Covid19 – Page 20

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – October 6

Tuesday, October 6, 2020

Cold

Covid 19 does not die in the cold

It just lays dormant, waiting

to warm up and infect more people

Cold

means more caution is needed!

Ezekiel 39:29

I will never again hide my face from them, when I pour out my spirit upon the house of Israel, says the Lord God.

1 Corinthians 12:4-7

Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.

Words of Grace For Today

During Covid 19, like many times before though for some much more intensely, we need to be careful for each other.

The kind of care is not to avoid some great big monster of a villain, who invades our lives and leaves tracks and vivid images of the him/herself in our memories.

This villain is a teeny, tiny virus that can get us mildly sick and contagious, or very ill so that we feel we are dying, to killing us … and what many seem to forget is even if one survives, this little virus can leave it’s surviving victims’ health compromised for the rest of their lives. The compromise can be as little as an irritation to deal with, to major health issues that alter how one can live through a normal day.

We cannot know, if we are in an proximity of other people (and very few of us live anywhere NOT in close proximity to others through a normal week), if we or someone else is infected and contagious, or what air space is filled with contaminated microdroplets containing the virus, or what surface has the virus waiting for contact to infect us. And we cannot know for sure when we are leaving the virus behind for others to be infected from us.

Stupid is the infected President who waves to people from the balcony, takes of his mask, and turns to be in close proximity to a number of his staff … and they test positive a few days later!

Stupid is a lot of what people do nowadays!

Stupid and deadly for some people, debilitating for others, inconvenient for others.

God promises not to hide his face from us, again.

So God endures these stupidities with us.

God has given us all many gifts of great varieties, and to all of us God has given the Holy Spirit for the common good. Each and every one of us has received the gifts to not have to be stupid about Covid 19.

We may be sick and tired of the limits and restrictions. Still we can and must comply with health restrictions and recommendations to keep each other safe.

It’s better to be sick and tired of the limits, than to be sick and tired, out of breath, and incapable of living fully for the rest of our lives, simply because we or someone that came close to us, decided to be stupid about being sick and tired.

God, save us from stupid! Especially from those who have authority and means to provide for our safety (individually and collectively) … and they do not.

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – October 5

Monday, October 5, 2020

Wind Blows, Wave Splash.

Do you have ears to hear?

Ezekiel 3:10

He said to me: Mortal, all my words that I shall speak to you, receive in your heart and hear with your ears.

Hebrews 2:1

Therefore we must pay greater attention to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away from it.

Words of Grace For Today

Our ears hear so much. The internet offers even more to hear than even 40 years ago we could imagine we could ever hear in one lifetime!

The question of our lives, over-filled with sounds and information is: What do we choose to listen to?

Music can inspire our hearts and minds to greater good … or evil.

Words can move us from complacency to action for good … or evil.

We must choose which is which, and which we wish to participate in with our ears, our minds, and our hearts.

Jesus gives us a commandment, to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind and strength; and to love one another, especially our enemies.

Can we choose to listen to Jesus’ Word each day anew, with ears attentive, minds focused, and our hearts receptive? We can, by the Grace of God through the Holy Spirit empowering us; though on our own we certainly cannot, and when we think that we can on our own then we surely error in choosing to listen to and work for Evil.

The Word of Jesus provides us living water, daily bread, and all we need to move into the future, fully aware that we move from past to present as God’s children, blessed to be blessings to others.

A wonder reveals itself in us each day.

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – October 4

Sunday, October 4, 2020

Matt’s

Abandoned Not-Home

Proverbs 3:5-6

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.

1 Peter 1:13

Therefore prepare your minds for action; discipline yourselves; set all your hope on the grace that Jesus Christ will bring you when he is revealed.

Words of Grace For Today

The world demands that we strive to prepare, possess, and secure for ourselves all that is necessary for the best life we can achieve. We are taught: Trust possessions, wealth, fame or at least good reputation, and your own knowledge and intelligence to provide a future of the best and and greatest comfort available to you.

God created us and provided us creation for an entirely different way of living. We must strive. That is a given. But we are created to strive to connect with our Creator and Saviour, and with other creatures of God. This includes working to provide ‘daily bread’, the necessities of life. We provide them not just for ourselves and our own. We provide them also for the needy, the poor, the strangers, the refugees, the outcasts … and for all the people the world prefers to forget.

This is to prepare our minds for action, to discipline ourselves, to count on God’s Grace alone, to trust the Lord with all our hearts, to acknowledge God. To count on Grace alone and to acknowledge God enables us to prepare for action and to discipline ourselves to be Christ’s hands, feet, and voice of Grace for the ‘forgotten.’

