Dance With Me

Dance with Me

I’ve always been a bit clumsy. Ask my sister, who watched me walk out of a store one summer afternoon and wrestle a parked bicycle to the sidewalk. Clumsy or not, I spent four years of my childhood taking ballet, tap, and jazz lessons, and I danced on a high school drill team for another four years.

Today I don’t often dance. A rare autoimmune condition has rendered my feet mostly numb, and some days I don’t even walk with much confidence—much less glide or twirl. Trust me when I say toes are not extraneous cosmetic appendages. Actually feeling them goes a long way to keeping one steady and upright.

Still, there is something wonderful about dancing. I smile every time I hear a song I danced to in my teens or twenties. I still have (and wear) the slick-bottom boots that danced many of those carefree steps. “If we are indifferent to the art of dancing,” says Havelock Ellis, “we have failed to understand, not merely the supreme manifestation of physical life, but also the supreme symbol of spiritual life.”^a

Once, a long time ago, a King asked me to dance. He extended his hand to me and called me by name, saying, “Dance with me.” I couldn’t refuse. I didn’t want to say no, even though I wasn’t sure I could match his steps or keep time with the music I heard. “The Christian life,” writes Ken Gire, “is about following Christ’s lead, not about him following ours. . . . He asks us merely to take his hand and follow him. To move when he moves. To speed up when he speeds up. To slow down when he slows down. And to stop when he stops. . . . We are relinquishing the lead. But look who we are relinquishing it to.”^b

“Dance with me,” he whispers. And clumsy or compromised, shy or ashamed, unsteady or uncertain, I still say yes. And I dance.

Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.

1 John 5:12, ESV

^a Havelock Ellis, “The Philosophy of Dancing,” Atlantic Monthly, February 1914, 197.

^b Ken Gire, The Divine Embrace (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 2003), 89.