Thursday, July 9, 2020
God Protects us
Alone or Overrun by Others
God’s Presence
Never Leaves Us
Psalm 91:9
You have made the Lord your refuge, the Most High your dwelling-place.
2 Corinthians 3:12
Since … we have such a hope, we act with great boldness.
Words of Grace For Today
Today a crowd of tents overflowed from the Web campsite and filled the Birches campsite with an accompanying number of vehicles so many there is not enough room to park them all, and at least 5 large dogs. Awake, there is hardly room for the correct Covid 19 physical spacing, and sleeping the tents are close enough that one is already within a few metres of at least a few people in other tents, not to mention others sharing the tent you are in.
As the clerk at the drug store said (as sick people come for medicines), she’d had it and she’s done, completely done with this Covid 19 thing.
Wishful thinking until it kills you or someone you love, or compromises your organs for the rest of your life. A personal declaration that your done certainly does not cover it all.
You become one of the most dangerous people on earth today.
Thankfully we have made the Lord our refuge. We dwell in the Most High, and we dwell in a place isolated from everyone, including that dangerous drugstore clerk, every other dangerous carrier of Covid 19, and the fools who walk right up to me at Canadian Tire while I’m quickly finding the one thing I’m there for, having waited a good ten minutes for the two fools to move away from me down the isle 25 feet. While I’m determining which of the five different spools of plastic string I need, they return, walk right up to me and stand over me, breathing heavily and grunting impatiently for me to be done, and then as I stand up they walk within a foot behind me, push my cart out of the way and say I should get out of the way. Later the same two guys nearly run me over as I back up one foot to change course since the isle ahead is blocked by an elderly man on his cell phone. This time I politely ask the two if they could keep their 2 metre distance. They huff that I backed up into them, as I stepped back a half step at most to turn my cart to the left down an isle.
There are hundreds and thousands of other shoppers I have no close encounters with when I’m shopping.
Brash stupid boldness, like declaring Covid 19 is over because you say it must be, or walking over people with no respect for physical distancing, is not the kind of boldness that Christ gives us, through the hope the Holy Spirit creates in us.
The boldness Christ’s hope gives us is to
– do the right thing when everyone else is not,
– say the right words to a bully, when everyone else is cowering and capitulating,
– risk everything we are in order to save children at risk of horrendous abuse by their parent,
– not work to protect oneself, but to protect others who are vulnerable,
– and many other inspired risky actions,
since we know we need not protect ourselves or make our own security.
Christ has done that already.
All that we are and have, is for Christ, so putting everything on the line to do the right thing is exactly why we live and have anything to work with.
Martin Luther was right, too. We are bold in all we do, unafraid that we will inevitably sin. That knowledge does not deter us from risking everything to do the right thing. We trust that we have been, are, and will always be forgiven by Jesus the Christ. This is not some reckless abandon to do idiotic things to no good end or imaginable benefit. This means that we do not allow the Devil, or the inevitability of our sinning, stop us from trusting that God will guide us to do the right thing, and to know it is right.
We sinners, of course, so often try to justify our own sins. Doch with the Holy Spirit’s help we resist that as well, easily confessing, and re-adjusting our path, our plans, our hopes and our dreams to reflect Christ’s self sacrificing way for everyone we encounter: we sacrifice ourselves, not others.
For those who cannot comprehend the true risk of a virus, compared to the true risk of life and limb in order to save others, compared to the true risk of losing one’s own soul, we must pray and bless them: Lord bless these utter fools and keep them and their deadly virus far, far from us, all of us, humans.