Covid 19 restrictions and precautions have taught us once again that ‘we are in this together!’ It does no good to protect just the wealthy and the privileged. The poor and the homeless need to be protected as well or no measures are sufficient. To protect the poor and the homeless requires first that we ensure the basics of life are available to them as well.

Long since recognized is that it costs less to provide homes for the poor, than it does to provide all the other services, like emergency services, minimal health care, etc for people living without a home.

In homes, people are better able to care for themselves, even when some cannot do that well, caught as they are in addictions or circumstances beyond which they can resolve. People caring for themselves, from a level in a home, achieves greater results than from the street or woods level. ‘Homes’ does not mean an apartment in a run down, dangerous, crime controlled place of squalor. ‘Homes’ means a place that anyone would be eager to live in: a safe, warm in the winter, cool in the summer, dry, pest-free, friendly neighbourhood. That’s why homes for the poor need to be built in every community, sprinkled in as part of life, in all our lives. So NIMBY has no place in this world. God calls us to say YIMBY! and YIOBY! and YIYBY! Yes! in Everyone’s ‘Best Yard’!

When we trust the ways of the world, or our own insights, then we settle for much less than we are capable of, less than providing well for all other people.

Trusting God alone, and God’s Grace alone, moves us to be in ways and to do things that we could never have imagined we were capable of being and doing.

God’s ways with us are wonderful, awesome, and down right frightening – unless we trust God. Trusting God they are wonderful, awesome and enthralling – inspiring and life-giving!

Breathe!

Now comes the adventure of your life.

Today is Sunday, a day of rest.

Which may be a calm day, a break from work.

It may be God’s day to get us to provide for the rest of the poor people in our city, county, M.D., or community a home, food, clothing and love!

It may be God’s day for us to get the rest of God’s work finally done! (or well on it’s way.)

Breathe, and prepare ourselves.

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – October 3

Saturday, October 3, 2020

Long Shadows of Early Evening

Tilt the World Thirty Degrees for Clarity

Isaiah 9:1

There will be no gloom for those who were in anguish. In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time he will make glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations.

1 Peter 2:9

You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.

Words of Grace For Today

As time unfolds we always find a way to deride people, places, and people from places.

God treasures all people, all places and all people from all places.

In time all those places that we have derided, God will bring into the glory that cannot be matched, God’s glory.

In time all the people that we have derided, God will bring into the glory that cannot be matched, God’s glory.

Where have we been? As people that deride others we have run ourselves into the darkness that the Devil provides so readily for us to hide our sins in. With Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection revealing God’s unconditional love for all creation and all people therein, we are brought into the Light, sometimes kicking and screaming for protection from the Light that exposes our corrupt way of living selfishly at others expense, some of us seeking others’ destruction for the perverse pleasure it gives us, the feeling of perverse power over others. I’ve met way too many people like that in the last few years!

As people derided others have tried to shove us down and hold us down in the darkness. With Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection revealing God’s unconditional love for all creation and all people therein, we are brought into the Light. With glorious relief and freedom we celebrate in the Light! We live with gratitude unmatched, for we were once nothing, and now we breathe, and live, and dance, and sing in freedom!

We know the wonders of God’s creation and God’s unconditional love for all people.

How are other people to know of God’s great wonders?

God calls us, the people freed from slavery and darkness, to proclaim the mighty works of God to all people. We proclaim the mighty power of unconditional love, of sacrificial love, and of the beauty of the universe.

For this we are set aside, a royal priesthood of God’s children. We saints are without number, growing with each generation.

Yet we are still slaves to the sin that the Devil uses to enslave us in darkness. We are simultaneously saints and sinners.

All the more we proclaim, so that we ourselves hear of the wonders of God’s love that saves us each day.

That’s worth a dance, a ‘happy’ dance of profound joy, each day!

Precautions carefully observed, restrictions adhered to, directions complied with, we still dance. No one can take that from us!

Our life may be off kilter. The Light of God makes shadows that guide us back on the level of God’s creation.

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – October 2

Friday, October 2, 2020

Peach, Blue, Orange

The Light of God

is in all colours

for all people

Isaiah 57:18

I have seen their ways, but I will heal them; I will lead them and repay them with comfort, creating for their mourners the fruit of the lips.

Mark 2:17

[Jesus] said to them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.’

