Monday, August 8, 2022
At Day’s End
Is It A Bloody Mess
Or
God’s Glorious Light Show?
Isaiah 9:5
For all the boots of the tramping warriors and all the garments rolled in blood shall be burned as fuel for the fire.
1 John 4:16
So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.
Words of Grace For Today
Boots of tramping warriors and clothes soaked in blood … all of it burned as fuel in fires.
And God loves us, is love, abides in us, and we in God as love.
Two stark images/concepts.
Does God’s love lead to the burning of soldiers’ tramping boots with blood soaked clothes?
The basic truth is life is a mess, a bloody mess, if not literally then figuratively. The only way for it not to be is to deny reality. Some do that by escaping through drugs, through great activities like high risk outdoor skiing, paragliding, bungy jumping (or you name it), or through addictions to work, through accumulations of power and wealth and … But that denying and escaping does not change reality. It only isolates one from reality.
God’s love embraces all that, the bloody reality and the escaping and denying reality, and all the good actions of people set on living well.
The real challenge in life is to face reality, bloody mess as it is, and still wake up each day and go to bed each day loving God, one’s own self, all others, and all creation.
That’s the miracle that God works in us, by Grace (in other words we do not deserve it at all, but God does it for us freely and free of cost), and with loving kindness.
Today is another day, a bloody mess for sure, and a day to love the ‘bloody mess’ out of every person and event, so that God’s good Grace prevails, if only for a short moment … for therefore we can hope and hoping we can overcome the ‘bloody messes’ and be as God intended us to be, overflowing with love.
Or we can do as most and as we usually do and self destruct in some small or large way as we try to make sense of the senselessness of the ‘bloody messes’ we encounter.
It’s harder to choose Grace. But then one lives well. And that no ‘bloody mess makers’ can take from us.
Another day? Which will it be for us? God promises Grace, always.
Gotta love that!