Category: Pain of Life through History

Perishing and Surviving (for real!)

Thursday, August 12, 2021

We can arm ourselves

as much as we wish.

Only God’s Blessings

Can Save Us From the Real Enemy.

Psalm 9:3

My enemies turned back, they stumbled and perished before you.

Ephesians 1:3

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.

Words of Grace For Today

There are wonderful words to be able to speak about the challenges of life and the enemies that would do us in, such as:

My enemies turned back, they stumbled and perished before you.

Or even less concrete, though much more valuable:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.

We need more than enemies that stumble and perish, we need more than the physical results of force that cost our enemies their lives. We need … well we need God on our side, or rather we need some hope that we can be seen by God to be on God’s size. Well, more than seen … we need to know that God has us on God’s side.

What we know, in our honest moments, is that there is no way on this blessed earth that we even know how to be on God’s side all the time, or even sometimes for more than a moment or two, if that.

So how can we even hope that God will ensure we are on God’s side?

We have only God’s word, God’s promises, and Jesus’ story, which is as much as we will get, and

…

more than we need.

God walks with us. We are not doing what God wants us to do all the time. God ensures we do God’s will as much as God can guide us to do so, sometimes in spite of us or what seems to be by accident by us. God certainly does get wondrous works out of us saints.

The greatest work begins as we confess and give God thanks that Jesus has brought God’s grace to bear on us. This great work is oft repeated, as many times as we stray from God’s will for us, which is so many times we cannot count them even those in one of our days. This work is completed when we show God’s grace to others so that they may know God as the One who walks with them, graciously bringing them to abundant life.

When we do that we know once again without a doubt that God

has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,

and God has blessed us in Christ with every creaturely blessing in the concrete earthly places that God gives us to walk in and through for our days in God’s blessed creation.

The world is after all God’s and God blesses us to live in it, to life abundantly in it, as God’s Grace-made saints.

Dreams, Power, & Home

Thursday, August 5, 2021

God’s home for us home is built

on the power of God’s

mercy, grace and enduring kindness

Jeremiah 23:28

Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let the one who has my word speak my word faithfully. What has straw in common with wheat? says the Lord.

1 Corinthians 2:4-5

My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.

Words of Grace For Today

God speaks to us in many and various ways.

Prophets reported their dreams, many waking dreams, that they knew were God speaking to them. They warned the people (usually the kings and rulers, but also the common folk) of the sin and evil of their ways and God’s response of ruin and exile. They encouraged the people in ruin and exile to have courage, for God would not leave them abandoned. The warned kings and rulers of God’s people and their enemies of the destruction that would come because of their foolish, proud, arrogant, and stubborn ways of trying to find their own way without or against God!

These words remain as they have been collected and recorded. They are warnings, cautions, and encouragements still for us today.

Even so these words, from dreams and prophetic wisdom given by God, most always work from the power of might that can destroy one’s enemies.

There were many false prophets, people who spoke their dreams as if they were from God, and the dreams and the prophets were not from God at all. Even when the words were wise, or wise of a sort, they were not from God.

Jeremiah compares these false prophets to the straw that is left after the wheat is harvested. They do not bear good fruit, though until the harvest they support the good fruit of grain that feeds the people.

Straw is nothing like wheat in its value and ability to sustain life. Straw is laid down to absorb the excrement and urine from animals in a barn or barn yard. Wheat is ground to make food for people or maybe mash for young animals or as a nutritious supplement for animals. Wheat feeds. Straw once used is set out to rot or to be burned.

So the words of false prophets, even those alive today, are worth little but to absorb crap, and attract crap they do until the dung heap in politics and on the internet starts to rot and stink to high heaven.

Precious are the words from God, as wheat is precious. They give life.

How can we know the difference? Sometimes it is a challenge and we are duped into believing false words of false hope … that drive us further from hope!

The difference is in the power in the words. The power of might that can destroy is not the power of God’s word. The power of God’s word is what God does with our lack of might, our lack of character, our lack of integrity, our lack of goodness, our lack of faith, our weakness of the most miserable kinds.

