She Keeps Them on Her
The word for Friday, September 4, 2026 is She Keeps Them on Her.
The anchor verses are Matthew 5:45 and Lamentations 3:23.
Bridget Josey is sixty-one years old and she carries bubble guns.
Not one. Several small ones, in whatever bag she has with her. She lives in Lansing, Illinois, grew up on Chicago's South Side, and works in records and information management for the federal government.
After the Taste of Chicago this summer she got on a crowded CTA bus to go home. She had the bubbles with her. So she took one out and filled the aisle.
The bus changed immediately. Riders cheered. The driver was laughing too. Somebody filmed it, and the video has passed two hundred thousand views.
She has done it at Navy Pier. At a White Sox game. At the Black Women's Expo. At Lollapalooza, where she sent bubbles toward Perry Farrell, who founded the festival, and then met him. Around the city people have begun calling her the Bubble Lady.
Asked why she carries the bubble guns everywhere, Josey gave a short answer.
"I gotta keep them on me."
It started with her five-year-old grandson. They played with bubbles together. She liked what happened around them, so she kept doing it in public, among people she had never met and would probably never see again.
Jesus says something about weather that gets quoted so often the force can disappear.
He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.
Jesus is talking about enemy love. HIS point is not that GOD cannot tell good from evil. HIS point is that GOD does not ration the ordinary gifts of creation according to a moral score.
There is no gate on sunrise.
The person who kept every promise gets morning. The person who broke one gets morning too. Rain falls without asking who owns the field.
Nobody on that bus qualified for bubbles.
They were commuting. Some had come from a festival. Some may have been tired. Josey did not survey them. She made no finding about who deserved anything. She opened the bag and the whole aisle got the same thing.
That does not make bubbles grace. It makes them a useful picture of something grace has always refused to become.
Payment.
Jesus tells other stories with the same pressure in them. Workers hired near the end of the day receive a full wage and the people who worked longer complain. A son burns through everything, walks home with nothing, and finds his father already coming down the road. In both stories somebody is doing arithmetic and somebody is offended by generosity.
Grace handed over as wages would no longer be grace. It would be a receipt.
Somebody reading this has been trying to earn GOD's warmth.
Not out loud. Just an interior account running quietly. Behind on the reading. Short with the kids. The same thought you keep having and would never say in front of anybody. You add up the week and wonder whether GOD has moved farther away.
That account has no bearing on the sun coming up.
You did not qualify for this morning. Nobody did. Light arrived over Lansing and Chicago and wherever you are, on people keeping promises and people breaking them, and none of it was priced.
Lamentations goes deeper because it refuses to pretend that a morning gift means the night was easy.
It is of the LORD'S mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning.
A few lines earlier the speaker says GOD made him walk in darkness. He says his soul has been deprived of peace. The ruined city is still ruined.
Then he says the compassions are new every morning.
Both sentences stay.
That matters because grace is sometimes mistaken for a reward that arrives after the hard thing is fixed. Lamentations will not let us do that. The morning mercy arrives while the book is still a lament.
Josey's bubbles do not repair Chicago. They do not heal a family or pay a bill or make a hard week disappear. She goes back to work. Everybody on that bus went back to whatever was waiting for them.
For a few minutes, something good came down the aisle from somebody who was not keeping score.
Josey has said that is what she wants. A few minutes of joy in a world carrying heavier things. She is not claiming the bubbles solve those things. She keeps them on her because sometimes a crowded bus can become lighter without anybody earning it first.
That is enough for the picture.
GOD knows exactly who is receiving HIS gifts. HE knows every failure and every kindness. HE is not careless with either one.
And still the sun rises.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
- 🙏 To the one who has been quietly keeping an account of yourself for years and has never once come out ahead.
- 🙏 To the one who gives something away every day to people who never learn your name.
- 🙏 To the one who thinks GOD's warmth rises and falls with the quality of your week.
- 🙏 To the one who woke up this morning owing more than you can pay and has told nobody.
Grace and Peace.