Genesis 15:1-12

God of the Stars,

Inside these walls, I know it all – the crooks and crannies, the common pathways, the doors I close, the flaws I hide, the ways I pass time.  In this home of mine, life is known and patterns predict.

So when you come with words of a new future beyond these walls, I cannot help but echo Abram’s words,

“O Lord God,what will you give me
for I continue to be childless?”

Abram knows his home and the emptiness it echoes.  The emptiness has its well-worn pathways but that does not stop you.

You continue and persist – penetrating the complacent griefs and the practices that protect.  You extend your hand and invite us to step outside to see all that these walls have blocked out.

“Count the stars,” you told Abram.  Grasp the future yet to be.  Glimpse the magnitude that lives beyond the known.  Wrap your mind around all that lives outside of these walls and beyond this period of time.

I confess the ways that my mind has let these walls dictate the scope of my vision.

Call me outside to count the stars.

Stretch wide my sense of time.
Plunge deeper my rootedness in your divine life.
Ignite my imagination.

May I live in the wider world as one bound to you, God beyond these walls.

Amen.