The power of God’s word is that it addresses our weaknesses and failings with grace, with mercy and kindness, with forgiveness and renewed life. God’s power is made known in how God gives abundant life to even the greatest sinners and the most horrible people. God’s power is made known in the sacrifice that God makes, giving the life of his own son over to the power that would destroy life. God makes this sacrifice in order to communicate to us (in Jesus’ story) God’s love for us, and the lengths that God goes to in order to offer us grace, and acceptance, and renewed life, and a home with all the saints of all time.

Welcome home! This is where the treasure of the fruit of the vine, the kernel of wheat, and the heart of love and hope is made real by God’s love for us. This is where there is food enough for all and a feast for every soul no matter how bruised or beaten. This is where everyone is actually welcome. It’s not just an empty phrase of a congregation looking for like-minded self-righteous people to fill the pews and pay the bills, but hating and condemning those who are different.

Whoever you are … this home is built not with power and might, cement and wood, furniture and cupboards. This home is built on the power of God’s mercy, grace and enduring kindness.

Welcome home!

Plumb line – Remember & Pray

Monday, July 26, 2021

Even the blessing of a sandy beach

Can be darkened by a dirt.

All is possible in God’s creation,

Good and Evil.

Amos 7:2-3

When locusts sent by God had finished eating the grass of the land, I said, ‘O Lord God, forgive, I beg you! How can Jacob stand? He is so small!’ The Lord relented concerning this; ‘It shall not be,’ said the Lord.

1 Timothy 2:1

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings should be made for everyone.

Words of Grace For Today

God sends locusts and then plagues that devastate Israel. Amos begs God to forgive the people, and God does. Yet God establishes a plumb-line in Israel’s midst, and God will not pass them by … yet then Amos reports:

The Lord said, ‘See, I am setting a plumb-line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass them by; the high places of Isaac shall be made desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste, and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword.’

God follows up relenting and forgiveness with full desolation of Israel’s high places and sanctuaries, with their enemy rising up powerfully with the sword against them!

This does not seem like God provides much of a life for Israel. The message is clear: God does not protect anyone, not even the most blessed, from the consequences of sin and evil in the world, their own sin and the sin other others around them, and the evil that would take all we build up as signs of our prosperity and security we provide ourselves.

Paul, knowing full well the price that can be suffered by even himself though he deserved none of the persecution directed at him, advises the younger disciple Timothy (and all of us reading the letter so many generations later) to continue in practising his (our) faith by making supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings for everyone.

We cannot save ourselves. Nor can we save others from the evil and consequences of sin that is possible since God has given us the freedom to choose to love God and all creation.

We can remember that God has saved us.

We can remember that God has saved us and continues to save us each day.

We can remember that God has saved us and continues to save us each day though we do not deserve it.

We can remember that God has saved us and continues to save us each day though we do not deserve it, at no cost to us, fully paid for by Jesus’ sacrifice and God’s Good Will for us.

We can remember to pray … each day …

in thanks for all God does for us

and for all people, that they would also remember God’s mighty, blessed works for them.

Give Us Kindness

Monday, May 24, 2021

Sometimes

Breaking Apart Is Going To Happen

Given Our Choices to Remain

Unbending

and Unkind

Psalm 34:15

The eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their cry.

1 Corinthians 7:15

But if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so; in such a case the brother or sister is not bound. It is to peace that God has called you.

Words of Grace For Today

Jesus had it right: Moses allowed for divorce, not because it is good, or willed by God, or right in anyway. Rather Moses allowed for divorce because God knows that in our sin we will marry and promise to love one another until death do us part, and then we will live such sinful lives as to break that promise and every other promise until we married couples will drive each other into despair with our broken hearts, minds and bodies, unable to love, trust, or hope for each other any more.

Paul had his convoluted hang ups about sex, marriage, and celibacy. His words on those matters rarely provide much wisdom or health to those who try to follow his advice. Yet here Paul has it sort of right: those who are not faithful to God and each other are most often better allowed to divorce and start life in peace from the hell that unfaithfulness brings to all.