Words of Grace For Today

God sees the ways of the world. God sees our ways in the world. God knows we are hardly better than the people who were Noah’s neighbours.

There are no shortage of pieces of literature and film which propose or play out either the plan of a human to rid the earth of the destruction of humans by destroying most of the world’s human population, or nature’s rebellion against the human species that seems dead set on destroying the environment, which is necessary for our own survival.

On a global scale, and in every age, God sees our species destructive ways and promises to heal us, lead us, and repay our tragic behaviour with forgiveness and comfort for those of us who mourn.

Jesus, God’s Word embodied in a human life, came to call people to a new (old) way of being in creation: graciously forgiving sin and loving unconditionally everyone!

We often read ‘Jesus does not call the powerful, the wealthy, the famous.’

This is in part true. Jesus does not call those who have no need for Grace (or actually room for Grace, since every person needs Grace!) As a physician does not treat those who (think) they are well, but those who know they are sick, so Jesus calls those who know they and all creation need healing.

Healing is a loving balm, on any day, but especially at sunset, in the midst of Covid restrictions and precautions, and Gaslit into poverty, as firewood is collected for another night and day of being able to stay warm, as the peach sky fades to dark orange, Jesus promise to heal all that ails us carries the day into the dark of night, assured that a new day will rise tomorrow morning with the sun.

Do you hear Jesus calling you?

Do you know the Grace that God has for you, the comfort as you mourn, healing as you are ill, and hope when you despair?

All that troubles us, God takes from us and bears, yet again through the dark of night. God’s Light exposes, reveals, cleanses, and gives life. God’s light will shine again, in the morning.

‘When is it truly dark?’ asked the rabbi his students. They suggest, ‘when one cannot see the oak in the far field?’ ‘When one cannot see the whites in the eyes of a person approaching?’ When one cannot see colour or form against the forest of trees?’

The rabbi answers, ‘It is truly dark when a person approaches you and you cannot see them as creatures of God who reflect the Light of God.’

May it never be so dark for you, for us.

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – October 1

Thursday, October 1, 2020

Fire

Holy Spirit Fire Inspires Us

2 Chronicles 34:27

Because your heart was penitent and you humbled yourself before God when you heard his words against this place and its inhabitants, and you have humbled yourself before me, and have torn your clothes and wept before me, I also have heard you, says the Lord.

1 Corinthians 15:9-10

For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace towards me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them—though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.

Words of Grace For Today

Because we do something, therefore God does something good for us.

This is the half faith understanding of God.

It is good to humble ourselves before God. It is good to be penitent before God. Nothing we do, though, can effect how God exercises Grace for us. That is something God does even though we clearly do not deserve anything good from God.

In fact we deserve nothing but condemnation.

God graciously gives us life abundant, adopts us as children, promises us life eternal, and walks with us each day.

Everything that we are is by the Grace of God.

Knowing we are all God’s Grace can make us to be, inspires us to be more than we otherwise could be.

Life is wonderful, by Grace, even though we may think the Devil is running our lives to ground.

So we work hard, very hard at being the best people we can be, by living God’s Grace for others.

Simple.

Just not the way the rest of the world works.

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – Sept 30

Wednesday, September 30, 2020

Leaves of Gold

Leave it all up to God

Psalm 116:10

I kept my faith, even when I said, ‘I am greatly afflicted’.

James 1:12

Blessed is anyone who endures temptation. Such a one has stood the test and will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love him.

Words of Grace For Today

Enduring temptation and keeping faith even during affliction; these things are ours to strive for in response to God’s Grace that gives us life, now and for eternity.

Here the half-faith concept of our relationship with God is presented: we do right then God rewards us with the crown of life. This is not faith based on Grace, or on Christ’ Cross.

This is like receiving an inheritance from one’s uncle who one did not know about. The inheritance comes at a time when financially one is about to sink into oblivion and likely death. It provides a better standard of living than one ever dreamed of.

Thereafter one lives striving to do the right things according to the dead uncle’s wishes, though one does not know exactly what they were since the will did not make any demands or requests. It just provided the inheritance.

One strives and tells everyone, including oneself, that since you have kept worthy of you uncles’ wishes, you have earned the inheritance, therefore you deserve it and need not share any of it with others.

We are the poor nephew, given the best inheritance. We are adopted as children of the living God, the creator of the universe.

Now, we are not clueless about God’s wishes for us. God calls us to imitate Jesus’ generous, unconditional, universal love for other people, especially our enemies, our neighbours and ourselves. Jesus lives a full life of sacrificial giving and healing others. We are empowered by the Holy Spirit to actually imitate Jesus. One our own it would be hopeless, but with the Holy Spirit giving us everything needed to imitate Jesus, we work the work of the saints.

