This past weekend, my wife and I attended a pair of basketball games at our local state university, a men's and women's doubleheader of our beloved Minnesota State University Moorhead Dragons.
Frankly, the men's tipoff game was a veritable drubbing, with the hometown team notching a win. And then the women's nightcap game started out in much the same way, before the local women's team righted the ship and made the game interesting in second half, before falling by only five points.
Full disclosure: While I am a big sports fan, my tastes tend to run to other sports, especially when basketball games are blowouts. My attention wanes pretty fast then. But Shelley is huge basketball nut, and so I'm willing to be a good sport to enjoy an evening with her watching and cheering on the hometown team.
So, on this particularly evening, when the basketball on the court wasn't riveting, I was pleased to find sitting near us in the home bleachers was a mom and her young son, a toddler who was not going to be entertained for several hours by the play on the basketball alone, but thoroughly enjoyed the bass-heavy contemporary music pumped through the arena's loud speakers during breaks of play.
Once play would stop and the music would come on, this little shaver would hop to his feet and boogey down like he was a professional whose career depended upon it on a televised dance competition.
Talk about joy unleashed! I had far more fun watching him then I did that night's basketball!
And I thought to myself, "Now this is where I see the Holy Spirit at work today!"
Here in this little boy who could care less if anyone was watching and judging him or not. The rhythms were overtaking him, and he wasn't hiding any of it. He let loose!
What a shame more of us can't live that way, right? ... Unencumbered by societal expectations and (gasp!) what others might think of our funky moves.
Coincidentally, this morning I received in one of my New York Times newsletters a column by Melissa Kirsch asking "Why Don't We Dance More?" Her conclusion: "We don’t dance as much as we could, or as much as we want to, because we’re afraid to look foolish."
She wrote that in her teenage years, her and her friends would gather late at night in a suburban parking lot, turn on the tunes and dance like no one was watching. "Those nights were exhilarating, opportunities to turn off our brains and let loose, to express ourselves physically, outside of the limited vernacular we normally afforded ourselves as self-conscious teenagers," she wrote.
In the course of her reporting, she discovered what you already know: As we become adults with responsibilities, we put dancing aside as something frivolous ... a kid thing.
And, frankly, we're the worse for it.
Yes, my family would be extremely embarrassed if I were to break out my stylish moves (I have none!) at a public basketball game. I mean, they're embarrassed enough when I dance in the privacy of our own home. But even this middle-aged dad with less-than-stellar dad dance moves admits that sometimes it's fun to just cut loose in our basement rec room, dancing like no one is watching.
The boy at the basketball game had it right. I wish I could share the sheer joy that he emanated but mere words will fail.
That was the Holy Spirit lighting him up, and relatedly bringing smiles to all of the folks who were sitting near him. What a shame we adults believe that we have to let go of that just to fit in as we age. Bummer!
Yorumlar