Blind Bullies

Monday, June 27, 2022

Here, in the Hermitage Meadow, the Sun Goes Down

And No One Is Falsely Accused, Not People, Not God,

but it is not so beyond this small refuge.

Ezekiel 33:17

Your people say, ‘The way of the Lord is not just’, when it is their own way that is not just.

Ephesians 5:10

Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord.

Words of Grace For Today

A common illness among humans is to know full well something is wrong, but somehow be unable to identify oneself as the source. Instead we blame others, believing the fault cannot possibly be ourselves. Innocent people are blamed. It may be simple scapegoating. The blamed person never even knows they are blamed. Seems innocent way to deflect responsibility for one’s sins.

Until it is not so simple, for one has been doing this for so long one does not know when one is blaming others for one’s own sins, and when others actually are the wrongdoers, and one carries on, driving people out of town with their reputations ruined, taking people to court, fully perjurying oneself, and sending innocent people to jail. These things just get out of hand.

Lawyers, Prosecutors, Clerks and Judges see this so often and care not one wit, simply carrying, knowing full well innocent people are accused and then convicted, and very not innocent people blatantly lie under oath in court. The courts care not one bit because they, too, add their lies on top of the perjury provided, in order to convict innocent, unfavoured people, and giving guilty, favoured people the privilege of destroying other people, as the courts themselves participate. There must be some kind of reward for the courts, prosecutors, lawyers, rcmp, and the actually guilty people who perjure themselves. It’s the reward all bullies enjoy as they beat up others who certainly do not deserve to be beaten.

It is an easy step to blaming God for one’s own sins, claiming God is unjust, when the guilty and unjust player is oneself.

Against this there is little defence.

There is only the comfort in knowing that saints of all generations have suffered the same kind of injustice, and even Jesus himself was falsely accused and convicted, and killed in a most torturous way, by crucifixion. The comfort comes in knowing that one is not the only person so unjustly dealt with, and that through the generations, God has always accompanied those falsely accused and convicted, and killed.

While we live, we pray, God save us from such injustice, from such blind and sick people.

While we live, we pray, God helps us each day to find what pleases you, and to think, speak, and do as you would have us.

The Kids …

Tuesday, June 21, 2022

Today,

the Light Shines Bright and Long

on All That Was Once

Hidden

in Darkness

Psalm 8:1-4

O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens. Out of the mouths of babes and infants you have founded a bulwark because of your foes, to silence the enemy and the avenger.
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?

Matthew 21:15-16

But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the amazing things that he did, and heard the children crying out in the temple, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David’, they became angry and said to him, ‘Do you hear what these are saying?’

Jesus said to them, ‘Yes; have you never read, “Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise for yourself”?’

Words of Grace For Today

Thieves struck.

Simple deception taking things that can be fenced for money for drugs, and

I am left without essential tools and money that I am so short of: my life is not threatened, but bankruptcy moves closer and closer, which may lead to my death, if it is not brought on sooner by other dark powers.

More, I am betrayed yet again.

When Jesus does the amazing things of healing people of all kinds of illnesses, or bringing people together to share, trusting each other, the leaders know that Jesus is undermining the very reality that their power over the people thrives on and requires: fear. Fear of each other. Fear of those in power. Fear of those who speak the truth. Fear of anything and everything. Fear fuels greed. Greed makes people predictable and easily manipulated.

When Jesus does these amazing things, the children (and with this term is meant also the simple people in the temple) sing out his praise, honouring him as the descendant of David that he is. Jesus has calmed their fears so that they can see clearly the world they live in.

They see Jesus and know him to be the Son of David, the one promised and hoped for for generations.

They see the leaders in the temple, and know the corruption that guides their leading the people, not in the people’s best interest, but to the leaders’ advantages.

They see the poverty they are caught in, the forces that keep them down, and the promise that they will have life abundant even today. They have begun to realize the blessings of life are not given nor taken by possessing power, riches, and reputation.

Looking at the world around them, they see the wonders that God has created and rightly ask how it is that God cares a wit at all about humans, so small we are in the universe. They see clearly that though humans are so small in the universe, though they are so small in their own world, God cares most about them, and showers blessings on them each day, blessings that others toss aside as if they were mere trifles.

