Why You Should Dance

Dancing.  Some people love it.  Some people hate it.

Some people seem to have no rhythm.  Some people just seem good at it.

Remember that movie Hitch?  Will Smith’s character is trying to help this uncoordinated guy get a girl, so what does he do?  He tries to teach him to dance.

I’m convinced that people that are just good at dancing got it from their family or culture.  Ever notice that Hispanic people seem to all be able to dance?  It’s a part of their culture.  Early on, they are around dancing.

Next, take the average white male.  Dancing is absolutely unusual!  The first time most of us were in a setting to cut a rug was at some awkward middle school dance.

Still, even those of us who find dancing to feel like visiting the dentist, we are all awed when we watch someone do it well.  It is both powerful and gentle, sensual and graceful, provocative and touching.  How awesome it is to watch two people hit all the right moves at all the right times.  It’s

no wonder that a style, like ballroom dancing, which most people once considered an ‘old folks’ thing’, became such a huge hit on TV with Dancing with the Stars.

How the heck do you get good at it then?

Practice…Try and fail and try again…Learn from others.

I actually dance.  Yet, I used to hate doing it.  Trouble is this: I married a white girl with a Hispanic heart.  Beth lived in Venezuela for a year after high school and caught the Latino bug.  I’m a white German who grew up headbanging to AC/DC.  I had to do some learning.

We’ve taken ballroom, salsa, and merengue classes.  We dance in our kitchen, we dance at weddings.  I can’t say I’m awesome at it, but I’m finding that it’s kinda fun.

I practiced, tried and failed and tried again, and learned from others.

To me, this is what life is like: we all want to be the one who can hit all the right moves at all the right times.
This is true, especially of our relationships, including the one we have with God.

 

How do you connect with God?  You practice.  What works for you?  Is it praying in the morning, at night, on the car on the way to school?  Is praying going through a list, or just chatting, or both?  Does reading the Bible help or is it confusing?  Would listening to music or drawing connect you closer to God?  Practice.  Try things out.  Ask others what works for them.  Learn from others.

The same is true of relationships with others.  Everybody wants to figure out the dating thing right away.  Guess what?  You have to dance.  You’ll have to practice, try and fail, and learn from others.  How do you get close to someone?  How do you deal with hurt feelings?  How can you show affection without going further than you want to?  What do you do when you start feeling different about someone? 

Dance, dance, dance. 

Practice, Try and fail and try again, learn from others.

Here are the lyrics to a song by one of my favorite artists, Pierce Pettis.  It’s called “To Dance.”

 

 

To dance
A prospective of bones
Musical bath
It's clearing a path of one's own

Blue jeans and muscle
Or crinoline rustle
You learn it in class or alone
To dance

To dance
It's a gravity thing
Shoes to the earth
Pulling toward a verse that is beckoning

Oh, the dizzy affect
Of rhythm and sweat
Flying like a kid in a swing
To dance

Arms in a moment
Some worried connection
Telling of hearts
Where they don't need protection

A journey in place
A private affection to share
To dance

Is swimming in time
Where passion, and public, and prudence can somehow align

Moving like lovers on top of the covers
Everyone knows it's alright
To dance

Touch without touching
Love without breathing
Hold on and let go without anyone leaving

All of part of the beat you're receiving
And sending back out through your feet

In itself it's complete
God it is sweet
To dance

To dance
The movement confines limbs in a language
That is spoken in three quarter time

And is suddenly gone at the end of the song
And you knew you were safe all along
To dance

 

Master Won Ton video #4

Thought some of you might get a kick out of seeing this again.

How to date and not lose your body

When I was a kid I used to cut a lot of lawns, one of which was for a lady in her 80s.  Each time I cut her lawn, however, she would stand at her screen door and watch me.  I always felt like she was making sure I was doing my job right.  I hated that feeling.

I have found that, in general, I don’t like when people watch me do things.  For example, I literally cannot type while someone is standing over my shoulder!

Yet, there are other kids, like some of mine, whose main way of feeling appreciated looks like this: “Dad, watch me.”  It’s crazy just how different people are.

The same is true of men and women.

There are a million ways that the sexes are different, but one of them is how they feel about their bodies.

When is the last time you heard a 110-pound guy ask if he looks fat?  Um…never.  Guess what?  Change the gender and the scenario is commonplace.  Guys are much more in tune with their own bodies, while girls almost feel detached from it.  This has a tone of implications, but let’s look at the issue of affection in dating.

