Invitation to Dance

Hello faithful family, friends, and followers and welcome! Probably our most significant update this week, and hopefully most of you have already read it, is Joy’s latest post in “Joy’s Corner.” If you haven’t read it yet, you can link to it here.

I am so thankful, amazed, blessed, and humbled by Joy’s depth of faith, compassion, and her heart’s desire to be transparent while giving glory to God for his mercy and grace. She is well aware of what she sees as her deficits since the accident and it takes a great deal of courage to speak out anyway. She titled her piece “The Lord is My Shepherd” and opened with the 23rd Psalm. Then, just this week in our read-through-the-Bible, we came across another beautiful and encouraging “God as our shepherd” example in the book of Ezekiel chapter 34, a book that while containing many warnings from God, also shows his deep love for all people and certainly foreshadows Christ’s life of shepherding and ministry as well. Speaking in his role as prophet we hear from Ezekiel…

“For this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I myself will search and find my sheep. I will be like a shepherd looking for his scattered flock. I will find my sheep and rescue them from all the places where they were scattered on that dark and cloudy day… Yes, I will give them good pastureland... There they will lie down in pleasant places and feed in the lush pastures of the hills. I myself will tend my sheep and give them a place to lie down in peace, says the Sovereign LORD. I will search for my lost ones who strayed away, and I will bring them safely home again. I will bandage the injured and strengthen the weak.”

And then, we came across a passage in the Psalms that caused Joy to look up and say, “This is my life, its talking about me!” From Psalms 116:

I love the LORD because he hears my voice

and my prayer for mercy.

Because he bends down to listen,

I will pray as long as I have breath!

Death wrapped its ropes around me;

the terrors of the grave overtook me.

I saw only trouble and sorrow.

Then I called on the name of the LORD:

“Please, LORD, save me!”

How kind the LORD is! How good he is!

So merciful, this God of ours!

The LORD protects those of childlike faith;

I was facing death, and he saved me.

Let my soul be at rest again,

for the LORD has been good to me.

He has saved me from death,

my eyes from tears,

my feet from stumbling.

And so I walk in the LORD’s presence

as I live here on earth!

I fully realize that it can seem counterintuitive or just irrational or mere religious speak, but both Joy and I want to genuinely voice how we have felt protected and shepherded even through the tragedy of the accident and the long and only partial recovery that has followed. A sense of God’s presence, peace, and sufficiency even on those, “dark and cloudy days,” sustained and sustains us and motivates us to witness to the hope that is in us. Even as we mourn losses, we can hold hope and live in joy. I’ll leave you with Henri Nouwen’s thoughts which express this so well:

Mourning makes us poor; it powerfully reminds us of our smallness. But it is precisely here, in that pain or poverty or awkwardness, that the Dancer invites us to rise up and take the first steps. For in our suffering, not apart from it, Jesus enters our sadness, takes us by the hand, pulls us gently up to stand, and invites us to dance. We find the way to pray, as the psalmist did, “You have turned my mourning into dancing” (Ps. 30:11)… These steps in the dance of God’s healing choreography let us move gracefully amid what would harm us and find healing as we endure what could make us despair. We can ultimately find a healing that lets our wounded spirits dance again, that lets them dance unafraid of suffering and even death because we learn to live with lasting hope.