Today, the summer solstice, a 50th birthday, a day of light, and the shortest night of the year … even today the children (the simple, honest people blessed by God even if poverty holds them the rest of their lives,myself among them) are able to sing God’s praise with clarity. It is that clarity and truth that threatens corrupt powers, falsely gained riches, and those who parade themselves as leaders. The Light of Christ always shines. Today it shines intensely on the darkness of those who steal by deception, who take from others to feed their addictions and amass their wealth, who claim to lead the people from positions of honour.

Today all glory is God’s as Christ’s Light shines revealing all the dark of human hearts and deeds and the brightness of God’s blessings.

Yeah, Sure!

Thursday, June 16, 2022

You Can Say Whatever You Like,

But That’s a Lake,

As Sure As Covid is

a Serious and Deadly Pandemic.

Exodus 23:25

You shall worship the Lord your God, and I will bless your bread and your water; and I will take sickness away from among you.

Matthew 6:31-32

Therefore do not worry, saying, “What will we eat?” or “What will we drink?” or “What will we wear?” For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.

Words of Grace For Today

Quite sure sickness is rampant among us. Coming out the back end of the Covid pandemic, and it’s not done with us yet by any means, is anyone ready to say that as we worship God our food and bread is blessed and we have all sickness taken away from among us? Covid is simply so contagious that measures to stop it are useless (well not really but people are no longer willing to pay the small price of wearing masks and keeping physical distance and restricting their social interactions to a small group of people so … well so measures are not kept and therefore governments are giving up on keeping them). The greatest sickness is exemplified by the guy who says Covid was a big hoax. Tell that to the families of all the people who died!

I’m sure that if I do not work hard for wood to heat with in the winter, and persist to find money to buy groceries with and show up at the food bank to supplement the ever smaller amount of groceries I can afford, and, and, and … I am sure if I do not strive heftily, I will meet my physical death.

So these passages are difficult to hear.

The truth of the matter is, when we worry about food and water, rather than actually working to ensure we have them, our worry sucks the life right out of us.

The truth of the matter is, sickness will never be wiped out from among us, not completely, and when we either think that it can be and behave like it has been or we ignore that sickness is part of life, we endanger ourselves and so many people around us.

The truth of the matter is that God created the world and said it was good! Hunger, poverty, drought, thirst, illness and death are part and parcel of our being able to choose to either love God or not.

Today is another day of opportunity: to ruin our days with worry and denials of sicknesses and death OR to enjoy our days with thanks for everything God gives us, and appropriate work to secure our daily needs and have enough to share with those without enough, and to live sensibly and cautiously so as to foster our own health and the health of those around us.

What’ll it be today for you?

Groaning

Sunday, June 5, 2022

Is this Your Lost Camper?

What’s It Doing In My Yard?

The VIN of the Lost/Stolen/Misplaced and Unlicensed Motor Home

Psalm 73:26

My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever.

Romans 8:23-24

Not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen?

Words of Grace For Today

There is every cause to groan at the developments of the previous days …

besides the reasons of every day: death is a’coming as our bodies give up life; we may be adopted and redeemed, but our bodies still have so many demands and limits and … well life, as one gets older and older, does not seem to get better, in fact, quite the opposite. Our bodies are not the only things that wear out. Machines that we rely on do as well. While our bodies are covered under the provincial health care plan, and we may have supplementary insurance, our machines cost lots of money to have someone qualified fix them.

So our machines get cobbled back together again and again, and pretty soon it’s a marvel that they work at all.

Our bodies get health care, such as it is, if a doctor will even care at all about you. All of that costs lots of money that comes out of our pockets as taxes, supposedly more if we have and make more money, though it seems not to work out that way. Even with the best health care, though, our bodies still slowly and sometimes quite quickly decay as if pulled back to be dust.

We can rejoice that with all this decay, God is our strength and portion forever, and that even our bodies will be adopted fully and redeemed fully and renewed, better than in our first life. We wait. We wait for God to keep the promise that our bodies will be redeemed and renewed. There is no proof available that this redemption and renewal will happen. So much of what we observe and experience points in exactly the opposite direction. So we are given hope. Hope alone. Hope in what is not obvious or not seen or sometimes apparently simply not possible.

