We visited the grandkids this past weekend, and early
Saturday morning, our granddaughter persuaded Bapa to help her with a science
experiment. This was a sweet time just for them, but the old home schooling mom
in me threatened to rise up and insert herself to make sure they were doing it
right, so to avoid this, while they set up in the kitchen, I preoccupied myself
in an adjacent sitting room with reading the Pioneer Woman. I hadn’t looked at
her blog in weeks, and she’s the only person on earth who actually makes me want
to cook. Plus, I love the pictures of her Bassett hounds.
So, as I’m reading my tablet, this song from Mercy Me blares from a speaker hooked to our granddaughter’s phone. Ingredients in the kitchen are gathered, discussions held about what to do, an oven
door is opened, and then sounds I don’t recognize.
What’s going on in there? I can’t really see (You can see my
struggle in trying to keep out of things).
I lean around a lamp that’s in my line of vision.
As I lift my tablet camera to capture the scene, I’m not
even aware for a few moments of the moisture that’s sliding down my cheeks.
Oh, how precious.
They had just dropped the task at hand and moved by the music
burst into a shag lesson. When the song ended these two were back to leaning
over their experiment.
Dancing sometimes has nothing to do with a fancy dress and a
tuxedo. Sometimes, it’s the spinning in your pajamas that moves the heart to
new places.
It’s seizing that moment of joy and not letting it pass by
you.
It’s not waiting til everything is just so to dance, because
we all know that on this earth, it’s never going to be just so.
It’s dancing right where you are in the middle of the dirty
dishes, the roof that’s leaking, the heart that’s aching.
As I watched the scene of joy unfold before me, it seemed as
if the Lord whispered to my own heart, “Dance with me?”
My friend Julie is one of those people who picks a new word
to live by every year. And I was intrigued when after several years of picking
very serious spiritual words like surrender, she felt led to choose dance (more about that here).
Hmm, dance. I liked it. But I had no idea God would speak to
me so soon about this very same thing.
Yesterday, my daughter came home for a visit. I walked into
her room, and she was digging in her closet and pulling out her old Pointe shoes and
leotards. She was a dancer for many years, but has found it
difficult to keep up with during college. She recently finished her graduation
requirements.
I asked the obvious. "What are you doing?"
“I’ve scheduled classes with the Atlanta Ballet,” she said.
“I’m working too much.”
It’s been sixty hours a week for some time. She really does
need to dance.
But it seems God is saying that I do, too.
And friend, maybe you need to stop what you’re doing
and do a little pirouette yourself. So, using the title of a song that Lee Ann Womack sent to the top of the charts years ago, "I Hope You Dance."
"Let them praise his name with dancing and make music to him with timbrel and harp" (Psalm 149:3).