Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.
– JAMES 1:22
I’m always curious about the person driving next to me. We all are. Who drives that kind of car? I wonder if they’re listening to the same song on the radio that I am (When that happens, it feels like it should be accompanied by a rainbow in the sky or a free dinner at Chili’s. Somehow, we feel mystically bonded, one driver to another — like we were meant to be there together). Driving around last Saturday afternoon, I was struck by a handful of cars whose drivers held striking similarities in their appearance. All the drivers were young and over-dressed. Hair was done. Make-up was perfect. The occupants were visibly nervous with each other. I took particular notice of one guy who drove with hands firmly on the 10-2 position on the steering wheel of his family’s high performance minivan, and whose lapel was adorned with a tiny white rose and baby’s breath. It dawned on me that he, like the others I had seen, was on his way to prom.
I started to think back on the holy terror that accompanied asking someone to a big dance. Of course, all dances are big — the specific mass of any dance can always be measured by the degree of fear associated with the asking. I clearly remember the build up to one particular junior high school dance. While it lacked the pomp and formality of the dances that would later arrive in my high school years, it still held a particularly terrifying trait: not in the asking someone to the dance, but rather, asking someone to dance. I had made the task even more painful by announcing to my friends that I was going to ask a specific girl to dance with me.
She was, like so many girls, a distant galaxy away from being in my “league.” My friends mocked. But, I was resolute… at the lunch table. I fully believed, with unparalleled conviction that I would ask her to dance. I felt confident, sure, solid. Besides, she was kind. She lacked the arrogance befitting someone of her beauty. Then, I saw her… at her lunch table, with her pretty friends, and her perfect sandwich, days from the dance itself. Whatever nerves I had at the thought of asking, despite my momentary surge in self-assurance, now took on a new energy of uncontrollable trepidation intent on destroying me. The reality of what I had just declared punched me in the gut with crippling power. I knew then that I had given myself my own impossible standard. My friends would hold me to what I believed and declared to be my intended future. And on Friday night, somewhere between Milli Vanilli, Roxette, and Bobby Brown, Richard Marx’ “Right Here Waiting” would clear the dance floor of all the fearful. At that moment, all my stupid friends would be glaring at me to see if my words of confidence and my predicted actions would converge in actually dancing.
With their relentless gaze my friends stared and challenged my burgeoning manhood. I asked her to dance. I nearly died. (NOTE: My memory of this moment was almost perfectly captured by the short-lived television show, Freaks and Geeks here. See if you can find yourself in it, too.) But, she said “yes.” She was kind. I don’t think we ever really spoke again. I guess my “Blue Angels” t-shirt and my over-sized retainer were just too much for her to handle. She let one get away. Her loss.
That idea, however — not the dance, nor the music, but the marriage of belief and words and action — is the central, guiding notion of our next few weeks worth of messages. We’ll look at a book of the Bible written in the infancy of the early church that called people to do more than listen, or hear, or learn, or speak about what they believed. Instead, this letter called people to act, to live, to demonstrate the power of their conviction by the way their faith was set in motion. It is one thing to declare an intention or a belief and another to live it. Together, let’s see what challenge lies ahead for us. It’s going to be a great series.
See you soon,
Jeff
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