U-Turn

Prayer requests please.

This Sunday, I am at yoga studio singing at their 15 year anniversary, after having left teaching there and every other yoga place I taught what seems like moons ago.

 

A little history on me and yoga…

 

I became a trained childbirth education & yoga teacher in 2004 with a specialization in prenatal yoga through children’s yoga. This was who I was to everyone. To me.

 

God lead me out of that world, it seems, to focus back on JUST HIM & me a few years ago. To discover my identity in HIM vs. the yoga. It took some time. It killed a career. I mean, when your former yoga teacher says “for faith reasons” she is no longer able to teach yoga… you have to ask, what craziness just hit this born again chick? Would you refer her out anymore, if you didn’t know the Lord?

 

But the Lord placed too many stop signs and opened up so many new doors to knowing Him for me to ignore in front of me – in verses, in “random” conversations and people showing up in my life clearly CLEARLY help-meets to lead me out of my ME state at the time and into… well… after a few years… where I am this moment.  Still in and out of the ME state, but praying on the latter.

 

Yes, as a small business woman, it’s been a painful road at times, but Jesus has been next to me since the day I was born and will be until I return to Him after this life. Now what I am getting in my time with Him now is it might not have been so much about “who I was to everyone,” how much I could lead them to Him or mislead them away from Him, or staying within the lines to stay in favor with Him, so much as my humbly learning more clearly who I am TO & BECAUSE of Him.

 

Up until that point, I didn’t receive Him as my Savior for ME. He was Savior to all around Him, sure. I thought, if I could be near them holy rollers that would be enough. A bible study.  Teaching Sunday school.  Packing the schedule with Jesus things.  Like the woman who said even crumbs go to dogs. Or, the woman who profusely bled and just wanted to touch His robe.  When He is accessible in my heart, of all places!

Recently, I started to feel a stirring to sub as a yoga teacher again after I took a class for my friend’s birthday not too long ago. In the class, I heard old familiar untruths come out of the teacher’s mouth – self worship – that stirred a righteous anger in me. Yet, I felt the next steps were to return to my former yoga practice at my gym. I prayed on it and was at peace entering that place. The teacher there drew me in in no small way. The choices she made with postures, language, how to flow in and out of everything…. I thought I was watching myself, something, I felt at home. There was something, a familiarity.

 

The next day I “randomly” ran into her at the grocery store. Within moments, she was praying over me in the cold cuts department after I learned she is a Holy Yoga certified teacher, of all things, and is called to teach in not necessarily Christian places, like gyms, etc…! We reassured one another we are called to LOVE LOVE LOVE in all the places Jesus would go, that some might not be called to go. That, wherever He brings us, we can trust He will shine His light onto those He means to touch in His own timing and way as He did so with us.

 

Since then, those big stop in your track signs are leading me back into that world. Big START sign invitations like a local yoga studio “randomly” calling me to teach again for them around the same time, my agreeing, and then being asked to teach the “Being & Doing from Christ Within” talk. I think I am hearing Him right that it’s not what I do in life but what I choose to believe who it is exactly that I am – His beloved daughter – that this is all about.

 

I am asking for prayer because, despite paralyzing fear about singing in public I have experienced almost my whole life and the work He has been doing in that to get me to sing on occasion on the Worship band at church, other singing endeavors, over the last few years, I am, again at this yoga studio this Sunday singing at their 15 year anniversary. It seems to have come full circle. This is where I first taught yoga and it is one of the places that has asked me back to teach over the years and whom I have not been able to return to until now.

 

I have been praying on what to sing that would help them to celebrate and, yet, be obedient to glorify Him. I have prayed on whom to accompany me. He has sent me a couple of friends and has opened up our schedules perfectly to prepare for this. The songs we are singing, I pray, will be the ones He has chosen we sing, to touch hearts in the way only He can, and allow us to be there in love and authenticity in honor of Him most of all.

 

The choices are: Garden (a growth song about caterpillars turning into butterflies, which I wrote and is on my children’s music album,) Oceans by Hillsong & A Thousand Years by Christina Perry. The funny thing I realized about the last song is that, when I was first dipping my toes in the exploration of who Jesus really is, in a book club for Christian moms over a decade ago, I was reading that Twilight book series. The unconditional love Edward has for Bella… I had never read about anything like it. I brought up in class, how I thought it might be how Jesus loves us. Poor me. Those ladies must have been praying for me – seeing the Lord’s love in a vampire book the first time. (He meets us where we are, ha ha!)

 

So, here it is, years later, He puts a song in my heart, through which I feel Jesus is singing to us in the lyrics and, it turns out it’s a song made famous BY the Twilight movie they made, after all these years. If this song is the most redeeming quality about that movie, I’ll take it.

 

So pray for us please that we would be obedient and trust in His leading and using this Sunday and to feel His Love & Peace deeply until then. Please pray for continued, focused and deep gratitude to Him for this opportunity to be called back into a circle I thought for certain He permanently pulled me out of and in which He would never return me to.

 

It’s a tight, loving community. He made it possible for me to have a history with them to participate. He worked it out so deliberately. I do not see myself the same way I did when I was called out of the yoga work, but He does, and that is magnificent to me.

 

Please pray, between now and then, I walk reassured of His love for us all and have complete trust He is doing the work, as He always has with each of us and that His loving will will be done.