While I do not see children playing this game now, when I was a child we played Ring Around the Rosie. The poem went like this: “Ring around the rosies; Pockets full of posies; Ashes, ashes, all fall down!”
When we got to the end, we would all fall down on the ground and then get up laughing. While some attribute this to a macabre ritual from the Bubonic plague days, in actuality there is evidence that it dates back to more playful origins in Europe. Needless to say, when we recited this as children we were not thinking about any plagues!
I have taken a lot of falls in my life–both figuratively and literally. There have been sprained ankles, broken elbows, paint chips embedded in my forehead when I fell and hit the corner of a wall, and more. But the falls that you cannot see are probably the ones that have left the most marks on me. The failure to meet someone’s expectations, the breaking of a promise, the crashing of a ministry I loved, and more, litter my life. Some of the falls were a result of my own carelessness and others were things out of my control.
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