Read 2 Samuel 6:14-22
ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
You have turned my mourning into joyful dancing. You have taken away my clothes of mourning and clothed me with joy, that I might sing praises to you and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give you thanks forever!
Do you like to dance? I absolutely love to. It is not that I have taken any lessons. I think I took some tap dance lessons when I was a kid, but the only tapping I remember is what I am doing now, on the keyboard. Still, I love to dance. Bring me to a club, take me to concert, bring me to a wedding, and I will inevitably dance it up no matter how I look. I just love to move my body. Besides, is head banging any different really? I love to do both.
Every now and again, including recently, I put together a mix of music to dance. The past two have been centered on darker dance songs. What do I mean by “darker”? That is a great question, for I feel the word “dark” gets used for so many different things that it is important to define. By dark, I mean that the music focuses on deeper, more substantive subjects that relate to the struggles of being human.
These songs can and do dive into different facets of humanity, from depression to anxiety, from loneliness to sexuality. All of these songs are relatable to human life and the struggle it is to be human. Have you ever noticed that. We cling to our lives like precious gems, and they are precious gems; yet, the cost of that is the daily struggle of survival. For some of us that is easier than others, but it is a struggle all the same.
Ask yourself this: “Have I gone through life without a single struggle?” Chances are, you haven’t gone through life unscathed at all. We all have our troubles, our trials, our doubts, our fears, our insecurities. Truthfully, not even Jesus Christ went through life without all of those struggles; therefore, how can any of us expect to do so.
As such, one of the things I have learned to do is to dance through the pain. First, it is hard to feel depressed and troubled when you are moving your body joyously. When I listen to the darker songs, they are expressing my pain lyrically, but the music is carrying me through it, transcending it through exuberant, joyful, and counter-emotional movements. Now, I am able to dance physically and so I do, but dancing need not be merely a physical activity; rather, it can be a spiritual and emotional one too. Put on your favorite music, sing out loud, scream the songs out if you have to. Dance within your heart, your soul, your entire being.
Friends, there is plenty in this world to cause us to want to stop dancing; however, that is when we truly stop living. God created us to dance, to joyfully worship God and to live freely into who we are as God’s children. Whatever your dance is, whatever music it is that makes you want to move, put that on and show the world that it is going to take more than struggles to keep you from rocking and rolling.
If we do that, there will be no telling what God will do with us. Just look at King David who danced, even despite the scorn of his wife, with all his might before the Lord our God. We can do the same too, and we can do so inspite of all that the world throws our way. Sisters and brothers, let us throw off our burdens before the Lord and dance them away, allowing the Lord to fill us with eternal and everlasting joy, a joy the world can never take away.
THOUGHT OF THE DAY
Not today, Satan! Today I dance!PRAYER
Lord, teach and help me to dance. Amen.
It is hard to put into words the fear, anxiety, sadness, depression and confusion that ran through most people’s minds at the close of this past Friday, December 14. By the end of the day we had learned, following spending the day watching the drama unfold on live TV, that 28 people had been shot and killed at an elementary school in Connecticut. Out of the 28, twenty of them were children between the ages of six and seven years old.