God on the Line 1)Dancing

1. 

When I was like 16 or so, I met a girl named Sara who changed my life.  I meet a lot of girls; some of them are into me, and that's exciting for a while, and some of them are great friends and some of them are great counselors and I've learned a lot from womenfolk generally.  But this girl was different.  Sara was about my age, and she was a leader.  We were on a church mission trip in Mexico...which in this case was like this awkward beautiful thing where a bunch of Americans do a bible camp for kids and the kids all laugh at how bad our Spanish is when we do dramas.  It doesn't matter though, because mostly we were there to just show love to them, and the kids had fun, which is most of what they'll probably remember. 

Anyway, I had a little experience in this sort of thing...I had perfected two or three different piggy back rides and entertained 20+ kids a couple times.  My Spanish was pretty weak, but decent.  Her first question was something like "How did meet God?"  I tried to answer, and as we're chatting I go around with this girl and apparently she's in charge of the kids' program at their church, and that's what she does for now.  And so we're going around door to door and we gather some 20 kids...and the camp goes really well.

The next day she doesn't show.  And the camp lags.  Things go slowly.  It's a disappointment.

And then the next day she's there and she's all smiles and service again, and I'm like "where were you?"

Nonchalantly "I was working."

And I'm like "You don't have a job."

And she's like "Well, yesterday morning I was praying and felt like God wanted me to go to this other part of the city to minister to people."

And my jaw drops.  Inside, I'm like "wait, we have our program right here, why would you need to go to the other side of the city?"  "That doesn't make sense."  And "Wow...how does she do that?"

This changed the way I understood God.  Because I was thinking like "well, this program, follow the rules, that's what we're supposed to do."  And then there's this girl Sara, and she's just like a leaf in the breeze, the Spirit blowing her about the city like she's dancing on air.  She understood God as someone alive, someone who changed where she went and what she did on a day to day basis.  And I wanted that.  I wanted to live with that kind of confidence and purpose.   And I tried.  But it was also confusing.  I was a very awkward teenager at times.  What DID God want me to do?  I remember sitting on the bus thinking about how to talk to the people around me about God, I think God protected them from me by making me terrified of talking to them, because my view of God at the time wasn't a very nice one, and definitely not one that most of them would have understood.  At any rate, for me following God didn't feel like dancing, or maybe, it felt exactly like dancing.

Once, a group of us got together and we were doing some swing dancing.  And we switched partners and I was stuck with this Austrian girl.  We were trying to do a simple waltz or salsa, but I was making some mistakes.  She frowned.  I got more nervous and made more mistakes.  And by the end of this, I feel like she's probably never going to talk to me again, and she might just hit me.  The disappointment on her face is palpable. 

When I was even younger at weddings, I loved dancing...I would just move my legs around as fast as I could, stomping around like if Animal had decided to join the Charlie Brown Christmas' Special.  I'm sure lots of people laughed in hindsight, but at the time that was pre-self-awareness.

So when I say following God was like dancing, I want you to understand, I don't mean it was beautiful or romantic.  It was awkward, and I mostly stomped around and stepped on toes and stood by the refreshments table because eating another strawberry was much easier than asking someone to dance with you. 

So I began to seek God.  I began to read the Bible and pray every day.  I became the best student at church, taking notes during the sermon and struggling to understand.  Why me?  I'm not a good dancer.  What can I do?  What am I supposed to do? 

I read a lot of books.  They had lots of answers.  They had all the answers.  But they didn't tell me what I really wanted to know:  who I would marry and in what country I should serve and what I should do and what I should study in University and where I should study.  They said things like "pray more."

Right...