Like most of Paul’s advice on these matters their are limits to his wisdom. As best we ‘know’ today it is not necessary that a couple have the same ‘faith’ or ‘religion’ in making a marriage reflect the goodness of life that God intended couples to experience and give witness to for those around them. Today we ‘know’, sort of anyway, that what makes a marriage work is often not that each in a couple have the same faith, but more importantly that they each have the same ‘intensity’ of faith.

Thus couples who share a complete disinterest in faith, religion, or spirituality (it is given many different names to try to establish that one’s ‘made up, personally customized faith’ is valid) can reflect God’s blessings as clearly as those who are most devote and share the same faith, worshipping together in their daily lives.

Regardless of what we think we ‘know’ today, regardless of how we ‘customize’ our ‘faith’, God’s promise remains true for all people: The eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their cry.

In this promise all couples, and all those around, can trust that God walks with us, no matter what convoluted hang ups about sex, marriage, and celibacy we may accept as a guide for our lives. The constant truth is there is no easy way to bring two sinners together as a married (or not married) couple and sustain their love, lives, and hopes through their relationship. That relationship will only flourish if God so aides the couple.

God alone can enable us to remain kind to each other. Everything else we can work out, if we remain kind. Without deep and profound kindness on both people’s part all hell will break loose … which nothing can mend except kindness rediscovered as forgiveness for oneself, for one’s partner, and for those around who inevitably ‘mess’ in couple’s lives to no good end!

We can thank God that divorce is available to us, not that it is good, but that it is too often less hell than continuing in a relationship broken by unkindness.

Moreso we thank God that God enables us to generously forgive ourselves, our loved ones, and our many ‘not loved ones’ who mess with our lives, so that kindness can serve as the foundation for our closest relationships.

Kindness is simply a primary manner of living out God’s Grace!

May you find peace, so that you may be kind this day … to all of God’s people, to all God’s creation.

Living by God’s Promise

Sunday, May 23, 2021

We Are Quite Small in All Creation and Time!

God Rules

over All

Daniel 4:31-32

While the words were still in the king’s mouth, a voice came from heaven: ‘O King Nebuchadnezzar, to you it is declared: The kingdom has departed from you! You shall be driven away from human society, and your dwelling shall be with the animals of the field. You shall be made to eat grass like oxen, and seven times shall pass over you, until you have learned that the Most High has sovereignty over the kingdom of mortals and gives it to whom he will.’

Titus 3:6-7

This Spirit he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Saviour, so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

Words of Grace For Today

To those who wish to lord power and destruction over others, to try to build their place in God’s creation and in time, like Nebuchadnezzar, .. to all doers of evil against God, God’s people, and any of God’s creation, God brings judgment and humility. God drives them, like Nebuchadnezzar, away from human society, to dwell with the animals of the field … to eat grass like oxen. All time shall pass over them until they have learned that the Most High has sovereignty over the kingdom of mortals and gives it to whom he will.

The power that God gives to God’s people is not to ‘lord it over’ others.

Rather through Jesus our Saviour we are justified by his grace, so that we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

We live in that hope and promise that life given to us now is abundant, and knowing and trusting this we are freed to live out God’s love for all people, to exercise for all others the same grace that God exercises for us in and through the telling of the old, old story of Jesus and his love.

Living in that promise, no matter what befalls us, no matter what enemies attack us with violence or lies, no matter our health, no matter how we suffer Covid (with illness, threat, or stress of the restrictions placed on our lives, or the lengthening of the pandemic and unnecessary risk Covidiots add to our lives) … no matter our circumstances, we are able to thank God for all we are and have, and to sing each day, Take my life that it may be, consecrated Lord to thee.

Thus we know, trust and live out that all is well, all is well, all manner of things are well with us … for God walks with us and God has sovereignty over the entire universe.

Thanks be to God!

Melodies Disparate and Haunting

Friday, May 21, 2021

Woods, Meadow, Mountains or Plain

We are Always Hungry in the Wilderness

Nehemiah 1:6

Lord, may your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer of your servant that I now pray before you day and night for your servants the people of Israel, confessing the sins of the people of Israel, which we have sinned against you. Both I and my family have sinned.