Hope is hope when it anticipates what is not seen or proven or provable.

God gives us plenty, even when in the previous days someone parks a 40 foot old motor home in my yard from across our campers where I live. This motor home has no license plate, is a mess inside as much as is obvious through the door’s window. It has all the signs of being stolen and dumped here, out of sight and in my way. The yard is used as a dumping ground.

Now that stupidity is a cause for so much groaning. When will it stop!

God gives us hope that even things like this will be resolved, since redeemed is a bit much to hope for.

Foolhardy or Courageous?

Friday, May 27, 2022

More Often Than Not,

The Challenges We Face Are Unseen,

Like the Mosquitoes on the Lake

and

the Wasps Nesting

in That Tree

1 Samuel 17:37

David said, ‘The Lord, who saved me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear, will save me from the hand of this Philistine.’ So Saul said to David, ‘Go, and may the Lord be with you!’

1 Peter 4:11

Whoever speaks must do so as one speaking the very words of God; whoever serves must do so with the strength that God supplies, so that God may be glorified in all things through Jesus Christ. To him belong the glory and the power for ever and ever. Amen.

Words of Grace For Today

Going into battle with nothing more than trust in God is wholly foolhardy.

David has brought provisions from their father to his brothers who serve in Saul’s army, now facing the Philistines. He hears of Goliath’s challenge. He witnesses the Israelis cowering in fear. He speaks up that facing such an enemy and putting him to defeat would surely win the king’s favour.

That just gets his brothers angry with him for his seeming foolishness.

David’s words reach Saul’s ears, he is summon, and David offers to be the one to fight Goliath. Saul rebukes him. David is just a boy. Then the verse above is David’s response. He has faced down lions and bears. Certainly he can face down one man. Saul, with few other options, sends David as a last hope, or rather as a meaningless sacrifice to let Goliath demonstrate his battle powers.

Saul dresses David in Saul’s own armour, and David takes it off because he cannot move in it. Instead he takes staff and 5 smooth stones from the wadi.

The rest is history.

Goliath falls. David rises to become the celebrated king of Israel.

Most of us, fortunately, will not have to go into battle, nor serve as king. Instead our battles will be less fatal by all appearances. Our callings will be varied, and God sends us out to be as courageous (not to be confused with foolhardy) as David in what we do.

Most of all, just as David relies fully on the little skills he has and the great faith that he has in God, so we are to rely on our God-given skills and more so on the great faith God gives us.

It is our attitude of gratitude (for God saving us and giving us renewed life each day) more than anything else that will carry us through adversity.

God did not create us all so that we can seek our own glory. God created, redeems, and renews us so that all people will know how great God’s mercy is, how abundant God’s grace is, and how beautifully unconditional God’s love for us is.

That’s something to start the day with: knowing that we, whatever we are called to be and do, do it all as God’s people.

Fire!?

Monday, May 23, 2022

This Way Is Blocked.

How To Break Through?

Zechariah 13:9

And I will put this third into the fire, refine them as one refines silver, and test them as gold is tested.
They will call on my name, and I will answer them.
I will say, ‘They are my people’; and they will say, ‘The Lord is our God.’

1 Peter 1:6-7

In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith—being more precious than gold that, though perishable, is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honour when Jesus Christ is revealed.

Words of Grace For Today

This world does provide an ample sample of suffering for anyone who chooses to live ‘eyes wide open’. While some may say it is ‘now for a little while’, the suffering never seems anything like ‘little’ to those who are caught in it.

The image often referred to in scripture, as in these two passages, is that through our suffering our faith is refined, and it becomes more precious. This may be a great philosophical perspective on other’s suffering, though I’m not sure it helps those who suffer now. Yet it is repeated, and repeated, and repeated … as if the repetition would help or that the writers and thinkers just cannot come up with something more helpful.

Maybe there is nothing helpful!

That would, of course, depend on one’s perspective of towards what end, what goal, what value, those who suffer will be helped.

If the end, goal, and value is to not suffer, then there seems (as history well attests to what we humans are capable and eager to do to others) to be no shortage or end to suffering.

