lessons from a barn dance

Obedience is a dance!

I know what you must be thinking!- This is going to be one of those corny longwinded metaphors that people use to illustrate a ‘deep’ concept that one could easily understand by doing a simple Google search. Guess what- you probably are right!

I recently discovered something profoundly beautiful through Afrikaans barn dancing aka sokkie. Nope, that’s not a typo, some friends all but forced me to spend an evening dancing to Afrikaans pop hits and I actually enjoyed it! Being the only, uhm, melanin-rich Shona-Ndebele girl in the room, it was no surprise that I was the least qualified dancer in the room that night. I was clueless! But my friends assured me that all I needed to do was follow the guys’ lead and fake it till I made it.

Growing up in an African household the concept of obedience was drilled into my subconscious. It meant dropping whatever you were doing to do whatever a gown up told you do. If you dared to negotiate let alone ignore what you were told- you would get the thunder- real and fast. In our family, you would not just get a hiding but a scripture reference to go with it- ‘Children obey your parents for this is right’.

So naturally when I decided to commit to Christianity, I was not surprised that it would involve obeying the Lord. I simply told myself- ‘Self, obey the Lord for this is right’ and that was it! I never negotiated let alone ignored His instructions-I knew in this case He could literally bring the thunder real and fast. I had read the Bible stories of fire and storms coming from heaven, I knew who I was dealing with. I didn’t want to go there!

But something changed along the way. Obedience started to feel like a negative word. It meant a long list of things I had to do for God. The to-do lists soon became like a prison sentence that I could only get out off through good behaviour. I lost the meaning of the word and replaced it with sacrifice. I sacrificed my time and went the extra mile with each task- I offered my best ram on the altar of sacrifice in the hopes of pleasing Him.

1 Sam 15: 22 what is more pleasing to the Lord, your burnt offerings and sacrifice or your obedience to His voice? Listen! Obedience is better than sacrifice, and submission is better than offering the fat of rams.

All my well-meaning sacrificial efforts to please God were futile because I had not once stopped to ask Him what would please Him. I was running on the false assumption that He would be impressed by my list of ‘good deeds’. A really wise dude (my Pastor) recently reminded me that God does not reward us based on our ability to meet our self-generated lists of demands. If God didn’t make the list, striving to fulfil it is a pure waste of time. Newsflash: God doesn’t work on a points system! Our good behaviour points cannot earn us a ticket into heaven!

Obedience is impossible without communication, it’s an ongoing conversation with our Creator. We speak to God, He listens. God speaks, we listen and answer in obedience. C.S Lewis puts it this way “There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him.”

Back to my sokkie story.

I realise now that the fun of dancing with a partner requires a certain level of vulnerability, trust and lots of mistakes in between. That evening I had to confront my cluelessness, trust in my partners’ ability to lead and my ability follow.

I figure obedience to God works in a similar way. He gives us the liberty to have weaknesses and awards us the choice to trust in is ability to lead and he enables us to follow Him. My favourite bit is that in this dance we will inevitably fumble a few times, step on His toes a few times and we might even fall. But the most important qualification you need for obedience is willingness- willingness to be lead, to follow and to occasionally look foolish!