Guys are most often the initiators in relationships.  They ask the girl to a dance, or to go out.  They also tend to lead physically.  They will be the ones, typically, who decide to put their arm around their girlfriend or to go in for the kiss.  Some of this is society.  We assume this is the guy’s job.  Some of it is God-designed.  We are very physically driven. 

Girls, on the other hand, are naturally more modest and reserved physically.  It doesn’t mean that she doesn’t like a guy’s touch, but she doesn’t want to be manhandled, nor does she want things to move too fast.  This is hard for guys to comprehend.  Because physicality is instinctive to them, they figure girls are the same.

So, what do you do about this? 

Fire can burn down a house, or…you can build a fireplace and let it bring warmth.  Physical desire

needs parameters so it can serve a relationship instead of torching it.  For both guys and girls, take some time to design your fireplace.  You can do this whether you’re dating nor not.  Think through what your limits are.  How far is too far for you? 

Don’t listen to the crap you hear around you in movies or from friends.  Think it through for yourself.  What is okay and not okay?  Where is the line for you?  What parts do want to make sure no one touches.  Sounds weird, right?  But if you don’t think about it now, when the heat of a moment comes, you won’t have a road map to follow. 

It may also be good to consider what situations you would want to avoid so that you don’t find yourself compromising those limits.  For example, maybe you have a great basement rec room with a TV.  Being alone down there with a significant other on a Friday night could be a volatile setting. 

Here’s the most awkward of all.  If you get serious in a relationship, I would challenge you to have a conversation about physical limits.  Yes, it’s completely awkward!!!  But when I had this conversation with Beth when we were dating, we both felt respected and felt like we were on the same page because we knew each other’s limits.  By the way, guys, I challenge you to be the gutsy one and bring the subject up first.  Let your girl know that you care enough about her to do this.

There is a mystery to the dance of men and women and this is not to steal from the fun of that mystery.  God cares deeply about that dance and how it will play out in your life.  Paul said in 1 Thessalonians 4:4-5, “Learn to find a wife in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like those who don’t know God.”  To me the differentiation he is making is a matter of control.  Holy and honorable respects the other person, treats them like a princess or prince-with dignity and adoration.  Passionate lust treats the other as an object to be used where it’s okay to ignore their interests. 

So, enjoy figuring out the opposite sex.  It’s nerve-wracking and fascinating at the same time!

How to date and not lose yourself

My analogy wasn’t exactly right last time.  I said that “There’s one basket, though, that is more important than any of these and has helped me weather every storm.  It’s the one that is tied onto my wrist and never drops.”

It’s not really on my wrist.  It’s not just another basket in my hands.  I realize that I am IN this basket. 

Your soul, your inmost being, the you of yous, like your body, can get tired when stuff hits it.  Relationships are full of hurts.  Even good ones!  When two people are trying to get along and share life together, you will indeed hurt each other (For good relationships they learn to use the process of hurt, forgiveness, and reconciliation draw them closer).

Obviously, break ups hurt, but even when a dating relationship is going well, you are two people with differences and those differences will sometimes hurt each other. 

That is tiring to the soul. 

Sometimes you can feel worn out, like you have no more left to give.  Or you may really think the person you are dating is worth it, but you don’t know how to get past an issue that the two of you are facing.  You are tired.

So when those egg baskets fall and break, you may fall too.  What will hold you up?  Where will your tired soul go?

David, in a song he wrote, has the answer for me.  “My soul finds rest in God alone.” 

If your soul is rested in God…

…you still have something to live for if you get dumped.

…you can forgive your boyfriend’s stupid comment.

…you can keep loving your girlfriend when she’s in a bad mood.

…you can still be ‘ok’, even if you and your boyfriend are having issues.

…you don’t have to be so crazy jealous of everything your girlfriend does without you.

…you can know that you are still loved and important even if you don’t have a boyfriend or girlfriend.

…you can survive betrayal and have the strength to find love again someday.

None of these things are easy and they will hurt.  But the song (from Psalm 62) goes on to say, “Pour out your hearts to Him, for God is our refuge.”  Let your soul rest inside God’s basket and you’ll feel much safer trying to carry the other ones.

How to date and not lose your soul

Is it possible?

Imagine that you are living in some time warp and it’s the olden days.  You just went to a nearby farmer to get a bunch of eggs for your family.  You put them all in a basket (remember, it’s old time so there’s no Styrofoam containers), and start off walking down the path back to your home.  The basket is quite heavy considering how many eggs you have.  So heavy, that it will surely make your fingers ache as you walk the hour-long trek to your house.

