Monday, January 11, 2021
A Broken and Repaired Log Splitting Wedge
The cuts sliced into the side grab the wood so the wedge doesn’t just pop back out.
God’s Word of Truth sometimes bites, so that it sticks in us!
Isaiah 56:8
Thus says the Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, I will gather others to them besides those already gathered.
1 Timothy 2:3-4
This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.
Words of Grace For Today
In the movie, The Bucket List, two old men in a hospital room together are told they have six months, maybe a year to live. One’s a rich, mean old guy. The other a thoughtful kind man.
The kind man starts a bucket list, but crumples it up and throws it away when his bad news arrives.
The other picks it up and eventually they expand the list … and then together they head out on the rich man’s dime to live it, (sky diving, visiting the Great Wall and the Pyramids … ) until the kind man discovers the limits of running away from life and love at home. The rich guy has left his love far behind him in life.
They return, one dies, the other goes into remission. By last letter and final request the kind guy asks/commands the rich mean old man to finally visit his estranged daughter … and the mean old guy discovers he has a granddaughter.
That lets him check off “Kiss the most beautiful girl in the world!”
Life, Covid 19 being no exception at all, at all, is filled with harsh realities, severe limitations, and breath robbing losses.
Into this life, Jesus is born. He does not live a life of comfort. His end is an undeserved, excruciating death, the purpose of which is to demonstrate for us (and give us a story to tell our children and grandchildren about) how much God loves us. God loves us so much so that God chooses to pay for our sins with God’s own son’s life. We get to live, because of that love … we get to live abundantly …
… unless we wish to ignore the story and God’s Grace, Love and Joy for us!
God is still busy …
gathering in people, even cantankerous old Lutherans who think they are saved so they ignore the inspiration and directions of the Chief Medical Officer … opps … the directions of the Holy Spirit (some of which indeed come from the Chief Medical Officer).
God, after all, desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.
Who are we to get in the way of God’s wishes?
Who are we, once we are baptized and saved, to do anything but work to fulfill God’s wishes?
If not now when? You never know when death (or loss of health) will cut your time short so that you run out of time to complete your bucket list … or God’s bucket list for you.
If you don’t have a bucket list and have not realized the list God has for you try this one each day:
Be boldly kind!
And then pause, breathe, and listen: God has a list for you, and is trying in many ways to show it to you.