Sometimes it seems like the curtain between spiritual reality and physical reality gets pulled back a little bit, and you're allowed to dance in the sunbeams before it falters down again. Last Sunday, before church, Jesus found me at BC&T, while I downed soy chai tea lattes and read old journals. Ideas that I'd been mulling over for months suddenly connected to each other, too quickly for me to record and leaving me chicken scratching concepts on napkins and making little triangular diagrams - "LOVE - TRUST - JESUS -> SPECIAL GRACE!" - which is like drawing a stick figure to try and express "Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss".
I bundle up and head out to my new Pentecostal church family. I bounce up to church so enthusiastically that I fell down a small set of stairs in my new heels (Lesson: Spiritual revelations should not be combined with high heels). I even make it through all of the hugging and introducing and the overwhelming touching of the South with grace and good spirits.
I have always pictured worship and prayer as a kind of dance. Dancing can communicate love without language being necessary; dancing also has this sameness of purpose and direction that seems to unify more than anything else. I read somewhere that "dancing is the music of the body;" I think that worship is the dancing of the soul. So through all this, I'm still, futily, trying to get my beautiful spiritual ideas down in triangular diagrams, when one of my absolute favorite songs starts to play. This is a song to dance to! (Metaphorically: I am a New Englander, still.) So I close up all my diagrams and stand up, super pumped about worship...
A hand on my back.
"Jesus told me to pray for you, sweetheart."
Eh?
"I felt, ever since we said hello this morning, that Jesus wants to tell you something!"
A kindly, grey-haired lady is kneeling next to me now.
"He feels your pain, baby, and I'm gonna pray that He re-leases you!"
Wha'? My pain? What pain? Jesus, are you telling this lady something about my unconscious pain that you aren't telling me?
"Jeeeesus, I pray for my sister! She's sad! She's suffering! She's empty! Her heart is broken and bleeding, Lord! It is broken! It is bleeding! May she know that YOU answer her prayers, that YOU hear her cry, that YOU will heal her brokenness! Re-lease her! Re-lease her! Jeeeeee-sus!"
So on, so forth. And then, that was that. Worship wrapped up, The lady gave me a weepy hug. I sort of patted her politely on the shoulder.
We don't do this in New England.
At first I was cranky. Interrupting worship, to me, is like interrupting a dance right in the middle. And not just any dance - it's like trying to tap out the groom on his wedding day: "I know you just got married, but I sure would like to dance with the bride... right - now!"
But the metaphor didn't help me stay cranky, because if Jesus is the groom here, then he knows that this isn't such a big deal, and I'm just overreacting. And then I had this picture of Jesus, in a tux, standing by the potted plants in the corner of the patio at the reception, watching my desperate face as I get sucked into a wild polka with a well intentioned Southern lady ("1 and 2 and! 1 and 2 and!") ... and he keeps catching my eye and grinning, because the sort of person that I give my whole life up to in a Divine Romance is also the sort of person that thinks that things like that are sort of silly, in a good, get-the-giggles kind of way. And knows that this nice lady doing the polka so vigorously really does mean well, and loves Jesus just as much as me - just in a different way. There'll be plenty of time to dance. But this sure has been a hoot, right, Laura?
Right.
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