About the Message

Back in New Jersey fifteen years ago, I did a monologue in a church service as a homeless person. In preparation, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out my look, and I tried it out on the women attending my scrapbook workshop that weekend. These pants? This shirt or that one? No makeup – how about my hair back? I affected a bit of a limp, if I remember right (because a friend standing at the door through which I left the sanctuary complimented me on maintaining it all the way out).

I spent a lot of time running lines in front of a mirror, just to see how I looked. I wanted to not look like me. And I apparently succeeded – I had a couple friends tell me after the service that they didn’t recognize me at all for quite a while.

But at one point while I was rehearsing with the mirror, I took a really good look at myself. And it occurred to me that several years earlier, it would have killed me to go on stage looking this ugly.

I didn’t realize until that moment how much my performing had been about me looking good. But it certainly was. I wanted to be praised and admired -- for my acting ability, but also for my looks, I guess. I wanted to be noticed. I wanted to be seen.

During my final few years in New Jersey, I also got involved in the dance ministry at my church. The first solo dance I did in a service was also my first real experience of debilitating stage fright. I was terrified. I genuinely had visions of myself standing on the platform in front of the congregation with every bit of choreography flying out of my brain, just standing there, staring. In the end, I was able to muddle through the performance, and people were all very complimentary of my work afterwards (most were amazed that I was a dancer at all).

But when the time came for my second solo attempt, the terror returned . . . so I did a bit of business with God. I told him that if I was going to put myself through this, he had to use it in a mighty way. If this was just going to be about me and my dancing, then it wasn’t worth the torture I was going through. But Lord, if you can somehow use this for your kingdom, then okay. I'll dance for you.

After that performance, I again received many compliments on my dancing ability . . . and decided I was done.

But the next Sunday when I was picking my daughter up in the children’s area, a dad stopped me, a man I had seen around but never spoken to. “You – you’re the one who did that dance last week!” he exclaimed. And then he got emotional. “It was . . . it was beautiful. It was like . . . you were dancing for Jesus . . . it was . . . it was like a love song to Jesus . . .” He sputtered and struggled with words and fighting back tears, but clearly, he had been moved by what I did.

And I thought, Crap. Now I have to do it again. Nevertheless, I was grateful to have been a tool in God's hand that morning.

This was one of the dramatic ways God grew me during my time at Hope Church: my performing -- drama and dance -- ceased to be about me and started to be about the message.

I teach my theatre students that drama can be a form of worship and a form of ministry. And if that’s true about playing pretend on a stage, then it’s true about anything they do in life. Childcare. Car maintenance. Anything. It is worship and it is ministry . . . if they choose to make it that.