Get Some Practice

I’m looking at him like he is crazy. Honestly, I hardly know him so he might be crazy, but I am in a foreign country with him, and several others, and I have to believe that he isn’t crazy. I have to hope none of them are crazy. Right now, I’m not so sure. As we walk through the crowded streets of Hong Kong, he is continually doing strange things and encouraging the rest of us to join him. He steps in front of people and does an “Oops, so sorry, where are you, oh, this way…” dance, if that makes sense. He breaks out into freestyle raps (loudly) on the crowded MRT. He takes selfies with people he doesn’t know. He calls it “taking off the flesh.” What does that even mean? He’s getting most of the rest of our eight person group to do the same thing.

We are in line at the border of Hong Kong and China, getting ready to enter Hong Kong, and he’s trying to get me to freestyle. I have never done that before, never planned on doing it either. I used to be more carefree, but I have become less carefree over the last couple years. I’ve become sort of a tight bundle of worry really. I find myself always examining myself: “Do I look dumb?” “Did I say the right thing?” “What is that person over there thinking about me right now?” Silly to think about, but these thoughts are always invading, causing constant anxiety, and ripping fun from just about everything. Results of my fear of failing…again.

“Ok, what should I rap about?” I ask him. I’ve decided I will try it. Why not? At this point, I can’t look more foolish than anyone else has so far, right?

“Rap about your gauges,” he replies with gusto. So I freestyle about my gauges and you know what? I did ok! No one burst out laughing at me, pointing a finger and calling me an idiot. People looked at me, but with smiles, not disgust, as I wove together a little rhyme about the big earrings in my ears and the Jesus I love so much. It was my first taste of “taking off the flesh.”

Now, almost one year later, I find myself only a few hours away from the place I first tried something so silly, and yet find myself still needing the same lesson. I am in my “prayer closet,” as one might call it, and I am asking God some questions found in a devotional I am using for my quiet time. The question is “Am I overly concerned with my own dignity? Is there anything I need to do to grow in humility?” I SO do not want to ask the Lord this question. I am afraid of what the answer will be, what God will ask me to do, but the desire to know what is between God and myself outweighs the fear of what He might say. I am literally trembling as I ask Holy Spirit to reveal His truth in this area and then get quiet to hear His response.

What happens makes me literally laugh out loud. The Holy Spirit takes me back to times that I didn’t care what people might think and I just did something silly. I have a particular friend who brings out what I call “the crazy” in me. We have a tradition that does this quite well. If a song comes on that is good for dancing, we stop, wherever we are (even in a car and on the side of a highway), and do a “five second dance party.” There have been several instances that we have done this and when we were finished, realized we had an audience (some of them rather large) only once the applause and laughter began. Moments like these come into my mind, thinking about times I made a fool of myself and I didn’t care who saw. I didn’t care because I knew the one I was with loved me and so it didn’t matter what others might think.

Doing crazy things for God sometimes takes practice. I get what “taking off the flesh” means now. It’s practicing for the times God tells me to do something someone could think was crazy, weird, insane, for the sake of the Gospel. It’s remembering that failing is ok. If I step out to do something for God and get it wrong, it’s ok because at least I stepped out. I would much rather step out and do something “crazy” and get the chance to see something miraculous than play it safe and miss the opportunity for God to change someone’s life. Am I perfect in this? No! I’m practicing though! Just the other day, I made a man smile as I broke out in the most ridiculous dance moves in front of a busy mall. Did anyone get saved or healed? Probably not, but a man smiled, and I remembered that thrill of stepping out and doing something totally silly. I got some practice.

“God is more interested in the level of risk we undertake with a pure heart to bless those around us than in our playing it safe with what we are absolutely sure of.” Kevin Dedmon