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.
Or
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.