Dancing With Daddy — A Prayer For the Reluctant Dancer in All of Us

DANCING WITH DADDY - A Prayer For the Reluctant Dancer In All of Us

“Let them praise His name with dancing; Let them sing praises to Him with timbrel and lyre.” - Psalm 149:3

Sometimes it feels like two steps forward and three steps back — this awesome, sometimes awful and seemingly arbitrary dance that we call life.  We step on toes, trip and fall and make the most graceful of leaps only to land and split a seam in the most embarrassing of places.  While we are provided with instructors along the way, the style and level of skill of each teacher will vary from season to season.  And even the most rapt attention to detail will not translate to skill by simple observation.  Apart from effort, earned blisters, bruises and beads of perspiration glistening on our brow, we are not dancers, but merely observers.  

We fall and get up only to fall and get up again.  With these setbacks, we not only lose our footing, but also our hopes and dreams.  Disappointment gives way discouragement and finally timidity and paralysis.  We take off our shoes, put them gently in their box, place them on a shelf, determining that we are not dancers after all.  The joy and unbridled enthusiasm we had to dance as a child, becomes replaced with comparison, self-imposed demands for perfection and a commensurate depletion of our joy.  

We can take a classroom of first graders and ask the question, “How many of you can dance?”  Every hand in the room will shoot up.  Take the same group of thirty in their senior year of high school and you are hard pressed to find even one or two hands that are willing to rise to the occasion.

Father, I lift the precious one reading these words.  They started out in life full of hopeful expectation, energy and passion, but somewhere along the way, circumstances of life have taken a toll on so much of the joy and zest with which they entered the world.  Wisdom and caution have decayed into fearful stagnation, and excitement for the morning is replaced with a mere hope of remaining hidden long enough under the bed to make it to the Lord’s return unscathed.  

Lord, turn up the music. Let them see Your loving hand reaching out (Acts 4:30) — not in expectation of punishment, but in loving invitation.  Reach out to where they hide beneath the bed of their failures amidst the dust bunnies and unmatched socks of the past.  Bid them to come and dance, but this time with You.  Show them to stand with their feet resting upon Yours.  Replace any sense of unskilled foolishness with delight and wonder of synchronicity of their movement with that of the author of light, beauty and freedom. Wash over them with childlike joy as they realize that you never intended for them to dance alone (Is 41:10).  You always intended to be their partner, and together their weak legs would be met with being lifted to Your shoulders, their fall backwards (Ps 145:14) with a graceful dip.  Oh Father, what a delight to dance with You!

Lord, renew their joy. Dispel their fear.  Banish the cruel task master of perfection and revive their faith in the God of the impossible to use their weakness to create something of beauty for His glory.  Delight them in Your presence and assure them that stepping on toes isn’t always a bad thing, as long as the toes they are stepping on belong to their Father.  In Jesus Name ❤️

Dear friend, have you lost your joy while chasing after perfection?  There is only one perfect One and He calls to you to come and dance with Him.  Let Him lead you, lift you and catch you when you fall.  Under the bed we merely exist.  True life is lived on the dance floor.  💡

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