Dancing in the Middle
When you greet the dawn of the early morning hours, you never really know what a day will hold.
Some days hold the best news of our lives. We earn promotions. We make the grade. We win the game. We fall in love. We say I do. We deliver the baby. We overcome the illness. We get one more chance.
Other days hold the worst news of our lives. We lost the job. We failed that test. We walked away broken hearted. We said goodbye to love of our lives. We lost the baby. We get the diagnosis. We lost our last chance.
The rest of our days lie somewhere in the middle and we must command joy and grace into the everyday happenings of this not-so-ordinary life. We must seize with excitement the opportunity to dance in the middle instead of running hard towards “best” and running fearfully from “worst.”
We must learn to find joy in the dishes that need to be washed and the laundry that needs to be folded. We must choose to find a smile right in the middle of cooking another family dinner or mowing the too tall grass. We must lift our eyes to see the more that’s happening right in the middle of our ordinary days filled with popsicle grins, mismatched pajamas, and midnight pillow talks. We must choose to live life well in the middle of it all, so that the we can truly feel the weight of our best and worst days.
It seems rather undesirable to feel the weight of our worst days. Truth is, if we never know the depth of the valley, we can’t truly appreciate the height of the mountain. If the weight of grief never bares heavy upon our shoulders, how can we truly feel the relief when it’s been lifted by the One who carries our burdens? Knowing how it feels on the bottom, dear friends, allows us to breathe in the expansive view from the top.
It seems these days that everyone wants to live their #bestlife…highlighting only the picture perfect best of days. But what if living your best life is really about living a life that is satisfied in ALL of its days; even the ones we label as worst?
What if the ability to live our best life hinges on our acknowledgement that a life surrendered to God is at its best no matter what comes against it?
A life surrendered to God is led not by fate or by happenstance but it is divinely directed by the Creator of the world. A life surrendered to God knows its place in the Kingdom and seeks to show others The Way. A life surrendered to God can find beauty in the middle because we know that each breath, each moment, each day is GLORY to the God who sees them all.
Dear friends, our days on this quick turning sphere of a world are but a shimmer in the sun and we must learn how to live without longing only for the best days and fearfully avoiding the worst. We must learn how to dance joyfully in the middle with as many as we can gather before the unique melody of our one song stops playing.
© Dani Hardy (August 17, 2019)