James 5:16

Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective.

Words of Grace For Today

The smoke at first curls and twists around and down to the ground as the fire starts to burn. The song birds’ melodies from the woods mix with the loon wails across the water. A distant dog barks always hungry that one. Then as the fire develops coals the hotter smoke, still grey and white, takes a straighter path upwards and away. Seagulls in a flock scream and screech across the meadow. The distant dog barks always hungry that one. Two solo geese fly over honking, their mate on the nest keeping an egg, maybe two or more, warm in the sub-zero pre-sunrise cold. Without notice or care the smoke turns transparent, so hot the smoke particles become invisible, until six feet up from the homemade chimney rain cap it cools to become visible grey again. In the distance the dog still barks, always hungry that one.

Our voices rise to God, sometimes in melodies sweet with praise, sometimes sorrowful wails, sometimes honking, calling attention to ourselves (at our best it is not just hubris but to provide a tiny bit of safety for the vulnerable, as the parent ducks and geese do), sometimes in screams and screeches desperate it seems though it too often is not so, and sometimes like smoke our voices rise to God full of all that our lives have consumed, too cool to rise, hot and clouded, or searing hot and invisible.

Always our voices rise to God because we are hungry, always hungry … for the bread of life, the living water, the light of the universe … for love

…

and we do not understand how to receive all that is already provided to us

…

so we are always hungry.

Then without notice or care God’s Grace permeates our living, we see the awesome wonders of God’s Love and will for us and all creation and

…

we are exposed,

so exposed,

exposed

as the sinners, the unfit creatures in a marvellous creation, that we are.

Our response can only be to lift our voices to God with Nehemiah:

Lord, may your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer of your servant that I now pray before you day and night for your servants the people of [fill in your people], confessing the sins of the people of [fill in your people], which we have sinned against you. Both I and my family have sinned.

We cannot confess other’s sins. We confess the sins in which we have participated with others and benefited from, namely the sins of our people of [fill in your people]. We acknowledge our shared sins, and our family sins … and our own personal sins.

This is the first step of becoming aware of God, yet once again, as we traverse our days on the side of God’s holy mountains, in God’s holy plains, and in God’s holy woods and wildernesses.

Confession brings healing so that we then are ready to do what we are called to do,

God’s work bringing abundant life to all people.

And our voices rise to God once again in melodies disparate and haunting … in profound thanks

for all God has provided for us.

Destroy, … or … Jesus’ Story De-story’d

Sunday, May 9, 2021

How Often We Try to Change

God’s Story for Us

Into Something More to Our Liking

And We Destroy (de-storying) Ourselves!

Deuteronomy 33:27

He subdues the ancient gods, shatters the forces of old; he drove out the enemy before you, and said, ‘Destroy!’

Luke 1:50

His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.

Words of Grace For Today

Lord have mercy on us!

The people, led by Joshua, move across the Jordan into the Promised Land. They are going to take it, occupy it, and claim it as their God given right. They have something of a claim to some of the land, for this is where Abraham and Sarah raised first Ishmael and then Isaac, and their grandchildren, Jacob and Esau, and after them the great grandchildren including Joseph. The 2nd generation of those who ran from Pharaoh’s slavery to be delivered into the Wilderness are all there is left, for those that were delivered from Pharaoh’s chariots and army through the Red Sea, turned against God at Sinai, made a godlet, an idol of their own gold in the form of a calf, and worshipped it.

Now, the story is told that God has subdued the ancient gods, shattered the forces of old, driven out the enemy before them and called on them to ‘Destroy.’

For the Love of God, how can we mess up God’s story for us so badly.

And then Luke continues in the same vein, for it is not a seldom embraced idea that somehow ‘we’ are good or at least ‘chosen’ and ‘blessed by God’ and they (or all others) are bad and not chosen and not blessed, and here as it reads are destroyed.

First off we ought to notice with open minds that the ancient gods are not subdued. They and their supports in force have risen up in the form of ‘new age’ religions.

