YRunning Back To You
I came to a powerful realisation today. It's amazing how things can just waltz by you and you can see what's happening without truly realising what it all means. Today was one of those days when everything came clear and I had to run back to God again.
You see, June's been my dance month. Last September, I felt God calling me back to dance and I started taking ballet classes again. This June I've attended two sets of dance workshops and prepared for one concert. I didn't think I'd be busy but I have been, and it's been fun.
Today was the last of the last. It was the Dance Collective conference and concert, a series of workshops put on by a group of Christian dancers. Things had been bubbling up since...since I don't know when. Since I realised next week I'll be returning to school, I guess. School always scares me, even though it's familiar enough to me now.
It had been bubbling up inside me, these feelings of helplessness and dread and reluctance that have become so familiar to me the past six months. It didn't help that somehow I knew I hadn't really been studying properly. Just going through the motions, knowing I was just doing it to get it over and done with in order to go out to play, dance, whatever. It burst out today, while I was dancing. One moment, I'm just dancing to the music, along with everyone else. It was an impromptu thing, everyone was dancing to the beat of drums, worshipping God. Some were just standing there, arms raised. But I wasn't really watching. I was stopping, stilling my body, then slowly falling to the floor, legs crossed, face to the floor. Hot tears flowing out, and all this while I'm thinking, "Why am I crying? I don't even know what I'm crying for!"
I'd already realised I was running away from my studies, using dance as a means of escape, but at that instant that information became more than fact for me. It instilled a renewed desire to please God and seek His will. To run back to Him. You see, I'd been thinking God may be calling me to dance, and He may well be, but in the process I had been using it as an excuse to forsake my studies and not honour God with them. Revising in a slipshot way, procrastinating, when it's obvious that He has called me to be in this school, in this situation, at this point of time. Now. Whether I like it or not.
I asked Daniel if he liked his job yesterday, and he said, "not particularly." I was surprised at that, and asked him why, and he replied, "because it puts me in situations I don't exactly like to be in." The familiarity of that statement struck me.
I'm called to honour God despite my circumstances, whether I like being here or not. Psalm 139: God has created me, He knows me, He hems me in behind and before. When He made me, He threw away the mould. What am I, Father, that You have blessed me with so much? Your goodness astounds me.
I was watching this dance today by a Christian dancer, Ng Kin Wee, that painted the perfect picture of what our relationship with God is like. He was dressed up in a yellow shirt with denim overalls and a yellow cap, like a little child, and danced with the innocence and trust of a little child before his loving father. In the middle of the dance he stands in the centre of the stage, hands folded, stamping his feet to the music while the lyrics go, "I may not understand what You have in store for me"--the way I feel I am like when I'm frustrated and don't know where I'm going. Eventually, however, he ends his dance in a lunge, hands outstretched, fascinated and rejoicing as he reaches out for his invisible Father.
It's always like this. Always not understanding, always struggling, always frustrated, but always running back to Him.
jac was here with you
6/25/2005 09:13:00 pm
YThe World Grows Older
Haven't been blogging much. There isn't very much to say, and when there is, I don't quite know how to say it.
For the past few days I've sort of been sitting around watching. It feels that way, at least. I feel like the little mouse in a corner who just sits and watches the rest of the world go by and wonders why people are the way they are. (Maybe it's the afternoon heat that's making me feel this way.) I feel so inactive, and rather unproductive, and most of the time I'm just a buoy in the ocean, bobbing away, biding my time for something, I don't quite know what.
It unnerves me to not be on a mission or to be hurrying somewhere or another. How strange that life can suddenly change gears; one moment you're rushing around to get your homeworkreadingshoppingtalking done in one day and the other moment you're sitting in a chair in the afternoon heat after shutting your book, realising that there's nothing else to complete by the rest of the day.
Do you ever have days like this?
I've discovered staring out of the window of a crowded bus is one of my most enjoyable activites. Just watching, watching and thinking and soon you stop watching what is outside and start watching what is inside you and realising that there is so much more to life, to a person, to this universe, than there is on the surface. And you wonder at its infiniteness because it means the God who created it is bigger than that--so big it blows your mind.
I am enjoying this.
jac was here with you
6/14/2005 02:31:00 pm
YA Walk in the Park
A week of holidays has chugged slowly by and I feel like I've been on holiday forever.
It's strange, I guess. You would think I'd have every reason to feel happy but I don't. Having holidays gives me more time to enjoy myself but so far I haven't been feeling that way. I've been going out with my friends and having time to dance and spend time with my family but the thing is that it's always been mingled with work because I have to study for blocks right after holidays, and that contaminates everything.
Something I've begun to realise about myself is that I have impossibly high standards. In my mind, the only time when I can be perfectly happy is when a certain number of favourable circumstances line up in the absence of unfavourable events. And that's ridiculous, as everyone knows. Because there will never be a perfect day like that, and if I continue to use that day as the yardstick I'll never be content, never be happy.
Paul says in Philippians, "I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want." I remember flipping to this verse during school term and asking God to help me understand what it is to be content. I remember also counting down eagerly the weeks till school holidays. The irony of it all is that I've gotten where I want to be and there's still more I want. There always will be. I've got to stop somewhere.
I've been running so hard and so long this week. Every day it's been one thing after another: chapters to finish revising, friends to meet up with, ballet class to rush for, newspapers to read, tv to watch, QT to do. I quantify everything, measuring them in terms of how they will benefit me, and pack my days up into compact to-do lists until, I realised, lying in bed last night unable to sleep for the nth time this week, that I've made myself so busy I don't have time to think, and so I compensate that by daydreaming in the darkness.
I need to slow down, I really do, and most importantly, trust God a little more. But tell me how to make these abstract terms a reality. Maybe the beauty of it all is that I can't. I can only change the inside of me and wait for God to change the outside.
And so continues my walk with God.
jac was here with you
6/03/2005 10:49:00 am