I have the pleasure, no, the privilege, of working with preschoolers three days a week. One of the little guys in class loves to dance. When there’s some transition time between lessons during the day, we put the music on, and the room fills with littles bodies jumping up and down. They look like popcorn. One little boy, I’ll call him Sam, always wants the same song. He hears the very first note of the intro, his face lights up with a smile bigger than his head, and he is catapulted into total joy and movement. He becomes Snoopy doing his “happy dance.”
One day, instead of letting the song play until the end, I stopped the music and called out, “Freeze!” Not only does that help develop muscle control, but it trains their listening and responsive skills, as well as their analytical ability to know that something new is on the horizon. After the first couple of times, the kids got the hang of it and would deliberately freeze in goofy positions…except Sam. He was caught up in his own little world of happy. He maintained the same smile, the same movement, the same curls bopping up and down. The only difference was he was dancing in silence while everyone else was frozen in position. I called out “Freeze!” again, but he still wouldn’t stop. When he finally realized that he didn’t have a choice, he started to cry (yes, I felt as though I had kicked a puppy), and he said through his tears, ”But, I don’t wanna freeze!” He was afraid that if he stopped, it would mean that it was the end of the fun for good. He was confusing “being still” with stopping altogether – no future fun, no further instructions for anything that he could possibly enjoy.
So, how often do we fail to stop to listen for further information? God says, ”Be still and know that I am God (Psalm 46:10). But wait! Doesn’t that mean that someone else is making a decision for us? Doesn’t that infer that someone else knows what we need better than we do?
Sort of. First of all, we don’t always know what’s best for our lives. Have you seen the news?? Second, we always have a choice. That’s one of the greatest gifts we have been given – we can choose how to behave and how to respond. Third, we certainly know best what we want, but I’m not really sure that we always know what we actually need. As we were growing up, even now, how often did we have to do things that we didn’t want to do, only to realize later that those things were crucial and so necessary? Sometimes we have to make those difficult choices sooner to realize the potential later down the road.
Being still means perking up our ears and waiting for our marching orders for what’s next – for what’s even better. It doesn’t mean that we sit around in limbo or stick our heads down into the nearest sandbox. Being still and listening means that we can have more confidence that our presumptions are not taking priority over what we actually know and can learn. It means being comfortable with being uncomfortable. Freezing is not shutting out the world, it’s letting God’s voice be heard when He’s speaking to us.
We all have our own unique path set before us. We may not be able to see further than the next few steps at a time, but occasionally being still will keep us from stepping off onto the wrong road. Sometimes, being still is the only way we can
Dance on.
Grace Notes 