What a life!

It is as beautiful as nature at the turning of the seasons, as gold carpets our paths and all our ways.

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – Sept 29

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Trees Reflecting the Light,

See Through the Trees

to the Living Water

Zechariah 8:19

Thus says the Lord of hosts: The fast of the fourth month, and the fast of the fifth, and the fast of the seventh, and the fast of the tenth, shall be seasons of joy and gladness, and cheerful festivals for the house of Judah: therefore love truth and peace.

John 8:32

You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.

Words of Grace For Today

When people wish to deceive in order to gain and maintain power, wealth, status, and position, truth becomes relative to one’s perspective, because the actual truth cannot be admitted. If it were all the falsely gained power, wealth, status, and position would be lost.

In war the first victim is truth.

In greedy business practices in a world based on greed there can be no truth except what is made up to be claimed as truth after the fact.

Truth is a double edged sword, it cuts down everyone living out of lies, and on the back swing lays to waste everything built up based on those lies.

I’ve always had a hard time believing people actually expected others to accept as truth the lies and deceptions they practised and presented as truth. Yet not only do they expect, they demand, and even threaten ruin or death to those who do not accept their lies a truth.

From lies comes death to the one who lives by them. First comes death of one’s own soul, for there is no integrity between creation, one’s actual history, and what one claims supposedly happened. The gaps grow and rip apart one’s soul. One walks, breathes, and appears to live, but one has sacrificed the soul of one’s existence, the essence of being alive. One walks through life a shell of a full human, rotten in the core with a thin veneer of life surrounding one’s dead innards.

As one loses one’s soul one loses connection with God’s creation, which as an embodied human, a child of God, is one’s connection to God and to other people, as one of God’s creatures.

Quickly one becomes entrapped by one’s own lies as one caught in quick sand, until eventually the lies rule one’s life, relentlessly and ruthlessly.

….

What is one to do, if one has so died and yet still walks and breathes, or if one’s loved ones have chosen this path of walking dead, serving greed, money, power, or position, instead of acknowledging our place in God’s creation as one of God’s creatures?

The sad truth of human existence is that every person at times and in various ways sinks into living out lies that at first seem to be to our advantage, but then cost us everything good about being human.

How can one be freed from this enslavement to lies and falsehoods, to evil?

The first thing to do is pray.

The second and ongoing thing to do is seek out truth, absolute truth, in God’s Word and among God’s people, good people who strive to live by truth. Seek with all our being the truth of God, and the truth of God’s Grace for us creatures, and the great possibilities for our response to such prodigal dealings with us!

The Truth is that Jesus brought and brings to us, of God’s attitude towards us and all people being fundamentally Grace, bought at God’s Son’s own life. This is an absolute truth. No relative factor applies or can be applied to it. Jesus welcomes us though we do not deserve it at all. Jesus welcomes all people, tax collectors in his time like liars of all times. As Jesus has paid the price for us and all our sins, God frees us from our captivity to all sin, including our lies.

This is true freedom.

Then by Jesus’ invitation we get to be gracious (on behalf of Jesus) with all the people we encounter, especially those we would normally ignore or discredit.

The Truth sets us free, to be the kind of people God created us to be; to be kind people, filled with gratitude and grace for all the people we meet.

When we know this Truth, then even in months of fasting, and doing without, God blesses us and calls us to share the blessings joyfully with others.

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – Sept 28

Monday, September 28, 2020

Precious, Long Awaited, Saviour

All Around With Us

Ecclesiastes 12:1

Remember your creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come, and the years draw near when you will say, ‘I have no pleasure in them.’

John 1:45-46

Philip found Nathanael and said to him, ‘We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.’ Nathanael said to him, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ Philip said to him, ‘Come and see.’

Words of Grace For Today

To find something precious is a wonderful thing.

To find someone whom you’ve waited a long time to find is a life changing marvellous thing.

To find the one promised to bring God’s Promises to fruition for all people since times of old is fabulous, and even out of this world.

Knowing whom one is looking for is a place to start, so that when it comes time that one may meander down the right back alley and find this precious, this long awaited, or this Saviour of creation one would even know what one has found.

It’s like panning for gold. It sure helps to know what gold looks like before one spends a few years panning through tons of rock and sand looking for paydirt.

