Sunday, February 7, 2021
What is Your Dream wish
for these polar-deep-freeze days
for it to be summer
when a tent is sufficient
for surviving a night camping?
Isaiah 65:1
I was ready to be sought out by those who did not ask, to be found by those who did not seek me. I said, ‘Here I am, here I am’, to a nation that did not call on my name.
Luke 14:23
Then the master said to the slave, “Go out into the roads and lanes, and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled.”
Words of Grace For Today
There is a name … a name which can free any person from every ill and misfortune, from one’s own real guilt and shame, and from the power of Evil. This name some people seek, for they know the universe needs deliverance and us all with it.
Others, actually most of us, try to deceive ourselves into thinking that life is just fine, that we can get by as things are, that we can meet the challenges of life on our own.
Truth is we simply cannot, and history is full of examples of people trying and failing spectacularly. Most people’s stories remain untold, though they would provide the same spectacle. Truth is we need a miracle to save us.
In the deep polar cold of these days the miracle would be …
Well, what would it be for you?
For me it would be for the truth to be known of these past fifteen years, for my reputation to be restored, and for the real culprits who knowingly created false police reports, false charges and false convictions to be exposed; for good order to be restored.
It is a bit too much to hope for, yet still is not real true hope is for those things that are too much to hope for?
Forgiveness does not have a different hope, neither does scripture allow that God does either. God does not wish good order to be restored by eliminating people who perpetrate such evils. God, rather, wishes that those people be transformed from agents of the Devil to God-made-saints even as they simultaneously remain sinners each day.
This is the feast that people on the roads and in the lanes are compelled to come and enjoy. That’s quite the paradox: God must compel us to come to a feast that we will more fully enjoy than we can imagine. At God’s feast we receive not just food and drink for our bodies, nor just for our minds, nor just for our souls. We receive food and drink for all that and all that for our neighbours, including even our enemies; for God wishes for them to feast along with us at God’s table of Grace.
All through history, all through each of our lives, God calls to us: Here I am, here I am! God calls to us even when we have not listened, do not listen and may choose forever not to listen. God is faithful especially when we are not. That’s the feast of Grace God puts on each day for us and for all people.
In the cold, God does not merely want known the truth of these last fifteen years. God wants known by all people the truth of all the years since the beginning of time to the end of time: God created and holds the universe together, each string, wave and particle, and each life with Grace. God wants us all to know that is the miracle, also today in the deep-freeze of -40⁰C or F.
To all those from the past fifteen years, from all the years since forever and until forever, who have create lies, deception, injustice and chaos, God continues to call: if you do not share the blessings I poured over you this day, when will you?
Each evening time is one day shorter for each of us, then each morning we are blessed with a new day. Each day as it passes is again one day less for us and each day again is another new day to know God’s Grace and to respond to God’s calling our names: Here I am. Send me. Use me to bring true justice, Grace and real hope to all people.
If not today, when?