Second off we ought to notice that God has not driven off the enemy before us. The enemy is still here, doing great damage to so many people. Further, the greatest enemy is not those that work against us; it is ourselves working against God who give power to evil from others and from within ourselves. We end up worshipping that ‘golden calf’ of our own making from our own ‘gold’. We turn from God as fast and thoroughly as any of God’s people ever have!

Third off we ought to notice that humans have used God as an excuse to ‘destroy’ since the beginning of time. The story of Jesus, the old, old story of Jesus and God’s love does not include destroying our enemies. It teaches us that we, like God does for us and all people, are called to love, forgive, and hope that God can save our enemies, as God has saved us.

Lastly we ought to notice that God’s mercy, in so much of Jesus’ story this is made blatantly obvious, extends not to just a chosen few, not to just those who fear and trust God, but to all people, even our worst enemies! God’s mercy extends to all people, from generation to generation.

Those who God has saved, as we are, received abundant life. That is not a life of comfort and abundance. It is life lived, no matter our circumstances, blessed with God’s truth, with God’s Promise, and with the call to extend Grace and life abundant to as many people as we possibly can in our ‘3 score, ten’ that we breathe.

Lord have mercy on us, all!

Adversity and True Strength

Wednesday, April 21, 2021

Life is a series of reflections

on us.

What have we,

What will we,

do

for others to enjoy an abundant life?

Isaiah 48:10

See, I have refined you, but not like silver; I have tested you in the furnace of adversity.

Luke 6:22-23

Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

Words of Grace For Today

This life may be terrible and even horrendous, but it will be all right in heaven, so this is all right, too, right?

What doesn’t kill you, makes you strong, right?

Too often these rather stupid simplifications of valid ideas are used as excuses to allow psychological or physical violence and abuse to continue. The truth is there are scars from many things that do not make one stronger.

Perhaps the worse use of these is to justify that some people can enjoy great wealth, privilege, and comfort, while others struggle to stay alive, and others die very ignoble deaths, all in order to make the ‘chosen’ few able to be wealthy, privileged, and comfortable.

God did not make creation for us to live in a while and then escape from it’s injustices to heaven. God made all of creation, saw the accomplished work of creating, and said, “It is Good!”

Life for all people is designed to be GOOD!

GOOD does not mean without pain or suffering evil, for then there is also no possibility to love and experience joy. Pain and suffering – and – love and joy are part and parcel of the kind of life God created us for.

We live and love and experience joy. Some day the people we love will suffer and die. We will then also suffer and experience pain.

And it is all Good.

It is true that those who enjoy wealth, privilege, and comforts now at the expense of others being able to live abundant lives will, for eternity, suffer their choices to be blind and deaf to what they do to others.

It is also true that those who suffer and know only pain, will for eternity be released from that horrible kind of experience and they will know joy forever.

Our lives here and now are not to simply accept all suffering and pain as necessary. It is to work as hard as we can to mitigate and minimize all pain and suffering, to provide an abundant life for everyone!

That’s a life full and long of hard, dedicated work of love, not the sentimental kind of love, the real kind of love that puts one into action and pulls one to sacrifice so that others can live well.

What makes us strong, truly strong, is to know that even as we suffer and are in pain God walks with us, still creating, still seeing all that God does through us, and God says, “It is Good.”

Therefore we know that already today all will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well.

White Mountain of God’s Grace

Friday, April 16, 2021

White Mountain Surrounded by Lush Forest?

…

OR

an ash dump?

Inglorious As They Are

Ashes Remind Us

How Undeserving We Are

And

How Gracious God Is To All People.

Deuteronomy 18:10-12

No one shall be found among you who makes a son or daughter pass through fire, or who practises divination, or is a soothsayer, or an augur, or a sorcerer, or one who casts spells, or who consults ghosts or spirits, or who seeks oracles from the dead. For whoever does these things is abhorrent to the Lord; it is because of such abhorrent practices that the Lord your God is driving them out before you.

Ephesians 5:9-11

For the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true. Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.

