Facing Covid 19: Daily Devotions – May 24

Sunday, May 24, 2020

The grass is greener …

The grass is greenest,

where the most manure is found

(where the cows ate for years, when this was a barn yard.)

Forgiveness is not needed for perfectly good people (they don’t exist!)

Forgiveness is needed for the rest of us, every last one of us!

Psalms 130:4

But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be revered.

Colossians 3:13

Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.

Words of Grace For Today

Rulers and people seeking power have long since used condemnation and fear to control people, with marginal success to surprisingly good success.

God is different. God seeks our respect through forgiving us, being slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

One may (incorrectly) think that God works more on the carrot approach, and less on the rod approach. God goes in a considerably different direction, in fact in the opposite direction from both carrot and rod. Instead of motivating us to do the thing that God wants us to do, with either a reward (the carrot) or with threat of punishment (the rod) what God does requires that we take a step back from ‘trying to motivate’ others to do what we want them to do, and realize God approaches ‘motivating us’ to do what God wants completely differently.

God realizes that the matter of getting us to do what we were created to do is not at all getting us to recognized what we must do, then to choose to do it, and to follow through when the going gets tough.

God shows us with Jesus’ story that no human is capable on our own of recognizing, choosing or following through with what is right.

The problem is that we cannot do what is right, well enough, to make it right. When we fear condemnation and shame for failing, we do even worse things, fooling ourselves into thinking the good is something it is not, just so we can do it, or that we’ve done a good thing, when we’ve at best messed around with good just a bit too much to leave it good.

We need a permanent fix, a re-creation, a new start, total redemption, and total freedom … again and again and again and ….

God does not trifle with us. God inspires us through the work of the Holy Spirit in us to accomplish pieces of goodness, in spite of ourselves. Thank God or everything would be ruined by us!

Covid 19 is just another challenge that forces us to pause. It is a tremendous opportunity to see what we really are like when we cannot cover ourselves with consuming, owning, travelling …. You name it, we’ve used it to run from the reality of our lives.

Now, with much of that taken from us, we’re left to deal with more of the actual reality of our lives … as God’s creatures.

We can now as much as ever revere God, for God forgives us and sets us free from our sins to move into each new moment of time as God’s forgiven saints.

God equips us by Jesus’ example to forgive … ourselves, and to forgive others, freely, unconditionally, and repeatedly.

Thanks be to God, there is so much to do, so much forgiveness to do, especially for ourselves, our enemies, and the stranger who seeks refuge among us.

That’s why being kind is the beginning of every good day. If one is kind, it’s easier to move to forgiveness from kindness than any other attitude when forgiveness is required (and it always is or will be shortly.)