Security With God: Poetry and Dancing

I want to ask you a question:

Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus?

Now, if that question gets you wondering if I spend my weekends as a middle-aged white man on a street corner handing out tracts from the 90′s, I’m sorry to disappoint you.

But I’m just a regular guy.

The reason I’m asking this question is because the middle-aged men who have handed out Bible tracts to me seemed to define “personal relationship with Jesus” a certain way, and since there were lots of them, I think their phraseology and definition just stuck among churchy people. What I think they actually meant by the question was, “Do you understand that Jesus is actually alive, that He still does stuff, that the Bible is relevant, and that you might feel differently about yourself if you prayed a prayer about letting Him change you?” I think those are valid questions, but a few years ago I realized that re-phrasing them simply as  “Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus?” led me toward me a pretty shallow understanding of the Christian faith.

Let me explain with a story.

My story starts in the summer after my freshman year of college at New Life’s Leadership Training program. That’s when I began re-evaluating the term “personal relationship with Jesus.” For many years, I had heard it used almost exclusively in the way that some evangelicals use it to try and determine if you’re “actually saved”, or if you just think it’s cool to call yourself a Christian since other people in your family told you that’s what your whole family is.

I went to an evangelical church in high school, and was pretty confident that Jesus was who he said he was in the Bible, so I considered myself to be one of the actually-saved people. I even did spiritual things like go to small group and read my Bible and sing the kinds of songs you see on PowerPoint slides instead of finding in hymnals. I was pretty sure that these things meant I authentically had the “personal relationship with Jesus” the middle-aged white guy handing out tracts was inquiring about, because it seemed that he likely went to a church like mine and knew Jesus in the same way I knew him.

At that point, I think my understanding of “personal relationship with Jesus” was purely black-and-white;  either you have it or you don’t. If you did, you got to go to heaven, and if you didn’t, you went to hell. And that served me for a time, because I could just compare myself to the people in my high school who drank on weekends and used profane language, and next to them, I was pretty sure I was “in” and they were “out”.

But then that summer came.

And pretty soon I wondered if my definition was really much good. You see, as long as I could end my evaluation of my standing with Jesus with a comparison against my high school friends, I could feel really safe and secure about how spiritual I was and how “close I was with Jesus.” But that summer was the first time in my life that I actually lived every day with people who professed to know Jesus deeply, and I soon found that “relationship with Jesus” might actually mean a whole lot more than I originally thought.

I specifically remember one time when a few of us went out to a park to spend some time with Jesus, and after we had done that, we just gathered to talk about what it was like. I’ll never forget what this one girl named Meghan Brown told us. She said that she spent her quiet time writing a poem to God and dancing with him. She said the poems were really personal, and that she was new at it so she didn’t think she was very good yet, but that they were something special just between her and God. And nobody else would ever get to read them.

“No; seriously, Meghan. What did you actually do?” I wondered.

But pretty soon I realized she wasn’t joking…

Some people actually do that kind of stuff.

It turns out that “devotional time” doesn’t just mean you have to read your Bible, pray in your head, and maybe listen to a couple worship songs on your iPod. You can even do crazy things like write poems to Him that nobody else will ever read, and dance with Him and yell at the top of your lungs how much you love Him the same way little kids do for their parents sometimes. Then I began to realize that people in the Bible did stuff like this too (Psalm 51:1-19, 2 Samuel 6:14, 2 Corinthians 5:13).

I quickly realized that the way that Meghan, David, and Paul seemed to be interacting with God felt a whole lot more “personal” than I was comfortable with. They treated Him like someone they could actually be themselves around, and love him in the way that felt fullest to them, like they would a friend, parent, or lover.

Later that summer, when someone on the beach asked me if I had a personal relationship with Jesus, I was surprised by my hesitancy to answer the question. I was pretty sure he was asking if I understood that the Bible says I can talk to Him and that He can free me from my bondage to sin, and I had a pretty quick answer to that. But his phrasing bothered me, because after observing Meghan’s life and the life of the men I was living with that summer, I was beginning to wonder how “personal” my relationship with Jesus really was. I began to wonder what it would look like if my relationship with Jesus was even more personal than my relationships with the other people I loved. If maybe I could express and receive love from Jesus even more freely than with my closest friends.

To be perfectly honest with you, all of this poetry and dancing talk still makes me really uncomfortable. But I’ve at least decided I want to give it a try. You see, at first I thought that maybe the reason the poetry and dancing thing is hard for me is because “that’s just not my style”, but then I couldn’t shake that nagging feeling that I was missing out on something. If it just wasn’t my style, then I probably wouldn’t have thought much of Meghan’s story, just like if she had shared that she enjoyed a new country music song she heard on the way to work that day. My friends’ new country music experiences just don’t have the ability to make me wonder if maybe there’s more to life out there for me.

I eventually had to admit that the reason that poetry and dancing made me uncomfortable was because every time I had tried risky things like poetry and dancing in my life, people told me that I looked stupid.

And I guess I was afraid of the same from God.

Like somehow I would hear all their accusations all over again about how silly I was if I did that in my quiet space with Jesus. But I don’t think He ever does that. In fact, I think He’s the safest person in the world to dance with and write poems to, because He has no ego. If I’m giving it all I have, He never thinks my worship isn’t good enough for Him. And like a father delights in his child’s fingerpainting as an expression of her love, so God delights in my singing and dancing before Him (Zephaniah 3:17, Psalm 149:4); if only I’ll trust Him enough to not call me stupid. And as I begin to sing and dance with Him, hearing his words of love and affirmation for me, I might even begin to believe that I’m not silly after all. And maybe after a while I’ll feel quite secure and content about who I am, even if other people say all the same hurtful stuff.

Since I’ve learned a couple other things about what it looks like to feel secure in relationship with God, this is just the first part of a series. There’s at least one more on the way.

Related posts:

1. Security with God: Asking Big