Words of Grace For Today

For whoever does these things is abhorrent to the Lord; it is because of such abhorrent practices that the Lord your God is driving them out before you.

Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.

Good old judgment of others who practice different beliefs, followed by exiling them.

The quality that is unacceptable of the practices that are of darkness and such abhorrent practices is that they seek to claim control of what cannot be controlled.

While these practices named in Deuteronomy are unacceptable and abhorrent practices, because they deny that we are dependent on God alone for everything, we ‘good’ Christians in the church have all sorts of practices by which we try to control what cannot be controlled, and thus to control other people with rewards for compliance and punishments for non-compliance with our ill-informed claims of what is ‘right’ and ‘good’.

Should we exile all the people from the church who practice the dark arts of controlling what cannot be controlled, that is: trying to control God’s will for creation and us people in it? Were we to do that I’m quite sure that there would only be left one person, the one devilish person who evaded being exiled by others by being the exiler of all others.

In other words: we all deserve condemnation.

Thanks be to God that God is gracious.

God is gracious to all people, even those who practice abhorrent dark practices.

Our response, so much healthier for all, is to be grateful, rather than judgmental.

Yet we so often choose to ‘get rid of the trouble makers’. Thus our churches are not filled with sinners. Instead they are mostly empty, and those that come are mostly judgmental sinners.

God have mercy on us all!

The Day of the Lord

Monday, March 29, 2021

The Glory of the Lord

is not only a ‘some day’ hope.

It is evident every day

in the simplest ways.

Zechariah 14:9

The Lord will become king over all the earth; on that day the Lord will be one and his name one.

Revelation 22:3-4

Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.

Words of Grace For Today

The Day of the Lord has many names. It is the day when all the wrong, sin, and evil that humans have perpetrated against each other and against creation and against God will cease and the after-effects will cease as well.

In human terms the rule of unjust humans over others will cease, and God will be king over all the earth and over all people; justice and truth, mercy and compassion, forgiveness and life-giving love will be the way humans will interact with each other.

In divine terms, all that is accursed will no longer exist. The city of God, the New Jerusalem, will be founded (or revealed to us). Jesus is the sacrificial lamb, given to convince us in terms we understand, that God forgives and loves us unconditionally – and that there is no limit to the lengths God will go to to forgive us and more, to convince us we are forgiven. Except God will not violate our freewill as beings capable of love. God will love us, forgive us, walk with us, stand by us, care for us, guide us … but God will not take away our ability to love ourselves, each other, all creation, and God.

This Jesus will no longer be a sacrificial lamb. He will be raised to the most exalted position, to sit on God’s throne, ruling with sacrificial love, over all the universe.

The Day of the Lord has many names and many images and many hopes expressed in them.

The Day of the Lord is the day when all that is wrong will be set right.

Those who benefit from the wrong that is now perpetrated and live lives of comfort will cease to live in comfort. They rightly fear and deny that the Day of the Lord will ever come.

The great majority of humans who have ever lived, and the great majority of those who live on earth now, will no longer suffer the ignominy of being forced to provide comforts and luxuries for others at the expense of the basic necessities of life, and even their lives. For the great majority of humans the Day of the Lord is the expression of hope that provides the little comfort available to them; on that day all will be set right, and those responsible and blithely benefiting from the wrong will no longer exist.

The Day of the Lord has been anticipated for generation upon generation … and is yet to come to be. Still we do not give up hope that God will set right all the wrongs that are done against us. We do not give up hope that God will set right the little wrongs (and not so little) that we do to each other.

Freedom. Hope. Life based solely on forgiveness and love.

We are not yet at the Day of the Lord.

For now, our sins give witness to God’s response to our failings: God forgives and loves and renews us.

For now, we get to be bearers of the Good News that God has placed before us in many and various ways, and in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection: namely that the substance of life is love, and the glue that holds it together, and the lubricant that makes it still move is unconditional forgiveness and love.

For now we have quite the life to live and to live that life in the full expectation of the Day of the Lord pulling us forward through each day’s challenges (including all that Covid 19 makes more obvious.)