Stepping Out Toward Christ

                                                                                                                         
          I call to you all day long, have mercy on me, O Lord.
     You are good and forgiving, full of love for all who call to  you.
                                                                                           
                                                                                    Psalm 86:3,5

Late, late evening turning into morning the long call from a coyote drew me out of my reading onto the back porch.  I stood in moonlight listening to his cry, the loneliness and hunger of it across the moon-drenched and starlit fields; leaves of the thick tree lines nesting it beneath queen Cassiopeia and old Saturn; beneath the canopy of God; my leaning out from the railing, lingering.  How I have cried out to the Lord God in the sparkling dream of night with a cry so desolate and lost and how He calls back, throwing His voice across the immeasurable distances I have created between us over and over like the chorus of coyotes' coming closely by.  Leave your life and follow me He begs, even now, in the silences between the possibilities and finality. 

Oh, you do not have to be bound and chained, only step outside and walk away from the house you have constructed, step out from the planks onto the dark waves of the air and live in Christ!