What if the end, the goal, and the value is something else than ending suffering?!

What if it the end, goal and value is how one lives, when one is in the midst of suffering, when one is free from suffering, and in fact in all circumstances of life?

Say (given the scriptural witness to this) that the end, goal and value is that we humans live in a love with God, and therefore we love all people, even our enemies and ourselves (which is usually the most difficult kind of love, since we know how little we deserve love.)

This first long weekend of the summer the crowds returned to the random camping area, first dribbling in on Wednesday already to secure a campsite for themselves and their group, most often a group using at least 2 camping units and numerous tents, trucks, cars, and noisy cycles, quads and side-by-sides. By Friday night all but the chilly spots along the lake (all well within 30 metres of the water) were overfilled, most bursting with drink, drugs, and loud music though a few had children and kept a quieter presence.

My nights’ sleep was more than once disrupted by the throbbing base of a piece of ‘music’ that spoke to a visceral, instinctual encounter with nature (having nothing to do with the peaceful nature that surrounds this lake until it is so disrupted by humans trying to escape reality.)

Saturday the kicker came. I made my usual walk along the high road and immediately saw something was wrong. A camping unit sat in the trees where no vehicle had ever sat before. A family had moved in two shorter, older campers, parked them on and on each side of the road easement that forms the border between crown and private land. The easement is only a trail passable by careful off road driving of something more robust than a 4×4 truck. They camped on each side and across the road that is the only way to bring in a camping unit to this end of the random camping area and into the private land where I rent and camp. There is another lower, closer to the lake roadway, with tight turns, many roots and holes where stumps have been removed that exits in the lake side of the random camping area. There everyone sees me coming and going, and it’s impossible to bring water in and out since the rough road spills more water than not. In other words they were blocking my roadway out and back in.

The father said they were not completely set up yet, claimed they (with weed and alcohol in hand) that they wanted to camp away from the noise and partying of the other campers because of the children with them, and refused to consider moving to other established camping sites that were still available where they could fit both their campers.

The threats voiced towards me, the belligerence and profanity, the open threats, and the orders to leave belied … well it belied a fear in them. And an animal that is caught in fear can be unpredictable and destructive. I could well be caught in their unpredictable violence that certainly more than bubbled to the surface of one young man.

I returned a second time later, after continuing to work on the writing due that evening, as I had been before this unwelcomed surprise. I asked how long they would be there. The young man, bursting with profanity and incomprehensible challenges, came so close to striking me that I was shocked. Another man, broken with age, a long grey beard, challenged me as well. Because neither would engage in a meaningful exchange of words I turned to the father who had come around one of the campers to join the ‘not conversation’ and said they would be there until tomorrow.

Tomorrow has come and gone and they camp still there in the way, promising to vacate the roadway if I need to use it, but blocking it from all practical use.

The real threat they pose to me is, since they can see when I come and go, they and others have clear opportunity to come up to my camp and ransack it or sabotage pieces of essential equipment, loaned to me to help me survive year around here, or worse.

How to put an end to this?!

Remove them from the face of the earth? That method has been tried so often in history and the results are ugly and never successful, or if they appear to be successful the backlash is worse than than the problem one sought to solve.

Ignore them and let them block my roadway, and the roadway for others. Another family came in last night to a site along that lower, lakeside road … and busted up the awning on a tree. The road is not wide enough, the turns too tight, and the holes tip a camper into trees one is trying to avoid. Ignoring them campers blocking the roadway is a passable solution, and really the only option for now. The danger is that they will stay with whole summer, or that others will move in when they leave, and the block will continue, and the danger that comes with it.

Or I can reframe my mind about what constitutes a danger, and trust beyond reasonable trust, that though so many will know my comings and goings my camp will not be damaged (again, for the theft and sabotage has already happened more than a few times.)

Or I can work to build some trust with these fearful people, ameliorate their fear, and defuse their under-the-surface anger so that they are less unpredictable, and less likely to vent on me or my camp.

Which is the raw, unfaithful response?

Which is the immature faith response?

Which is the ‘refined gold’ response?

Which provides for ‘us’ and ‘them’ that which every soul yearns for: to be heard, to be treasured, to be encouraged, to be welcomed and accepted just as one is?

