We began our yoga class backwards to what we normally do. At least that’s how I felt with a new teacher who began the class differently. We began lying down and then went to poses on our backs. Our instructor said given the clouds and darkness of the Northwest morning that it would be good to start this way. It wasn’t what I wanted to do. Usually, we begin with more rigorous upright poses and movements and then we lie down at the end after having “earned” that right with great amounts of sweat. That made sense to me. But today, we went a different way. Much of my life seems to be starting backwards first these days.
Our first Halloween as newlyweds was a shocking eye opener! Who in the world had I married?! It was Dan’s fourth year of his Master’s of Divinity in Philadelphia and I had left him home alone to go to a quilting class. I returned home and asked him if he had handed out all of the candy to the trick-or-treaters. He answered he had given nothing away because he studied the whole evening and never came down from the third floor attic to answer the doorbell. I was horrified that I had married such a man. That never happened again.
Many of the years Dan was traveling and other fathers or teenage children of friends stepped in to shepherd our children so I could stay at home and pass out candy. One Colorado snowy Halloween Dan and Dave, a fellow neighbor, took the children and trick or treated for beer (well, the beer cans came home and were enjoyed with neighboring parents at a later date). My heart was light that Halloween. There was much to be thankful for and laughter was easier that year.
As I prepare for Annie and the boys to come this weekend Dan is gone. He is doing a fundraiser for the very first home for trafficked boys in our country! There are an estimated 150,000 sex trafficked minor girls in our country. And there are, to my amazement, 150,000 sex trafficked minor boys in our country as well! This is a new statistic I cannot wrap my mind around. We are supposedly the richest country in the world and we have a totaI of 44 beds for trafficked minors in this country! And as of now, not a single bed available for a trafficked boy! So, as I prepare for my grandsons to come I pray. I pray and I am grateful that Dan is away helping to raise awareness of this horrific reality. I pray and the sorrow of what I just wrote intensifies in my heart.
And that takes us back to yoga class, which began backwards. I didn’t want to begin lying down and working towards standing and balancing poses. I wanted to do the hard things first so I could rest at the end. Isn’t that how our lives have been? We have done the hard things first. Like, the disappointments of our childhood and adolescence and then the agony of watching our children having to live through their own journeys. I know, I know. There was so much joy for us and for our children, but let’s be real, much of it was lonely and hard. And that is nothing like the hell many children of this world live in.
Still there is a belief to which I hold: There is a new day ahead. There is a day when wrong will be righted. A new day when the lion will lie down with the lamb. The day my grandson loves to hear about, when sickness will be no more. When evil will not prowl endlessly on this earth. I believe in the resurrection of Jesus. I believe in the resurrection of the dead. I say this out loud. I read the passages that give me hope to see the good and not to forget the bad. And to do this, I have to begin backwards to get to what will some day be.
Becky Allender lives on Bainbridge Island with her loving, wild husband of 36 years. A mother and grandmother, she is quite fond of sunshine, yoga, Hawaiian quilting and creating 17th Century reproduction samplers. A community of praying women, loving Jesus, and the art of gratitude fill her life with goodness. She wonders what she got herself into with Red Tent Living!
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