Skip to main content

dance lesson

Image
Images from Life magazine

Dean and I have been taking swing dance lessons for a few years now. I must admit that I have a love/hate relationship with dancing. I like the physical activity, I like learning the moves, I like hanging out with Dean and meeting interesting people, and I love watching skilled people dance. Here are the parts I am not so fond of. First, taking dance lessons means dancing with a different person every 5 minutes or so; this is a bit socially awkward for an introvert, but I can deal with it. The second and biggest downside for me is that much of the time I feel like I just don't know what I am doing. Very often the leader I am dancing with will start a move or give me a signal and I will miss it. I won't know what to do next and I end up at odds with him, out of sync or facing the wrong direction. Honestly, much of the time I feel like a bad follower. This particular session our teachers focused on showing us how to be better followers. An exercise we did one evening was to try to follow the other person's moves without any physical contact. It was amazing how much I could pick up just from watching the other person once I knew where to put my focus.













This was a breakthrough for me! I was not a bad follower, I just hadn't known where to look! Because of this I was always waiting for a nudge, a push, a pull, a prod, something to get me moving in the right direction or give me a clue about what was coming next. But that's not what dancing is about; it is not one person pushing or dragging the other one around. Many of the places I had been looking were unhelpful: the floor, my feet, my partner's feet, their arms, their forehead, our surroundings, etc. When I watched my partner's shoulders, it became quite obvious where they were going, no prodding needed. I could see a change coming, could notice a shift in momentum or direction, could tell where they were putting their weight. It was a freeing experience to know that I did have the ability to follow, to know what was coming, and to respond appropriately.

Sometimes I feel the same way in my relationship to God. I seem to be floundering, all over the place, trying to get in sync with what God is doing. If there are signals, I seem to miss them or even misinterpret them. So I pray for more obvious nudges, clearer signs, and await a touch from God to set me in a certain direction. But the movements of God are all there for me to see if I just know where to look. It is not that God doesn't want to touch us; it is that he does not want to force us. The beauty of the dance is ruined by a forceful and demanding lead who leaves no room for the follower to express herself and shine in her own unique way.

Whether or not I feel the touch of God is sort of irrelevant. I can know the joy of being a great follower if I keep my eyes in the right place: not on my feet, not on my circumstances, not on the floor or the sky, not on what others are doing around me, but on the core, on the heart of the one I am trying to follow. Everything else flows from that.

Comments

Shelley said…
I have learned so much about following from dance as well! In my case, in ballroom dance it's all about staying in frame...also a great analogy for staying in relationship.

a good word Matte :)

Popular posts from this blog

Names of God

The Hebrew word "YHWH" (read from right to left) This past Sunday I gave a talk on the Names of God, the beginning of a series on this topic. This first talk was to be a gentle introduction so I thought it wouldn't take too many hours of preparation. Well, I quickly discovered that the research is almost bottomless; every time I thought I had a somewhat definitive list of names, I found another source which added a few more or gave a different twist on some of the names I had already come across. After several hours I was getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data (and that was only looking at the Hebrew Bible). I wondered how I could present this to people in an orderly and accessible fashion and within a reasonable time frame. Not everyone is up for a 3-hour lecture crammed full of detail on a Sunday morning. So I took a break and spent a bit of time meditating on this problem and asking the Spirit for guidance. And then I thought that being overwhelmed by Go

comedic timing

Comic by Joel Micah Harris at xkcd.com One of my favourite jokes goes like this: Knock, knock. Who's there? Interrupting cow Interrupting cow w--- Moooooooo!! Timing is important in both drama and comedy. A well-paced story draws the audience in and helps it invest in the characters, while a tale too hastily told or too long drawn out will fail to engage anyone. Surprise - something which interrupts the expected - is a creative use of timing and integral to any good story. If someone is reading a novel and everything unfolds in a predictable manner, they will probably wonder why they bothered reading the book. And so it is in life. Having life be predictable all of the time is not as calming as it sounds. We love surprises, especially good surprises like birthday parties, gifts, marriage proposals, and finding something that we thought was lost. Surprises are an important part of humour. A good joke is funny because it goes to a place you didn't expect it to go. Sim

soul refrigerator

I went grocery shopping yesterday and came home with three bags of food. After I unpacked them all, this is what my fridge looked like: really empty. How does that happen? How can I feel so full and ready for any food emergency one moment, and after one quick glance, realise that I have nothing, really? Today is one of those days in my soul as well. I woke up with gratitude and fullness in my heart, ready to take on this day and all the wonderful opportunities that it presented. Then I caught a brief glance of some emptiness in my life and bam - my buoyancy was compromised. For the past few hours I have been treading water, trying to keep my head in a positive space, bobbing in and out of disappointment, and catching myself whining with pathetic indignity at the cement blocks of other people's stupidity that are tangled around my ankles. When I am staring at the empty refrigerator of my soul, these are my thoughts. Where do I go from here? Perhaps I should slam that refrigerator