Meditation: All the Wrong People
Texts: Genesis 12:1–9 | Matthew 9:9–13, 18–26
Take a slow breath.
Let your body settle.
Let yourself arrive here, just as you are.
You do not need to have it all figured out.
You do not need to be further along than you are.
You do not need to be different than you are right now.
Just be here. Just breathe.
· · ·
Here is an honest question to sit with: What is the box you have put God in?
We all have one.
We take the wild, uncontainable mystery of the divine and organize it into something manageable — doctrines, traditions, categories of who is in and who is out.
And the box feels like faithfulness.
But every now and then, we look up and discover that God has walked right out of it.
· · ·
Hear what God says to Abram:
Go from your country, your kindred, your father's house — to the land I will show you.
Not the land I will describe in advance.
The land I will show you — when you get there.
Notice what God is asking Abram to leave.
Not just his geography.
But his tribe. His belonging. His identity.
Everything that tells him who he is.
Gently ask yourself:
What is your settled world?
What is your father's house
— the comfortable certainty, the familiar tribe, the understanding of God that keeps you safe and leaves you unchanged?
Do not judge what rises. Just notice it.
· · ·
Now hear what Jesus does.
He walks past a tax collector's booth and says two words: follow me.
No probationary period.
No cleaning yourself up first.
Just: follow me.
And before the chapter ends,
he stops for a nameless, invisible woman and calls her daughter.
He takes the hand of a girl who has died and raises her to life.
Three people the world had written off.
Three people Jesus refuses to walk past.
Gently ask yourself:
Who am I walking past?
Whose name do I not know?
Whose hand am I not taking?
Do not judge what rises. Just notice it.
· · ·
Now pray:
Holy One,
you keep walking out of the boxes we build for you.
Forgive us for trying to contain you.
When my certainty has become a wall,
open a door in it.
When I am sitting at the wrong table,
call me to yours.
When I walk past the ones you are already moving toward,
stop me.
Give me the courage to leave the settled world
— to follow you into the unfamiliar,
toward the people I have been avoiding,
into the land you will show me when I get there.
Amen.
· · ·
Rest for a moment in this truth: The invitation is not to have it all figured out. It is simply to follow.
Take one slow breath as you return to your day.