I Hope You Dance

Our last stop as we have looked at faith the last few weeks, is looking at faith through the lense of a dancer.  It is the graceful fluidity and movement of a dancer that is the beauty of faith as we learn to wait gracefully.   The word grace according to the dictionary means seemingly effortless beauty or charm of movement, form, or proportion.  Just stop and close your eyes for a moment and think of the last time you saw a dancer dance.  A good dancer is graceful as their movement looks effortless within the time and space they occupy. A graceful dancer never looks forced or strained, unnatural or artificial.  Instead the beauty of the dance is in the dancer’s ability to respond to the music and move in union with it.   It is this union that is the same thing that we do when we wait gracefully. It is having faith without worry, concern or anxiety.  It is trusting that you will know what move to make and when to make it.

Shoot waiting is HARD!!!!  However the harder something is, the bigger the blessing will come thereafter if we can wait; if we can endure.  It’s kind of like a rainbow after the storm.  Or think about it like this.  All the best foods you eat on any holiday (Thanksgiving, Christmas etc…),  are NOT the ones that come out of a microwave.  No the turkey, the dressing, the greens, macaroni cheese….all those things take time in that oven or on that stove to cook and if we rush the process they will not be thoroughly cooked and we won’t be able to eat them.  Well we can eat them but who wants to eat a pink turkey or one with blood running through it?  Or cold macaroni and cheese or greens whose succulent leaves were not simmered long enough to make them tender?  So if you think about it in terms of a cooked meal, a rainbow or the fluidity of a dancer, there are many times in life that if we can learn to wait gracefully, we will get what’s best!  Here are some things I have learned about waiting gracefully;

There’s usually something in it for you to learn.  Sometimes God uses life experiences to teach us something.  As a matter of fact if we don’t wait long enough to learn the lesson and we run from it, we will only have that same lesson come up again and again.  As a matter of fact it is usually a harder lesson to be learned the second or third time around.  Just ask someone who got left back a grade in school.  It is harder to get left behind isn’t it, not to mention being teased by your friends who have moved on as you have to learn something over and over.  Here’s another example.  Let’s say your boss just really gets on your last nerve so quit your job and find a new one.  Well guess what, whatever it was you were meant to learn via that old bosses behavior usually is right there with the new boss only it is 10 times worse!!   You know the saying “the grass is always greener on the other side?”  Well it’s not really that the grass is greener it just looks greener from where you are standing.  So take the time to learn how to keep up your own grass, and you will get it exactly where you want it to be.  So stop and look at yourself in all things and see what you can learn about YOU while you wait.

Waiting allows you to gain clarity.  I have seen how if I can wait and not act out of emotion but instead calm myself down long enough, I can see things from a much better perspective.  You know anytime we act out of a negative emotion, anger, fear etc… it will produce a negative behavior which in turn produces a negative result.  Who wants that?  So ladies, be careful what you water as it just may grow in your own neighborhood (if ya know what I mean 🙂

Don’t mess things up by following your own agenda. When I think about this, I think of stories like Abraham and Sarah in the bible.  You see God promised them a son in their old age and nothing had happened in a long time.   So Sarah took matters into her own hands and had Abraham sleep with her handmaid in order to produce a son.  You can read the story in the bible to see all the drama that came with that.  The point is,  Sarah eventually had a son but the decision she made according to her own agenda actually came to back to bite her in the butt as her handmaid was starting all kinds of drama.  Instead if we learn anything from Sarah, it shouold be that our plan may not always be the right plan.  However, the best thing to do is to wait on God’s plan. We must become like a dancer and wait for your cue and don’t go out and start dancing out on stage making a fool of yourself before the time is right….if ya know what I mean. 

God’s timing is perfect.  I have learned that things may not happen exactly the way I want them to or when I want them to but if I trust God then I also must know that He knows what I need and when I need it.  So I can just rest assured that if it is for me, its coming.   I have seen that when I sit back and let God do it, He does it abundantly above all that I can ask or think.

Yes waiting is one hard thing to do, but it is a necessary part of life, so if we can learn to just sit in the wings and wait for our cue before we come out on the stage of life, we will definitely learn to dance with the gracefulness of THE best dancer!! As we follow the fluid motion that is all around us we must remember to.

 “Be anxious for nothing…” Philippians 4:6a

So instead of being anxious, God asks us to live by faith and trust that as you wait, God is cuing the music just for you.  He is finding just the right song, at just the right tempo so that you too can have your time to dance and when He does cue the music…I hope you dance!!!!!

 “Faith isn’t the ability to believe long and far into the misty future. It’s  simply taking God at His Word and taking the next step.”  – Joni Erickson Tada

 “The Lord will either calm your storm . . .  or allow it to rage while He calms you”. – unknown