The Christian Life Involves Dance, not Drudgery
As soon as my granddaughter, Harmony, was adopted by my son Josh and my daughter-in-law Kara, they noticed how much she loved music. She often responded to it by dancing on her chubby, nearly-two-year-old legs, spinning around in circles until she dropped over dizzy. From Motown to Disney princess anthems, from classical instrumentations to “Baby Shark,” Harmony loves music, and she loves to dance.
One day I put on a song from the animated movie Tangled, and Harmony started her circles, inviting me to join her. I am not much for getting dizzy, so after a moment I grabbed her hands and integrated her circles with the disco twist. We were swaying joyfully back and forth to all things princess when suddenly Harmony dropped my hands and raised her arms as if to say, Pick me up. Hold me. Dance with me. How could I say no? I held her close, spinning her in circles, her eyes locked on mine. As she relaxed into me I imagined my son at her wedding, holding her close for the father-daughter dance. After a few moments I figured she’d had enough, so I put her down. But she immediately lifted her hands back up, and we began to dance again—back and forth, swaying and spinning, motioning to the music with joyful abandon until the song was through.
I confess I thought nothing of our dancing session until I saw the video my wife had recorded from her quiet post in the doorway. Seconds into watching the video my eyes brimmed with tears. Harmony was opening her life to mine. She was asking for a relationship, for rest, for shared joy . . . and she was inviting me to be one of the ones to join her.
Harmony does not understand adoption yet. She does not understand “forever family” or the sacrifice of self her birth mother made to carry her to full term. But she understands I am her “Baba” (my given grandfather name), and she understands that I want to dance with her.
I feel so privileged to have this little girl in my life, and I am not even her daddy (just her daddy’s daddy). But that day, and every day since, everything in me has wanted to give her a sense of security, love, acceptance, and safety. If all these longings could ever be fulfilled in a moment, it was in that moment of dancing with Harmony. If those longings rushed so readily from my limited and imperfect heart, how much more must our perfect and all-loving Father desire those things for me—for us!
What has Harmony been delivered from? I may never fully know. But I know the family she has been delivered to. It’s a family where she has not only a mom and dad who are filled with excitement and love and the longing to be godly parents, but also an extended family who cannot imagine themselves without her. In addition, she has a Christian community who is committed to do all they can to love her in the covenant family of God.
If you are a believer in Jesus, you are Harmony. We are all Harmony. Like her, we long for relationship and rest. Like her, we long for the accepting embrace of our Father. And like her, we may not understand much. Sometimes we are dancing cluelessly along while the Father is filled with longings for us to experience his immeasurable grace, love, mercy, kindness, and goodness. As he holds us he feels all of that in an instant, and when we catch even a glimpse of it, we are overwhelmed.
Many more dances with Harmony have followed, and hopefully many more await us in the days to come. But during that one dance with her, I learned so much about the Father’s heart toward me as his child. In fact, I experienced more of the doctrines of grace, justification, and adoption than I have learned in years of study and preaching. Colossians 1:13 tells us, “He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son.” We have been transferred from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light. Yet until our total and complete delivery to our long-awaited eternal home, we are being invited to dance today, in the here and now, dipping and swaying and spinning as he “turns [our] mourning into dancing” (Ps. 30:11). This book is about us being invited to experience the joyful abandon that I call waltzing with Jesus—the three step dance with Christ toward transformation that is Repent, Believe, Fight. We are being invited to dance with the One who plays music to our souls.
Adapted from The Gospel Waltz: Experiencing the Transformational Power of Grace by Bob Flayhart (© 2023). Published by Gospel-Centered Discipleship. Used by permission.
Bob Flayhart (DMin, Covenant Theological Seminary) has served as lead pastor of Oak Mountain Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama, for more than thirty-five years, and serves on the board of Covenant Theological Seminary. Bob and his wife, Laurie, have three children and five grandchildren.
Holly Mackle is the author of Bright Star, The Story of Esther, the family Advent devotionals Little Hearts, Prepare Him Room and Connected Christmas, and curator of the mom humor collaboration Same Here, Sisterfriend. Holly and her husband, David, wrangle two young girls in Birmingham, Alabama, where she is a lower school librarian.