May God provide the ‘fire’ needed to refine our faith, so that in all we think, say, and do others will hear us rejoicing and calling on God’s name saying ‘The Lord is our God’, so that the Spirit may reveal with our praise, Jesus Christ’ glory and honour … and love for all people, those that threaten us and that part of us that lives in fear.

May God provide, through us, that every soul will b be heard, be treasured, be encouraged, be welcomed and accepted just as one is!

Dust and Ash Heaps

Wednesday, May 18, 2022

God Created Not One Person to Live In the Dust and Ashes

1 Samuel 2:8

He raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap,
to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honour.
For the pillars of the earth are the Lord’s, and on them he has set the world.

John 1:1

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Words of Grace For Today

God creates the universe, and, though evil and the results of it are always a necessary possibility (so that we can choose to love) God did not create people to live in the dust and ash heaps of life.

God created all people to live with honour,

with respect,

with sufficient clean air, pure water, adequate clothing and shelter,

meaningful labour,

being loved and able to love.

This is God’s blessing for us, that creation provides more than plenty for all to enjoy the necessities of life all their days on earth.

Through history (and certainly today) human greed and self-righteousness have driven so many into the dust and ash heaps of our excesses. What are we to do? Shake our heads in disgust at those living in the dust and ash heaps? Develop religions and ethics that allow us to ignore those poor, those without the necessities of a blessed life? Arrogantly assert that God created us and by our own hard work and merit we have earned and deserved more than the necessities of life even though that has thrown so many other people on to the slags heaps of life?

No!

God’s blessing pour over us.

We need not fear that there is not enough, no matter what the world (that’s all of us) tells us. We can share, and sharing every person will have the necessities of life. That may as well free those caught in the despair of having too much, for having more than enough drives one’s mind and way of living to become unnatural, other than as God created us to live.

God’s blessings pour over us,

with more than enough for all people.

Different? Precious!

Wednesday, May 4, 2022

Francesco Melzi’s Portrait of Leonardo da Vinci

As Neurodiverse as We Get!

As Many Children Are,

If We Would But Notice!

Psalm 127:3

Sons and daughters are indeed a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb and a reward.

Mark 9:36-37

Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’

Words of Grace For Today

In Jesus’ day, children were a nuisance of too much trouble to be ignored. One had to actively work to keep them … away, out from under foot. They were less than human and they died in droves. Why care for them? Why bother with them? Why? Why? Why?

Today we have a different attitude towards children, at least in some parts of the world. In other places they are soldier fodder, as long as they are big enough to carry guns. In some places they are sexual fodder, no size minimum. In some places they are labour fodder. In some places the girls are necessary for future wives, married off even prepuberty, and then boys carry on the family privileges. In other places only girls are valued and boys are ridiculed into self-loathing and shame (well that’s getting to be the case here at home too.)

No matter how we value them, children are a challenge. As infants until (hopefully) they are teenagers, they require care in order to survive, though there is no shortage of children having to fend for themselves at much younger ages.

So how do we appropriate them?

Like so many humans that we put less worth on, our appropriation of them, our valuing them, influences how they develop and how they live.

When we do not give value to others we diminish their lives.

Elders, revered by their culture, live longer. Not only that they live more capable much longer as well, thinking more clearly, moving more ably, contributing more value to their culture longer.

People we classify as ‘mentally ill’ herded into institutions, fared much more poorly (generally) than when they receive appropriate care, supports, and self determination living ‘in the population’. So today the ‘mental institutions’ that flourished in the 50’s and on have all but disappeared.

The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) first came out in 1880 in the USA. While the history of recognizing and suppressing (killing usually) expressions of neurodiversities is long and cruel, the ‘modern’ era certainly does not improve much on the damage done to people identified as mentally ill, though we’d like to think so.

The truth is neurodiversity is the evolutionary mechanism in the human brain allowing us as a whole species to adapt to a far greater spectrum of circumstances than would be possible otherwise. The list of artists, inventors, designers, discoverers, explorers, and geniuses is occupied almost entirely by neurodiverse persons. Why? Because they are capable of ‘thinking outside the box’, which is exactly how their brains work from the get go!