As you round a corner that takes you through a short cut via some woods, you stumble a bit on a rock, lose your grip on the basket, and bam!  The cracked eggs lie gooey all over the ground.

Now let’s reverse the story and add several baskets.  Now you’ve spread out the eggs that were in the one basket into four.  Of course, you still stumble at that corner, but this time, instead of dropping all your baskets, you just drop one.  Yep, you lost some eggs (bummer!), but you’ve still got three baskets left.

Dating can be a lot of fun.  It can also destroy you. 

So, how do you avoid the destruction?  Carry more egg baskets.

Going out with someone is always going to affect your heart.  While you are acknowledging that you like someone else, you are also putting your worth ‘out there’ as well.  One of the pleasures of dating is that it feels really good that someone else has picked, of all people, YOU to be their favorite.  Naturally, if you eventually break up, it hurts because they’re not just rejecting your taste in music, but you as a person.

There’s no way around that hurt, but there are ways to avoid it destroying you. 

In the egg analogy, eggs are your sense of value, worth, well-being, the sense that “I’m good.”  As humans, we place those eggs in certain baskets in our lives.  If you put them all in one, though, like a dating relationship, and you drop it (aka someone dumps you), you will feel worthless, used, unlovable, bad, or worse. 

Dating tends to make people want to put everything into that basket.  How do you know if you are putting all your eggs in a dating basket?  We get clingy, we stop caring about what anyone else thinks, we don’t listen to other’s advice, we think nothing else matters, we ditch all our friends and sometimes even family, we get overly jealous and suspect others of plotting against our relationship, or we might even feel like our significant other is our reason for living. 

Outside of the fact that if you lose this person you will have nothing left, the one basket thing also keeps people in bad relationships.  I’ve known girls who had abusive boyfriends, but were convinced that if they broke it off they would have no life afterwards or that no one else would ever love them.  So, they stayed in the abuse. 

So, spread out your sense of well-being in other things too, like your interests, your hobbies, your family relationships, your friends, or your talents.  These are the things and people that can hold you up when you hit the crises that life sends your way, like a breakup.

There’s one basket, though, that is more important than any of these and has helped me weather every storm.  It’s the one that is tied onto my wrist and never drops.  I’ll hit that in another post.

Wisdom from a Vampire

I read a vampire novel!  It was my first.  I know it’s hard to believe, but I never read any of the Twilight series, though I saw the first movie.  The book I read was simply called The Vampyre by

John Polidori in 1819.  In it, the main character Aubrey joins a mysterious man named Lord Ruthven on a trip. 

Aubrey is not initially aware that his companion is a blood-sucker, yet he can’t help but notice Ruthven’s strange behavior.  When they stop in towns, Lord Ruthven is very generous with needy people…certain needy people.  If someone is legitimately poor and needs help, Ruthven gives him nothing, but if a person seeks money to spend on vice (a fancy word for sinful stuff) Lord Ruthven gives lavishly.  Even at the gambling table, the secret vampyre wins against desperate men, but loses on purpose to greedy men.

We can learn from this vampire!  Lord Ruthven desires to destroy and the best way to do that is to indulge our sinful appetites.  Sin is such a churchy word to throw around.  This story illustrates what it truly is though: anything that destroys life, love, and relationships. 

Jesus said that evil “comes to steal and destroy.”  That is evil’s goal in our life.  We need to recognize that we have an enemy, and it’s not a vampire.  Our enemy wants to wreck us, to shame us, to make us feel worthless, to get us to go further in our self-destructive habits, to burn the people that love us, to break off connections with others, to isolate, to hate others and ourselves, to not care enough to do much for those around us.

“But,” Jesus goes on, “I have come that you might have life and have it more abundantly.”  What part of you is taking life?  What voices are trying to tear life and love from you? 

I’m trying to listen more to Jesus’ voice that tells me to choose His way, to choose to live life fully and to love fully.  I have a tendency to listen to the other voice that says, “You’re not enough.”  That

can depress me and keep me stepping away from my wife and the people in my life.  Yet, I’m recognizing evil’s voice more and letting the great power of the Holy Spirit override it. 

Join me in fighting the life-sucking vampires!

Master Won Ton video #1

Master Won Ton shares the joy of his wisdom again :)