Dancing with the Star

Ballroom dancing has been a part of my life for many years. It’s special to my husband and me in many ways – a wonderful date night experience, a new body awareness, lots of fun and of course a chance to wear nice clothes and enjoy great music. And yet….

And yet there’s days I wonder what we got ourselves into. Because dancing is a lot harder than it looks, and it doesn’t necessarily get easier with time. There is literally everything to consider, from steps and patterns, to posture, to the positioning of every single body part. Then, there’s poise. And expression. And body tension. And grace.

Maybe I should have stuck to something like riding a bicycle?

One reason we never gave up is connected to an experience we had early on as dance students. We had been taking lessons for just a little while, learning our first steps and patterns, when I experienced my first dance with Pierre, the now-owner of our studio. As he invited me to the floor, I felt like I was transported to another world. It was a world where I gracefully floated across the studio, moving in sync with my partner, and effortlessly following patterns I had never learned.

It was a most incredible experience.

I went back to my lesson, back to the nitty-gritties of all the techniques I yet had to learn, the steps I messed up and the poise and grace I certainly didn’t possess. What had just happened?

What I’d experienced was dancing with a gold level professional – and simply by following him, I not only felt good, he made me look good. I actually didn’t even know how to follow yet; but just my willingness to be led by him allowed for him to make our dance beautiful.

I’m sure you guess where I’m going here. The connections between dancing and our relationship with Jesus are incredible. He’s our gold level professional when it comes to everything in life, and to the amount we learn to follow him, everything becomes more beautiful as we dance through life.

Over the years of my dance journey (and with the help of many more dances with my husband and professionals) I noticed a few things about following as a dancer:

• If the leader is an incredible dancer, his partner will look good almost no matter how much she knows or doesn’t know.

• The best way for the partner to learn a new step is to concentrate on the steps of the leader and imitate his movements.

• In order to be able to feel the lead, the follower has to be fully engaged – with her whole core, her senses, and her presence.

• The easiest way to follow is to close your eyes and to feel rather than to see.

• Dancers who overthink things tend to anticipate patterns and therefore miss the actual cues given by the leader.

• You cannot dance in harmony unless you fully trust the leader.

If you pause here for a moment, I’m sure you will come up with your own analogies of how this relates to following Jesus. I invite you to take a moment to do so!

Here are my thoughts:

• If the leader is an incredible dancer, his partner will look good almost no matter how much she knows or doesn’t know.

If we accept Jesus’ invitation to dance, our spiritual lives will bring forth unexpected beauty despite our lack of knowledge or experience in being a good person or doing good deeds.

• The best way for the partner to learn a new step is to concentrate on the steps of the leader and imitate his movements.

Learning new spiritual steps happens not through knowledge, but through imitation – through allowing the one who knows the steps to lead us into them.

• In order to be able to feel the lead, the follower has to be fully engaged – with her whole core, her senses, and her presence.

While we don’t need to know much or have any skills, our fully present self is necessary for us to expect God’s everyday clues for our practical lives – our daily decisions, conversations, and encounters.

• The easiest way to follow is to close your eyes and to feel rather than to see.

Giving up control and becoming vulnerable allows me to realize what is actually going on.

• Dancers who overthink things tend to anticipate patterns and therefore miss the actual cues given by the leader.

Those of us who think a lot about how things should be (hello, Enneagram 1’s) easily miss what Jesus – whose plans are beyond our comprehension – wants to do next with our lives.

• You cannot dance in harmony unless you fully trust the leader.

A life lived in harmony is not characterized by the absence of challenges but by fully leaning on someone you trust.

Some days, I feel like it’s my first day on the floor, and I wanna go home and ride my bike. Other days, I can see and feel some efforts paying off. But either way, I remind myself that in ballroom dancing, it’s never about one dancer alone. It’s what happens when two dancers come together. The most amazing thing is, we get to do our spiritual dance with the master of all gold level pros.

Whether you feel like a bike rider most days or not, Jesus invites all of us into this daily dance of following Him beyond what we expect, understand, or sometimes even feel comfortable with. This dance, although sometimes hidden from our physical eyes, is what moves our spiritual life toward gold level quality.