This does not minimize that many neurodiverse people face huge challenges just ‘getting along.’ I should say, though I am no genius, that I am one of this group, and have paid heavily for thinking and being different throughout my lifetime.

The real cost, as I have experienced is the cruelty shown me in the last decade by so many (also the courts). It goes like this: people tell you you are X (some kind of different), and they ridicule and devalue and silence and shun and incarcerate and shame you for being different, then one’s ability to ‘fit in’ becomes life threatening.

Not only do we experience the world differently and often more accurately than ‘normal’ people, we also have to dig deep in history and in ourselves to find our own worth, in the face of so many people cruelly devaluing us in order to try to establish their worth to be more than it is. Being ‘normal’ is not that great!

And then many sociopaths having risen to exceptionally powerful positions and extracted their power from the ‘normal’ masses. One can look at Putin today pouring soldiers lives into over running Ukraine, or Trump amassing popular support while he continues the stripping of money and opportunity from the ‘normal’ masses, the middle class, to provide for the huge corporations, whose legally defined primary value has to be profits (ie, taking from others for themselves.)

It’s been like this, with variations in players and their ways and means, since the beginning of time. How can one, even as a ‘normal’ person, live well yet alone survive in such a world order?

God’s shows us that this is not, this most certainly NOT, anything like what God intends for us. This is the cruel sin that God would save us from inflicting on each other and on ourselves.

For each person life starts in infancy, and one develops through childhood. During that time huge parameters are made as to how one lives thereafter. Some are hard parameters and one never outlives them. Many are ‘soft’ parameters, which one butts up against throughout one’s life though one can overcome them, maybe.

As Jesus came to love and save all people, Jesus certainly does not dismiss the children, devaluing them. Instead, Jesus demonstrates that children (like all people we devalue and cast out) can be appreciated and given attention, and therein give abundant life!

Some of us neurodiverse people have special gifts of receiving children, treating them so as to communicate to them that they are of great value (which they are!)

It is a deep, dark mark of sin on our culture that as we rush to value women (and falsely blame men wholesale for all the problems of the world) we play it out as a zero sum game. We make men lose as if that will help women! Worse, we devalue and falsely accuse and exile men who are so gifted with children (as if all so gifted men were instead sexually deviant and a threat to children!) The price is paid by us all, first by the children, and then by our collective loss of people who know their own value and give to life and to all people.

Such a loss.

Jesus would have it otherwise: ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’

The children are our future. How we teach them to value themselves and all creation and all creatures is our legacy. We set the parameters that our species will have to deal with in the future.

Ahh, people, treasure what is precious. Different is precious!

Plans and Preparing

Monday, May 2, 2022

Old and Ugly, But It Was Still Sort of a Home.

God Planned

We Live and Pray

and Work Diligently

To Survive

Isaiah 25:1

O Lord, you are my God; I will exalt you, I will praise your name;
for you have done wonderful things, plans formed of old, faithful and sure.

Ephesians 1:4-5

… just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will ….

Words of Grace For Today

Oh Ephesians, Ephesians! The end of one thought ending a sentence and the beginning of another in the next sentence, and both thoughts could stand separate from their sentences, to be placed together as they are here, in one sentence, and since there was no punctuation in the original Greek maybe we can get away with it, and maybe not. Though I’d think so, for now.

By contrast the thoughts in the Isaiah reading are repeated often enough in scripture: God created long ago, marvellously created the entire universe and it was good; and it is all created as God planned and we are a part of that.

So the Ephesians writer (psuedo-Paul) is on track: God created us. More than just create our species and let it run its course in time, God planned for each of us in the particular, knowing we would sin, and answering that with a plan for salvation for us all. In that salvation plan, demonstrated to us in Jesus’ life, ministry, death, and resurrection, we are not merely grabbed and dragged along for the remainder of our lives. We are given a history (Jesus’ record) of being holy, pure and blameless, filled with God’s love for all of creation and all people, and then sent out free.

More than free we are adopted, and destined to be adopted long before time began, – adopted we are as God’s own children. Just because God so chose this for us. And as God’s own we get to be God’s grace for all other people!

Covid Blues, and anything else that may come our way, you are nothing compared to the life, pure and blameless that God adopts us into. Come what may, God has prepared us for all that, and for being God’s adopted for other people.

