Thursday, August 11, 2022
How Many Mosquitoes Are There in This Photo,
In All The Air Shown?
104,000,000,000,000,000 or so?
?Maybe or Does My ‘Spidey Sense’ Have It Wrong?
It Doesn’t Really Matter, Does It?
What Matters Is How Many Have
and Are Going to
Bite You!
Psalm 31:24
Be strong, and let your heart take courage, all you who wait for the Lord.
1 Corinthians 13:13
And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
Words of Grace For Today
We can do all the spiritual exercises we want to, building up all the strength we can imagine possible, and we will have little effect on the outcome of the battle evil wages against us.
It’s like an individual school teacher, nurse, pilot, or dentist trying to earn enough to set right the imbalance of power and wealth in the world (say that individual is extremely good at earning and has $1 million a year to dedicate to the project), where the global economies are valued at $104 trillion, and the problem will require wealth a million times that each year to actually effect the solutions needed over 3 decades. So let’s see $1 million needs to be multiplied by 1000 (bringing it to $1 billion) and by another 1000 (bringing it to $1 trillion) and another 1000 (bringing it to $1 quadrillion), and another 1000 (bringing it to $1 quintillion) and another 100 or so (bringing it to $100 quintillion) and then add another mere $4 quintillion. That’ll give us enough for the first year. Each year it has to be the same, adjusted for inflation and growth of the global economies. But that should illustrate how hopeless that project would be for one person, and for all the people who joined in the project if they were just over half the people on earth, or even all the people on earth. Getting more and more people to embrace the project would lower the needed amount significantly, but the likelihood of even getting a second person to commit to the project is so astronomically unlikely that raising the money oneself would probably be easier, or rather, just as impossible.
So go for all the spiritual strength you want and can find and … you’re still doomed! Deader’na doornail!
What can match the strength that we need to overcome evil. Well nothing we are capable of is that powerful, not even as a small start.
The only things that can possibly overwhelm and subdue evil are those things God gives us, like faith, hope and love. The greatest of these is love. But if we try to acquire or control these for our project to overcome evil, they no longer remain as God’s, they become ours, and they become hopelessly inadequate even for everyday life, yet alone the battle against evil.
Thank God, literally, that God provides all we need for daily living (if not daily survival on this planet) and that God has long since overcome evil, with the death (submitting to evil) and the resurrection (negating the power of all evil for all people of all time) of Jesus, God’s own son, God himself.
It’s a small thing, but it’s what we can do: give God thanks, each morning, noon, and night.
As for the people who are out there on their own trying to overcome evil, and probably contributing more to evil than anyone cares to know about, well, we can pray that they do not waste too much life (their own and others’), and that some day they will wake up to the wonders that God provides each day.
As for those suffering evil, well we give our everything to counter the effects on them, to help them recover and find joy in faith, hope and love again, and we work like the dickens to counter specific agents of evil, like Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but also so many other injustices even in our own back yards. That’s more than enough for a full lifetime, and for that we need all the faith, hope, and love and strength that God will give us.
Another day in the trenches … joyfully proceeding onward.