Month: August 2021

Monday, August 23, 2021

Wood Cannot Become Gold

Nor Can We On Our Own Become Holy.

God Provides Wood That Gives Heat

Which Gives Life.

So Also God Provides Grace

By Which God Makes Us Holy.

Leviticus 22:32

You shall not profane my holy name, that I may be sanctified among the people of Israel: I am the Lord; I sanctify you.

1 Peter 1:15

As he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct.

Words of Grace For Today

Profane and holy, these two ways of thinking, talking, acting describe our lives.

Sigi grew up in a ‘normal’ farm family on the prairies, within view of the grand Rockies. Watching her family work to raise crops and cattle each year she was no stranger to the cost of illnesses, and the benefits of health. She was a bright young girl, brighter than most around her. She saw the discord in her parents’ lives between what they said they believed in and worked at and how they lived their lives. As a young teen, as teenagers are wont to, she resolved to not make the mistakes that her parents made.

Beginning with her own health she believed firmly as her parents did that her body was a gift from God, and also since her baptism, a visible presence of God’s Grace for all to encounter, and for her to benefit from by giving abundant life to others. Her parents said they believed their lives were gifts from God, including their bodies, and then they ate foods that were not healthy. The allowed their bodies to become fat and out of shape, even though they worked hard and were strong, they were not fit. In time the illnesses they allowed into their bodies would show themselves.

At first, when Sigi resolved to keep her body fit, she loudly critiqued her parents, shaming them as best she could. She developed habits that she knew were healthy. Sigi ate only food she knew was healthy for her, only the foods that she needed to be and stay healthy. She exercised everyday and through the week had a routine of various exercises that kept her whole body fit. It was a painful year that her parents endured while she ingrained her habits into her life. She allowed her critique to spread to others in the family, and then to others in the community.

When her father had his first heart attack, she was brought up short. She stopped critiquing her parents, and others. She was bright enough to realize that her critique on her father was a contribution, even if small, to his stress and therefore to his heart attack. She started to realize that being healthy was more than just being physically healthy. So she began a life-long struggle to find, develop, and maintain a healthy mind and a healthy soul.

Six decades later, in her early 70’s Sigi was still struggling with this same struggle. She had seen her father survive 4 heart attacks, many years of good return on the farm, and the two decades of large swings from profitable to huge losses. In the deep trough of the third great loss her father suffered his last heart attack. The farm was repossessed. Her mother moved to town to a small apartment she rented. Her mother’s dementia advanced suddenly in that small apartment and she died within the year.

By then Sigi was married, had a career as a psychologist, had her own three children, and had suffered their teenage years as her parents had suffered hers.

Sigi still struggled to find health in her own thinking, in the deepest corners of her mind, in the darkest valleys of her soul. Her habits were all healthy. She was still physically fit, though her body ached from arthritis, occasionally so bad she could barely move. She attended church. She meditated daily. She prayed for her family, for her church, community, country, and the whole world. She prayed for people around the world. She donated a tithe to her church, and gave even more to aide for people in terrible catastrophes around the world. She practised good, sustainable, and environmentally friendly ways of being on earth: She drove a small, economical car, installed good insulation on her small home along with a solar panel array that provided most of her electricity needs, and composted and reused most of her waste. She had bicycled most everywhere until her arthritis hampered that, and still during the summer she managed to do most of her grocery shopping using her bicycle, now a bike with an electric assist motor to help her up the small hills and rises between home and the store.

When her husband, Vern, had died of a massive stroke when he was only 58, something in Sigi just broke down, and left her unable to find any peace or purpose or health or hope.

Then so many years later, as if by a miracle everything changed again for her (like it had when she was just a teenager realizing that her parents said they believed one thing and lived completely differently). She was listening to a sermon, a simple sermon, not even a very good sermon, she heard words that she’d heard many times before: that Jesus saved us by Grace alone, not by our merits. It hit her like thunder breaking through an invisible lightening bolt and exploding in her like fireworks.

She had worked all her life to be healthy, to honour God with her body, mind, and soul, as she was a visible being of God’s presence on earth for her and others. What she had struggled against all this time was that she just could not make herself completely healthy, not healthy enough; not in her body, not in her mind, and certainly not in her soul. Her failures were as visible as her successes to anyone who knew her well could tell you. Her demands to be healthy had ruined relationship after romantic relationship before she met Vern, and many friendships as well throughout her life.

She realized that she could no more earn God’s blessings by trying to be completely holy, any more than her father could stop his heart attacks, her mother her dementia, Vern his stroke … and on went the list of other’s illnesses, reminding her of her own illnesses and the suffering she had caused so many people with her ‘holier than thou’ attitude.

Sigi regained a sense of purpose in life through more than a year of searching to understand this revelation, that she was saved by grace alone though she did not and could not deserve it, and that she was to be that same grace for others.

She realized that only by Grace could she ever reflect the holiness that God wished for her, only by Grace could she turn to God who was always with her, as the holy companion God promised to be.

She realized that her efforts to be completely holy were as all human efforts done as one’s own, as profane as anything she’d ever witnessed in her life.

Only by allowing God to make her holy, though she deserved it not one bit, could she be holy at all, and only then could her life be a visible witness to God’s holy presence with all people. It was all by Grace, that wonderful thing that God was for all people: giving freely without cost, given with ease to make one at ease, moving one through time with the beauty of a dancer, of a butterfly appearing from nowhere, moving through the heart wrenching challenges and losses of life as if pulled onward towards the goodness of life for others.

Sigi lived her final 2 decades, trusting that Grace was for her and for other people. She moved gently, kindly, sharing God’s unconditional love with all. She still struggled to be healthy in body, mind, and soul, but her struggle was not on her own. She allowed herself to fail, forgiving herself as God had already. She even enjoyed ice cream for the first time in her life, without a guilty conscience, trusting that this enjoyment was also part of a good abundant life. Profane she realized was unavoidable, though one ought not jump into it headfirst if one didn’t have to! Holy she humbly realized in new ways each day was all gift, a blessed gift of God’s Grace, a gift God offered to each sinful person.