Friday, March 11, 2022
We Dominate Much, Fracking for Oil, Destroying Fresh Water
Never Can We Change the Light of Christ
That Gives People Life, Blessed Life
Ecclesiastes 8:8
No one has power over the wind to restrain the wind, or power over the day of death; there is no discharge from the battle, nor does wickedness deliver those who practise it.
Matthew 6:27
Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?
Words of Grace For Today
As a young girl, Garcia quickly learned (brilliant as she was) that her world was populated by those who got whatever they wanted, and those who had very little. More significantly she learned that she could manipulate almost anyone into giving her what she wanted. She just had to make them think they could get from her what they wanted.
Her parents worked long hours. Her father as a pastor, her mother as a nurse. They were seldom at home with their five children, so she would get her siblings to fight among themselves and she would somehow always walk away with what she wanted, a bigger portion of breakfast, the best part of the fish for supper, two oranges at Christmas time (a treat that was so rare they only had oranges five times while she was growing up.)
As a teenager, when her parents could not provide her money to buy the special things she knew she deserved, she sought out the men who could make almost anything happen for her. All she had to do was report what her parents and their friends said in quiet whispers about the national socialist government … and they had plenty to whisper about as friends and other church leaders were arrested and jailed … or simply disappeared. The church was the only place anyone dared protest against the government, yet the leaders were throttled and threatened without mercy.
When her brother ended up in the hospital with a broken arm, cracked ribs and a broken collar bone after a fight with her, she visited him often because she was fascinated with everything at the hospital. She decided she wanted to work there. She asked her ‘friends’, to whom she reported on her parents and siblings, and everyone else she could, what she had to do to become a doctor. They, knowing full well how bright she was, said it would not be a problem. They would make sure she would get into the program at the University after her Abitur.
True to God’s promises, though, wickedness deliver those who practise it and she graduated a half year after those ‘friends’ were no longer anyone, since their government had fallen into ashes. Everyone in that government or aiding it ran for cover, hiding from their past realities, the better to benefit from the new reality, a democratic government. No one was concerned for Garcia’s future. When she applied for medical school, they knew she had been an informer and they denied her application without hesitation. She applied to be a nurse. They denied her application. She asked what she could train for to be able to work in a hospital and she was offered training as a nurses aide. Later she would falsify her resume and claim to be a registered nurse, take an exam in her new country of opportunity, and with almost no actual training start working in a hospital in an operating room. Being brilliant had it’s benefits as did her ability to manipulate almost anyone she met.
No one has power over the wind to restrain the wind, or power over the day of death.
Jesus asks, ‘Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?’
Garcia had no idea about adding hours to her own life, but she knew from her experience that she could manipulate other people to subtracting every future hour from their lives. When she saw no advantage to her husband, except his two life insurance policies, she got what she wanted.
He was not the first, nor the last. Garcia lived a life of wealth and privilege and comfort … though she did not know it. She always wanted more, more, more. She worried and fretted about others who had more. She lived in terror that her life would fall apart as she had helped so many other’s lives fall apart, in her home country and in her adopted country.
God patiently waited for her to ‘wake up and smell the roses’ of God’s great blessings and grace. She came close a few times but walked right back into her well worn habits of destroying others to make her way in life.
When she died it was poetic justice; she gave up all her future hours during one of the increasingly debilitating terror episodes that haunted her.
No matter what power we think we have, the winds of God’s Holy Spirit, along with the ferocious winds of climate change, blow in ways we cannot predict. For all of us there is no discharge from the battle, nor does wickedness deliver those who practise it.
Today we pray for all the men who now spend time in jail for crimes they certainly did not come close to committing, as all the Garcia-s out there who manipulate reality, getting eager police to join in with false reports and judges who relish their power to cruelly ‘punish’ men for being good, honest, law abiding, and gracious people.
No one has power over the wind to restrain the wind, or power over the day of death.
God does have the power to give us, not everything we want, but everything we need in this life to live blessed to be a blessing for others.
