Postures that Prepare Us
Jun 3
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Jenny Gehman
"Please place your seat backs and tray tables in their full upright position.”
My husband and I flew from Pennsylvania to Colorado to celebrate the completion of my training in spiritual direction last year. Our round-trip flight meant we experienced two departures and two arrivals. Two ascents and two descents for a total of four times, hearing the flight attendant’s voice over the loudspeaker instruct us to assume our upright positions. All in preparation to depart or arrive.
This got me thinking about postures that prepare us for what is to come. I wondered if the airline instructions stood in sharp contrast to those Jesus might have received for his round-trip journey to Earth. Had he come in his full upright position as King of kings and Lord of lords, he never would have fit. Earth cannot hold him.
To prepare for his arrival, he had to assume not an upright position but a bent one. And bend he did, into the tiniest of seeds in a woman’s dark womb.
When the time came for his departure, Jesus bent yet again. “Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father” (John 13:1). So what did he do? He bent low to the ground — into the shape not of seed but an enslaved person — and washed his disciples’ feet in an act of love.
In a devotional I read, the author said God is bent on loving us. She meant that God is determined to love God’s people.
I wholeheartedly agree, but the word rang in my ears differently. I heard it in reference to the ways God loves us: bending and descending, lowering and leaning in.
We serve an upright God who is bent on bending. Bent on loving us. And who has a bent for the bent ones. A bent for the burdened ones. A bent for the ones brought low.
In the gospels, we encounter Jesus physically bending to the ground to protect a woman caught in adultery from the upright ones about to cast stones (John 8).
We hear him defend a prostitute, bent on washing his feet with her tears (Luke 7).
We watch in wonder as he bends rigid rules and, on the Sabbath, heals a woman who has been physically bent for 18 long years (Luke 13).
We marvel with the multitudes on that momentous day when Jesus blessed the bent — the meek and the mourning, the merciful ones, the persecuted, pure and poor (Matthew 5).
God is bent on bending and lifting the low. To enter the doorway of the suffering, the sinners, the sidelined, and the sick, our Savior stooped.
I find this to be excellent news for me — for us — when we find ourselves, as Edmund Sears penned in “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear,” bent beneath life’s pressing load.
Like the woman in Luke 13, my body was bent for 18 long years. I was brought to my knees by feet that could no longer support me and grief that kept grounding me.
I don’t know what has bent you, friend — poverty, pressure, or pain. I don’t know your past or present journey that has laid you low.
But what I do know, and what I have experienced, is that our precarious bent position is the very posture that prepares us both for the arrival of God to us and our departure back to God.
It’s not the rigid or proper but the bent and bowed who are blessed.
As the Holy Spirit kindly reminded me, this posture prepares us for God and one another.
As I prayed for shalom in several relationships that have rubbed me wrong, I was moved to confess the areas where, in my own sense of rightness, I have become stiff-necked and straight.
As I asked for the grace to bend, I realized that sometimes we need to stoop to see when we can’t see straight.
An upright position may be the preferred one for a plane, train, or automobile. But in our walkabout daily lives, a bent frame may serve us best.
God is bent on loving us. It’s how Jesus came, how he left and how he serves us still.
It just may be that when we are bent, broken, or brought low, we are in a prepared place to enter a portal of grace, precisely postured for who and what awaits.
Jenny Gehman
Jenny Gehman is a spiritual director, freelance writer and retreat facilitator. She was trained as a music therapist, but hospitality is her heartbeat. She is a firm believer in the wild, wide-open, warm-hearted welcome of God, our “Holy Host,” and believes it is at God’s table we are healed and made whole. Jenny lives in the Amish Country of Pennsylvania with her husband, son, and usually a visitor or two. She enjoys crackling fires, classical music, and chocolate of the darkest variety. You can learn more about Jenny and sign up to receive her weekly Little Life Words by visiting her website.
Jenny Gehman is a spiritual director, freelance writer and retreat facilitator. She was trained as a music therapist, but hospitality is her heartbeat. She is a firm believer in the wild, wide-open, warm-hearted welcome of God, our “Holy Host,” and believes it is at God’s table we are healed and made whole. Jenny lives in the Amish Country of Pennsylvania with her husband, son, and usually a visitor or two. She enjoys crackling fires, classical music, and chocolate of the darkest variety. You can learn more about Jenny and sign up to receive her weekly Little Life Words by visiting her website.
