Monday, February 20, 2006

Dancing With Jesus

This weekend I attended interdenominational ladies retreat held here in Timmins. While I'm now on IV antibiotics to treat my infection, thanks to God's perfect timing, I was still able to attend most of the sessions even if that meant getting lots of questions about "what did you do to your hand?"

On Friday night the speaker (Kathy Mainse from 100 Huntley Street) talked about how God wants to be our lover, not just our master, potter, and shepherd. After her message we spent some time in prayer and while I was sitting there praying, I felt someone standing next to me and suddenly a lady started praying for me. After she finished praying she said: "I see you waltzing with Jesus- Jesus wants to dance with you."

Now I am probably one of the biggest skeptics that there is when it comes to stuff like this, but as soon as she said these words I knew that it was from God. Let me tell you why:

This last summer was an amazing time spiritually for me. My relationship with God was flourishing and I literally felt like most of the time I was dancing with Jesus. He would lead and together we would move through life to the beat of His rhythm. And the more time we spent together "dancing", the closer we got and the deeper our relationship became. But then things changed.

When it happened for sure I don't know, but sometime over the past couple of months, I stopped dancing. It wasn't a sudden thing but as I began to get sicker and sicker, I danced less and less. Then the dancing stopped completely. It wasn't like my relationship with Christ dissolved, in fact my faith was never stronger, but those intimate moments became few and far between.

So when that lady said "I see you waltzing with Jesus- Jesus wants to dance with you" it was like my eyes were opened wide. In that moment I realized that the discontentment I was feeling wasn't from my illness, but from the missing intimacy between Christ and I. Where once we moved spontaneously through life and our relationship was filled with excitement and fire, I had unknowingly fallen back into the religious structure of a forced formula friendship: "take 15 minutes of Bible reading, add ten minutes of prayer, subtract one sin, add three good deeds and God is happy and so are you" kind of thing.

And I'm happy to say that thanks to this weekend, that structure has been removed. I'm "dancing" again and I'm loving every minute of it. And the more time I spend dancing, the more Christ pulls me to Himself and the clearer His voice becomes and then it doesn't really matter if we're dancing all by ourselves in a world filled with chaos and strife. All that matters is that I'm moving to His rhythm through this life and drawing nearer to my King- that's exactly what I want my life to be about.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Kristen,
I think the Lord uses other people to speak to us some times because we didn't get His Word the first time He spoke it. Anyway, I think the following quote is fitting to this blog entry.

"Life may not be the party we hoped for, but while we are here we might as well dance." -Author Unknown

Kristen said...

Thanks for the quote Byron- I love it!