Dance on!

This past Sunday saw me, my wife and our eldest daughter comfortably seated in Bergen's largest concert hall, eyes and attention riveted on the stage where hundreds of youthful performers in rapid succession demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt the wonders of the energetic and beautiful movements called dance.

Well, of course, our pride swelled to inexpressible proportions when our youngest appeared in the company of the other 20 or so dancers belonging to her group, but this wasn't as much about Silje Kristiane's debut on stage in front of 1500 people as it was a celebration of a gift many a believer has come to disdain and despise as sinful to the core.

IGNORANCE OR BIAS?

Maybe they have wilfully ignored the many passages in Scripture referring to dance as a way of expressing our joy in the Lord (King David danced, remember), or maybe their thinking has become conditioned by years of repeated fire and brimstone calls to abandon the ghastly carnal, licentious behaviours in the balmy dance halls or discoteques? It's true that some types of dance probably only exist to trigger wild, uninhibited erotic sensations, and it's probably also equally true that dancing to some people is simply a kind of foreplay in scant disguise. But the misuse or misappropriation of human activities and talents never automatically proves their innate sinfulness.

God created man with a physical body. And that physical body was intented for daily use, whether in work or in leisure. And with the same bodies with which we serve God in the honourable work we do in the fields, in the offices, in the machine halls; with the same bodies we create moments of aesthetic rapture; with the same bodies we take the ordinariness of controlled movements and elevate them into exceptional displays of visual delight.

PRAISE FROM THE ATHEIST

The vast majority of dancers that graced the stage floor that Sunday night, aged 6 or 16, simply - maybe unwittingly - praised the God who gave them their bodies. They may never have consciously intended their performances to be perceived of as acts of praise, but sometimes our own motives matter very little: what results from our many hours of labour and preparation still testifies to the genius of our Maker. The painting by the atheist, the song by the hedonist, the food prepared by the agnostic chef: all may inspire an awareness in us that God can be honoured by all that we do.

Dance on, believers. Never let cases of misuse hinder you from heaping praise on your heavenly father, even when you dance to the highly contagious and masterly crafted rhythms of the incomparable Michael Jackson.