Beauty 365 … Stories of Love and Life for Everyday
Lock-down journey Day 33…A change of perspective.
This photo is taken flat on my back on the mat of our backyard trampoline.
We procured this trampoline many years ago. It was well used in its heyday. At the time, I was homeschooling the children, so most days, schooling breaks meant a ‘jump on the tramp’. If I recall correctly, it came with instructions that said, ‘Jump with caution, one person at a time’, what a joke! Thankfully though, to date it’s never been the cause of a broken bone. Maybe a broken tooth or two and a few bruises, but that’s not bad when I think of all the double bouncing, stacks-on and wrestling it has seen!
For the last several years it has seldom been used, apart from when other families visited, for whom it was a novelty. More recently we have discussed giving it away. To me it has become little more than an eye-sore; a giant space shuttle type gizmo, landed in our garden, long grass growing underneath, impossible to tame with the mower.
During these lock-down days, however, the trampoline has made a resurgence; kids jumping together to music, or sometimes lying listening to a lecture in the sunshine.
Day 32, and something lured me, too, onto this trampoline upon which I haven’t been in years! I felt decidedly old ladyish, hauling myself up onto the mat. My daughter joined me for a jump but the combination of laughing and jumping wasn’t a good idea, so I lay on the mat, and stared up. What glory! I surveyed the world from that new angle…the blue, the clouds, the trees and birds, and I wondered why I hadn’t ventured there sooner and oftener.
In the readings of these Easter days, the many people to whom Christ appears after His resurrection, who at first, fail to recognise him, have astounded me. I have been prompted to ask myself what I am failing to see? What or who is right under my nose that, because I am too constrained by deadlines, juggling too many things at once, undertaking one task while thinking about the next, and desiring what I don’t have, I simply fail to see?
I am grateful for these slow-down days and am asking God for the grace to see more clearly. And I’m off again to the ‘tramp’ to do it!
