God of the Soil,
In your extravagant generosity, you did more than create the tree and its fruit. You created the soil. You set into motion generative processes so that life might continue in eternal growth and production.
We praise your creation but we must also follow praise with confession. We confess that we do not understand your creation. Your generative process is counterintuitive to our instincts. We want more growth and you have made this possible. But we deny your process’s dependency on the process of pruning, clipping, trimming.
There are trees within me that are wasting the soil. There are plants that once had their glory days, branches heavy with fruit, that now are dry and brittle. Should I not allow myself to embrace this reality as reality, I will continue waiting for illusive redemption that will not come for it would be for my glory rather than yours.
Grant me the capacity to repent.
Allow me the strength to feel disappointment and failure.
Give me space to express my desire for a new day with new possibilities.
Waste not this soil you have give me. Prune these branches of past glory so that they might enrich the soil for all that is yet to be born anew.
In all the fruit yet to be shared and all the garden yet to bloom, may you be praised as the Generative God that we cannot understand but we can trust with our lives.
Amen.
pause.give.thanks 