HOPEFULNESS seems like a strange way to start the season of Lent, I suppose.  With a closer look, though, I think we’d find every religious impulse, every act of faith, so somehow rooted in hope.  Even discipline.  Perhaps with discipline the most.

I started last Wednesday hopeful in the belief that I could manage my schedule more effectively, read more for the heart and soul, and be more aware of everything around me through the Lenten season.  Like this overcast sky, life hasn’t let up much since then.  Dinners with friends thinking about serious issues.  Coffee with friends processing work.  Sad news from far away and home.  School things on the weekend and church things in the time that remains.  Now that odd crunch that catches you unaware at the end of the quarter (even though you always knew it would happen).

All that hope and discipline for what?

We do it to dance.  At least that’s part of what Donald Miller suggests in an excerpt from his first book, Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance.  While it may be more than what Miller was going for, it’s this dance that discipline promises.  Learning the steps, the moves this way and that. “For a while we glide and swing our practiced sway, God crowds our feet, bumps our toes, and scuffs our shoes . . . So we learn to dance with the One who made us.  And it is a taxing dance to learn.”

In one of her early songs, Sara Groves sings of girl who “hears a rhythm calling, the echo of a grand design.”  Steven Curtis Chapman sang “I am the heart, He is the heartbeat.  I am the eyes, He is the sight. . . I am the dancer, I need the Lord of the Dance.”  Take the image and sentiment for what you will, but at it’s heart is true and truth and a good thing to reflect on this rainy Monday evening.

“But once learned, don’t we glide.  And don’t we sway.  And don’t we bury our head in His chest.  And don’t we love to dance.”

You can read the rest of Miller’s entry here.