Benediction: In the midst of your own chaos may your eyes and heart remain open to see, receive and nurture the fragile gifts of hope that spring up around you. May you find strength in the God who hears you, remembers you and acknowledges you.

Benediction: May your eyes and heart wake up to the land you are actually living in. May you notice all the places that continually leave you suffocated and oppressed. May you also confess the ways you have made life narrow for others. May the forgotten names and stories of shalom mark for us the path forward.

Benediction: May we look past our individual comforts and remember our communal identity. May we see how we might be where we are for such a time as this, and open ourselves to our role in the restoration of shalom. May we wrestle with how we might risk our privilege for the sake of others.

Benediction: May your experience of God break free from the limitation of gender. May you honor all of the voices that paint for you pictures of God. May you give yourself, and others, permission to embrace the divine beauty found in both the masculine and feminine.

Benediction: May you recognize all the ways you try to change God's plan, especially when you've been invited to walk the road of suffering. When love shows up and offends you; because it looks different than you had hoped, may you continue to trust that love know the way to wholeness.

Benediction: May you find the courage to dig in your heels, to stay and not go, to persist and not turn back; so that you might bear witness to the ground beneath your feet revealing that which has been there all along.

Benediction: May you remember that your power to choose will never be taken from you and when used, it can make all the difference in your life and also in the life of others.

Benediction: May your desire for more of God invite you to refrain from the bottles and bread that keep leaving you empty and hungry. May you make room at your table, and in your heart, for the cup and the bread you don't fully understand. In making room may you be surprised by nourishment, healing and hope like you've never known.

Benediction: May you learn a loyalty to one another that calls you out of darkness and makes curious every onlooker and observer. May the words you speak be dripping with life, so that you might discover the many who are desperate to sit at your table. May the way you love be extravagantly free of asking for anything in return. And when you lose your way, keep company with God, keep loving.

Benediction: In the famines of our lives, when we are convinced there is nothing left to give, may we present to one another a generous spirit of hope. May we come to see and understand that the invitation to leave the narrow place is always presenting itself to us.