … we share as we have received: God is with us, Jesus has not abandoned us. Together we CAN wait, also for Christmas.

Perhaps the separation and challenges Covid 19 forces on us will teach us to wait, with patience … and to provide each other the comfort that surpasses all other: God’s comfort for God’s children.

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – November 27

Friday, November 27, 2020

Dead Tree Stick Out

Life Always Come to an End

For Each and All of Us

And if We Think We Can Survive on Our Own

… that’s a fool’s thing

Psalm 38:10

My heart throbs, my strength fails me; as for the light of my eyes—it also has gone from me.

James 1:3

You know that the testing of your faith produces endurance.

Words of Grace For Today

You have heard it said that whatever challenges do not kill you make you stronger.

You have heard it said that testing one’s faith produces endurance.

The first is phooey.

Covid 19 often does not kill the person infected, but there are a number of ‘long haulers’, the people who do not die, and they do not recover. Instead they suffer pain, fatigue and organ complications without end.

Covid 19 is not the only challenge that may not kill you fast, but it will almost make you wish it had.

Testing one’s faith is different. God gives us faith as a gift, and it grows as we face the challenges that life throws at us.

It is different when the challenges of life, more than Covid 19, bring our heart to throb, our strength fails, and the light of our eyes slip away from us.

It’s the beginning of the end of life, threatening our breath, our time, and our hope.

In this time of huge challenge, as life slips on a slippery banana peel on the edge of our graves, we discover exactly what our lives are made of, what our hope provides, and what our faith sustains.

If we think we can somehow go it alone, when our last foot flies into the air and our other foot only has a small grip on that slippery banana peel, it will be quite the surprise …

as God stands, firm on the ground, and catches us, so that our days do not come to a crashing halt.

It is hard to be humble when everything is going so well we can pretend we accomplish life on our own. It is easy to be humble when we can barely breathe, our arms and legs fail to move as we ask they would, and our eyes no longer distinguish between light and dark, colours and black, blessing and curse, and we experience how clearly it is that only by God’s Grace do we live, breath, move and see.

God’s presence with us in the best of times and the worst of times leaves us so humble that there is nothing else in us, but the breath we use to give God thanks. It is good to be so humbled as to give God praise for creating us.