a time to dance
The curtains open and the music swells, and I imagine flitting, light-winged, across the stage, which looks blue, lit like the sky. I imagine the freedom of soaring, the air wrapping about my waist like a pair of lifting hands.
They will soar on wings like eagles, I remember. They will run and not grow weary.
I sit back in my seat to watch Adam and Riley and their friends dance about their dreams, a dance they choreographed and practiced for months after school, and I can’t help but revisit a mid-week phone call from one of Riley’s teachers. It came in just at the end of rehearsal, around the time I glanced at the clock and began to expect my babies home.
“I’m a little worried about Miss Riley,” her teacher had said, before explaining that Riley had been over-tired all day at school, that at rehearsal Riley had become confused and disoriented and couldn’t quite lift her arms. I struggled to understand. Did this mean that Riley actually couldn’t lift her arms or that she didn’t understand what they wanted her to do? Riley’s teacher told me they hadn’t seen any obvious signs of a seizure, but that Riley’s eyes were bloodshot, and they’d pulled her from the stage to rest. “She’s flustered now, and I don’t know if I’m the cause of that,” her teacher said, “but I was concerned; I didn’t want her to have a seizure.”
I sat down in a chair and looked out the window, but I could only see those bloodshot eyes Riley’s teacher described, that look Riley gets when she can’t decide if she should be afraid.
“Thank you for calling me,” I said slowly, watching the limbs of the pear tree sway in the backyard. Kevin and I had been praying about Riley’s rest, asking for protective discernment to keep her safe during the busy week of rehearsals. “And thank you for knowing when to pull her from the stage for some rest.” This call would help us make decisions as the week wore on; it would help us protect Riley from the potential for seizures. Even so, it felt like a shadow had descended on the afternoon. I hate that Riley even has to worry about such things at all, that the threat of seizures limits her life.
I traced the path of the sun through the leaves outside, suddenly remembering something I’d read this morning. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it,” the apostle John wrote (John 1:5). Curious, I had looked up the word translated overcome in a lexicon and discovered it to be made, at it’s root, of two words, a word directionally indicating down plus a word that means to grasp with purpose, to seize and pull. I had texted a good friend, told her how this encouraged me. Quite literally, it says the darkness can’t take down the light, I wrote her. The cosmic wrestling match continues, and God patiently teaches me to hope in the light that nothing can take down, not even this darkness I can name.
It’s okay to acknowledge and name the shadows. Epilepsy, autism, diabetes, those words label some of ours, the shadows that chronically pass over our family. But in the darkness, an unconquerable light shines, and that Light has a Name too. Christ, I whispered. I wanted to point, to shout–Look!–like John the Baptist. Speak His Name, and the shadows fall back.
I watch now as my children and their friends begin to fly across the stage dressed in gauzy dresses and tie-dyed shirts, blue and gray and starry silver. Even their costumes seem to represent the twin tensions–light and dark, night and day, fair weather and storm. I watch as one of my dear friends, now dancing in a wheelchair, grace-fully glides on stage; as one of the teachers lays his own arms against the arms of a friend whose body won’t obey and clasps our friend’s hands and helps him elegantly move his arms like wings, free and full of breath. I take a breath myself, a gasp, really, and begin to cry. Look, look!
My kids and their friends live too divorced from any kind of pretense to pretend they don’t see us from the stage. Some of them lift their hands just a little to wave. Adam tilts his head, squinting against the stage lights to acknowledge me. I watch how fluidly he moves, how focused, how natural, how unhindered, and I weep over his freedom of expression.
The light shines in the darkness, I remember, and the darkness can’t take down the light.
Riley shines from center stage.
She’s beautiful, that’s my only thought, as I watch her move like she belongs, like she’s safe, as the lights glow on her hair, turning it back to gold, to the color it was in her childhood. God made her beautiful, that’s what she always says, and in this moment, I can see not just the beauty of her features but the beauty of her spirit as she extends and glides and expands through the dance. Riley reminds me that we are not now as we will be. The shadows can distort our perspective; they can dull our perception of the weight of glory.
It’s not a perfect dance, not technically, but I think that’s why it touches me so deeply, why it scrubs me free of all my careful numbness, why right now I feel it all–the pain of affliction, the freedom and hope of Christ, the radiance of true life. I watch Adam twist and turn and eventually, purposefully, lay his choreographed limbs down on the floor, feigning rest, and I think, This is us. This is us, the wild variety of vulnerability, of weaknesses, of limitations; the longing for rest; the living hope, the Spirit gracefully loosening the bonds that would pull us down. We will all one day fly free. We will soar. I watch the kids dance and I know the truth of what John wrote as surely as ever.
I witness it every day with my own eyes:
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can’t take down the light.
