Just Dance

Sweat plastered my face and my cowboy hat threatened to slide down over my eyes. I punched out kick-ball-changes and pumped my arms to the hypnotic beat.  The stage lights stared me down like an interrogation.  My heart pounded in my temples, my fingers, my chest. I don’t remember breathing the entire three minutes that I was on stage.  I confidently shook my hips and worked the crowd with twelve other girls dressed in the same plaid shirts and too-big, one-size-doesn’t-fit-all, white cowboy hats. I was fully alive and fully uncontainable.  I licked my parched lips and tasted the salt of sweat. I heard the beat of the too familiar song, but I didn’t listen to it, I danced it.  I was pleased to find that my body moved in perfect harmony with the music and the other dancers.  We danced in perfect formation on the creaky, dark stage.  I caught a glimpse of the spellbound audience, eyebrows raised, lips formed into a breathless “O,” but I didn’t really see them.  The dance, the movement, consumed me and for three whole minutes I was totally free.  My doubts, fears, and insecurities vanished.  I danced who I was, but most importantly, I danced who I wanted to be. 

God has a way of speaking to me through visions—not visions I see, but visions others see and boldly share with me.

The visions have ranged from strange to cheesy to downright disturbing. I’ve been lucky enough to be given the visions with a caveat: if it doesn’t resonate or sound like God, then don’t worry about it. And I haven’t.

Amidst the generic and the platitudnal (is that even word?), I’ve been told phrases that speak straight into my soul.  Even writing about it sounds too lavish, too over the top, but sometimes God reveals a vision or a word or an encouragement to others just for me.

Like the one I received a few months ago. A woman from church had a vision of me dancing. She felt like God had a message just for me.

“Lead like you dance,” she said to me.

Say that to anyone else and it may sound cheesy, hokey, or downright terrifying. For a lot of people, dancing is a source of panic, anxiety, and fear of looking stupid (just ask my ex-boyfriends). But for me, dancing is one of the only times I don't feel stupid, when I don't care about whether or not I'm doing it right. Dancing for me is pure joy, pure freedom.

"Now I've never seen you dance, but I get the sense that you know that you're good," she ventured.

Bingo.

Through the tears that betrayed my heart, I smiled and nodded. It was true. It is true. When I dance, I know that I'm good. Not in a conceited way, like I think I'm the shizz, but in a joyful way. In a way that I am so free and filled with joy, that I know the act itself is good. God created me to dance, and it is good.

At the time she told me this, I was struggling with the idea of moving into leadership at church. I felt called to lead a book study on the topic of body image and eating disorders--me, a shy introvert who has never even had an eating disorder. What could God possibly want to do with me?

In the midst of my insecurities and second-guessing, God spoke to me through an image of a dancing girl.

God was calling me to step out in boldness and confidence and joy. And when I did, when I began to leave behind the reservations, I began to transform into the leader that I never thought I could be. The leader that God was calling me to be.

This week this vision has hit me particularly hard. I’ve been second-guessing everything—my job, my life, even this blog. I’m been frustrated, foolish, stuck. I am not dancing.

I picture the dancing girl; I remember the dancing moments like I described at the beginning of this post.  And I ache for that kind of confidence. I want to know that what I am doing is good. This kind of confidence is God-given. It is not arrogance. It is not conceitedness. It is peace. It is contentment. It is resting in God's hands. It is obedience to the unusual things that God calls us to that the rest of the world, our friends, possibly our mothers, don’t understand.

Right now I’m waiting for this calling. For the next step in the dance. I’m praying for discernment. Praying for joy.

And while I wait for a macro-calling, I invest in the micro-joys. I choose to reclaim the areas of my life that I know I am called to. I choose to reclaim them with boldness and confidence and joy. I choose to follow the lead of my God with freedom and abandon.

I choose to dance. 

A Better Answer

This is a follow up to yesterday's blog post, Solidaridad, which I suggest reading first. 

***

"I know there is poor and hideous suffering, and I've seen the hungry and the guns that go to war. I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks for early light dappled through leaves and the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives. Why would the world need more anger, more outrage? How does it save the world to reject unabashed joy when it is joy that saves us? Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn't rescue the suffering. The converse does. The brave who focus on all things good and all things beautiful and all things true, even in the small, who give thanks for it and discover joy even in the here and now, they are the change agents who bring fullest Light to all the world." from Ann Voskamp’s masterpiece, One Thousand Gifts

This, this is the better answer to my haunting question: What does it mean to live in solidarity with poor?


“Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn’t rescue the suffering.” 


How I wish someone had whispered this truth to me when I first opened my crowded closet; when I first swiped my ATM card for apricot face scrub and a new roll of floss at Target; when I first felt the summer sun warm up my parent’s patriotic front yard.

"It is joy that saves us..."

How I wish our study abroad discussions around solidarity had ventured beyond fair trade shopping and SUV bashing and into the fine art of learning to love our neighbors—poor or 1% or anywhere in between.


"Why would the world need more anger, more outrage?"

I mean, how are we supposed to love the poor if we don’t love ourselves? What kind of improved quality of life are we lobbying for if we can’t even recognize the God-like qualities in our suburban Christian friends?


I learned this lesson the hard way. Floundering and seething in an anger that quickly wore out its welcome.  In an anger that helped neither the poor nor the poor saps around me.

My first real step toward living in solidarity with the poor (on which I still have an immensely long way to go) was when I started to live in solidarity with myself. When I started to live in solidarity with my immediate neighbors. When I started to think that I was worth loving and that, maybe, the people in front of me—my Whole Foods Shopping, Invisible Children v-neck wearing peeps and my less well-versed in the rhetoric and fashion requirements of social justice friends and family alike—were worth loving too.

Solidarity began when I asked myself, like Ann Voskamp, Where can I bring life? Where can I choose hope?

How can I become the brave soul who focuses “on all things good and all things beautiful and all things true, even in the small?” Where can I “discover joy even in the here and now?”

The surprising answer to the solidarity question is this: joy.

And in that joy comes a valuing of all human life and all of Creation, a heart that hopes, eyes that see the gifts, and lips that praise the Gifter.  This is the foundation of solidarity. This is the seed that blooms the hope to sustain a multitude of change agents bringing fullest Light to all the world.

Who wants to live the better answer?

***

P.S. I am still stubbornly passionate (although no longer belligerent) about reducing my injustice footprint and learning to live and act in ways that serve, support, and empower the poor.  I would love to talk shop with anyone interested in living more justly, sustainably, and joyfully.

But how, you ask?

You can read more of my thoughts in my post on fighting both first world apathy and third world poverty or dive into 7 Practical Tips (and delicious writing) from Jen Hatmaker, author of  "7 : An Experimental Mutiny AgainstExcess."  Or check out Julie Clawson’s fabulous book, EverydayJustice. Or find out more about my favorite poverty alleviation non profit that I just so happen to work for: Plant With Purpose. 

The Bend and Stack

I'm in. I want it and I want it real bad. I want a life stacked on joy. A life built on rejoicing. A life graced with gratitude.

But how?

As I grapple with what I know of this joy stacking equation, this unempty-moment-living, I'm struck by a recurring posture of both the head and the heart: bending.

There is the stacking, the adding up of joy and gifts. But there is also the bending.

The bending of heads in prayer. The bending down to notice. The bent posture of a humble heart.

You can't have joy without humility. I think I really believe that.

Joy requires the humility to relinquish cynicism. The humility to seek prayer. The humility to seek help (I am learning this one oh-so-richly right now).

I recently rediscovered this audacious prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi that speaks to the paradox of this bend-your-heart-in-humility-and-you-will-be-lifted-up-with-joy. This paradox of our faith.

He prays,

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love.

Where there is injury, pardon.

Where there is doubt, faith.

Where there is despair, hope.

Where there is darkness, light.

Where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,

grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive.

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Amen.

In case you missed it the first time, "For it is in giving that we receive. It is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life."

It is in this humility, this bending low of ourselves and our priorities and our vindication, that we find God. It is in humility that we find ourselves gifted with the call to participate in the ministry of Jesus. It is in humility that we can sow love and heal nations and bring life.

It is in humility that we stack up joy.

And so today I give you the best new dance move in my spiritual repertoire: the bend and stack.

While I'm pretty sure it won't win me back an ex-boyfriend, I am certain I want to cultivate the kind of heart bending that leads to joy stacking.