A 5th wheel 40 foot camper unit was moved in last fall before the snows fell. The owner said he was there, homeless with no where else to go, but there only for two weeks, the legal limit. Two months later his truck still came and went until …

nothing.

No tracks.

No guy.

Spring melt came, traffic came.

Still no truck.

Still no guy.

Still the 5th wheeler sat unattended back off the road, yet so visible along the entrance road to the random camping area.

Fishing season is done.

Very little traffic comes and goes.

The two huge dips in the entrance road fill with ice-water-slush.

For weeks it takes an off road, raised 4×4 to get in or out.

Then two guys, one tall and lean the other shorter and stocky, show up in a red diesel truck on a Sunday afternoon, ‘just back from working up north’ and they wanted some peace from their women, or they say.

The next day with no sign of any other traffic in and out the locks on the 5th wheeler are broken, the door left swinging in the wind, and things have disappeared out of and from around the camper.

The next day a crossover stalls after getting through those water-ice-slush filled dips in the road into the random camping area. Lucky for the couple within a small infant, with an hour a truck comes along, and pulls that poor wheel-locked crossover back through one of those dips (the deepest one) and out of the way. But the crossover sits there for two days, unmoved before the couple returns to retrieve it.

The 5th Wheeler, though, still sits there abandoned as it has all winter long, though now it’s door swings in the breeze.

For this, the owner of that old camper, homeless as he may have been, certainly was not prepared.

Maybe no one can be prepared for losing nearly everything and then having the little bit that is left vandalized and open to wild animals (especially the real wild and dangerous kind on two legs).

Even if that were to happen to us, we are adopted, and given new life, pure and blameless, as God’s own.

God save us!

Still we pray fervently to be spared this further indignity and threat to our very life … and we work diligently to prepare that nothing is left unattended, un-watched, secured as best anything can be. It cannot be God’s plan, that homeless people are victims of thievery, losing the last bit of everything they have to keep them alive. So we pray, God save us. And we work to be ready for all the tomorrows that we may yet live to enjoy.

Always,

Always,

Always,

Especially in the face of dangerous wild animals,

We trust God,

and since God has chosen us as children, long before the beginning of time, so that in this time all will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well.

Tender Hearted

Friday, April 29, 2022

No Matter The Obstacles or Waves,

Christ Brings Us

to Tender Hearted

Grace for All People

Zechariah 8:17

Do not devise evil in your hearts against one another, and love no false oath; for all these are things that I hate, says the Lord.

Ephesians 4:32

And be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.

Words of Grace For Today

There are great ways to be in this world that provides us so little goodness.

God makes a start with us, and returns over and over again to restore us using everything possible to cure us of our our every ill that would drag us down to the pit.

Sometimes we are surprised like Saul on his way from Jerusalem to Damascus.

Saul sets out to bring in the rogue Christians, (Errant Lutherans we’d say.) Without warning The Light Strikes and The Voice Declares! And Everything is changed!

Sometimes lightning strikes (well near-strikes will do since a direct strike leaves little but a burned corpse), like Martin Luther, and we end up on a journey we had not anticipated.

Most often the journey starts rather routinely, like when a baptismal service starts or at the start of familiar songs at a concert. Hearing only the introductory chords the crowd breaks out into a roar of delight. After the applause rolls to silence the song fills the air, our minds, and our hearts, God at work:

… If it be your will, that a voice be true From this broken hill, I will sing to you From this broken hill All your praises they shall ring If it be your will … (Leonard Cohen’s If It Be Your Will)

The journey after that can be anything. God walks with us, and always calls us to be Grace for others, to be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven us.

The journey is full of challenges. Today the Covid Blues have set in most everywhere and intolerance, rage and violence erupt without warning around us, sometimes from within us.

What are we to do?

Martin Luther knew the blues all too well. His answer was to sit with his friend Philip Melanchthon, drink bear, and sing hymns.

Sounds, Sites, Smells, Memories, Hopes, Dreams. God uses it all to reach us and to restore us.

Whatever God guides us to do, there are so many people needing someone to reach out to them, with kindness, tender heartedness, and forgiveness.