It is best, when one is looking for something precious, someone long awaited, or for the Saviour of the universe, that one start when one is young, for learning what these things are requires a young person’s fortitude, strength and quickness. It’s awkward in old age, when arthritis sets in and everything hurts when one moves, to have to run quickly through the gamut of possibilities in order to know what is precious, awaited or able to save creation.

After one, in one’s youth, has diligently sought for what is precious, whom is to be long awaited, or who can actually save creation, it is in one’s old age, when most of life is already spent, that one realizes the simplest and most common things are precious, like smiles and kindness. It is then that one realizes that the long awaited person is one that has always been there with you, and waiting is not what counts, nor in the finding, but rather it is in sharing kindness with that one becomes the one who is precious.

In one’s old age it is then that one realizes that the one who has saved creation, for it has already been accomplished, could not ever be found. For this one has walked with you from the earliest days of your youth through each day even into one’s old age when time moves so fast and things take so long to accomplish.

The Saviour of the Universe is the Creator of the Universe, is God’s own Son, Jesus. We need never say, ‘Come and See,’ for God is already here to be seen, known and heard.

Open your eyes and God can be seen. Open your ears and God can be heard. Open your heart and you will know God has been and ever will be with you.

No one is alone, not even with Covid 19 self isolation, for God is with us.

Facing Covid 19: Daily Words of Grace – Sept 27

Sunday, September 27, 2020

Little White Water

A pleasant water wave for children of Grace

Psalm 98:2

The Lord has made known his victory; he has revealed his vindication in the sight of the nations.

Acts 14:27

When they arrived, they called the church together and related all that God had done with them, and how he had opened a door of faith for the Gentiles.

Words of Grace For Today

God’s day of victory is a great day to celebrate,

for those whom God claims as children.

It is a day of reckoning and defeat for those who stand against God, for those who live a faith based on hate of others (the victims vary), for those who claim they make their own way without God, for those who have chosen their own rewards at the cost of others’ well-being and even lives, and for those who serve the Devil in so many a various ways.

Repeatedly God gives cause for celebration to God’s people as God opens up their understanding of God’s Grace to include more and more people, until all are included … or excluded by their own choices.

As the forecast has held steady in its predictions of strong winds, gusting winds, white water waves whipping winds, destructive winds the actual wind has been a light breeze or at most a steady, small wave making wind.

During these days I have taken particular notice, and been particularly grateful, for in preparation for the climate change’s last-year’s-extreme-become-this-year’s-normal storm and the new extreme storm, I’ve worked on setting two tarps to provide shelter in new ways. The work would have been challenging to design and construct with dried lumber of my choosing and materials that are offered for sale in any lumber yard store. I have none of that at hand. Only a few old tarps made from the skins of long since useless insulated tarps from which I’ve pulled the innards to work as insulation elsewhere and the dead trees killed by last winter’s thaw and freeze cycle.

I cobbled one tarp into place rather quickly earlier this week. It covered a nice area high enough plus about 6 feet. It has a nice airy feeling under it. Then there was only one day of winds 20 and 40 km/h gusting to 40 and 60 km/h. It whipped that tarp madly, snapped multiple strands of twine and even rope, and pulled stakes right out of the ground laying part of the tarp back down on the ground. I modified it for a temporary fix so that it would not all be ripped and shredded into nothing useful and waited for the winds to subside.

The forecast predicted strong winds with gusts for the next day as well. In the calm that came I was up a 12′ ladder made from 2×4’s long ago, with a chainsaw in hand, trying to delicately modify the top of a vertical support miscalculated to be a few feet too high to best withstand the winds, dragging tarps over new supports while standing a precarious perch 16′ feet in the air, and tying together tarps that are only tentatively anchored in place. Any strong gust could have put me on the ground, with a chainsaw running, or a small piece of twine wrapped around my hand or whatever.

I have been amazed how inaccurate the forecasts have become with climate change wildly playing havoc with historical precedents. These day’s I’ve been thankful, at least that the wind is not been as forecast.

Today, the tarps are in place, tied well (I hope), and staked solid. Now the winds are stronger, though still not the high gusts that were forecast. It’s a great test of the modified and improved protection by old tarps.

God’s Day of Vindication and Judgment is like that: we predict it to be ferocious, and destructive of many things we hold dear.

Those who dwell in the Word of Jesus, the Christ, have become accustom to Grace being God’s way with us, at the most unexpected times. It blows through us as a gentle breeze, in the quiet of calm, with the fragrance of fresh life.

God’s day of victory is a great day to celebrate,

for those whom God claims as children.