My mom and dad paid for over 16 years of dance lessons. They started because I was initially clumsy and couldn’t alternate my feet when walking upstairs at the age of two. My love for dance continued and for this reason I like to watch So You Think You Can Dance on a fairly regular basis during the season.
Wednesday night I tuned into the last 20 or so minutes of the show and was disheartened. There on the screen was a beautiful young woman. However, her audition costume was one resembling what a bride should wear in the marriage bed the first night of married life. I think you know what I mean.
In an interview with the contestant she told how as a young girl she was shy and withdrawn. Her parents put her in dance. Now, 20 years later, she is auditioning in front of an audience of millions, scantly clad and performing a burlesque jazz number.
I have to ask, Is this the result her parents were hoping to gain when they put their precious preschooler in dance?
I am of the thought the more skin revealed, the more sexual behaviors portrayed, the more loudly the heart cries, “See me? Am I enough? Can you tell me I am enough and I am beautiful? Can you tell me I am worth dying for and fighting for? Do you notice me?”
Let me just say that I did not watch this young woman’s dance. I fast forwarded through her performance. Although I am a woman myself I wanted to uphold these words:
Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light, but when it is bad, your body is full of darkness. ~Luke 11:34
Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things; and give me life in your ways. ~ Psalm 119:37
You have heard that it was said, You shall not commit adultery. But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. ~ Matthew 5:27-29
Please know that I was not tempted by this beautiful young woman. However, I know that the dance she was doing was not meant for my eyes nor the eyes of anyone but her husband.
Now back to those questions from earlier especially as they relate to Father’s Day. Dad’s are meant to present the cup of Living Water to their children. They are to be the cup-bearers of their Father telling God’s little girls and boys whose they are and that for which they should hunger and thirst.
A guest pastor on Sunday, Dr. Charles Lowery, put it this way, “We should be telling our children, ‘You are God’s little boy. You are God’s little girl.'” In this way we are imparting the knowledge of whose they are and portraying the practices of how they should act.
In being a cup-bearer of the Living Water of Christ Jesus parents are filling that void in children’s hearts that say, “Am I enough? What is my purpose? Is there more to this life than my own fleeting pleasures? Isn’t it all about me?”
I am so thankful for a father and a mother who trained me in the way that I should go at an early age. I remember in particular one evening where I was sitting inches from the television screen pointing to a long line of beautiful majorettes and saying, “I want to look like her, and her, and her, and her.” Then shaking my head and adding, “Not like her.”
My dad pulled me aside and told me that it doesn’t matter what we look like on the outside; it is what is on the inside that counts. He continued that we shouldn’t make fun of people because of their size or looks. These words combined with my mother’s constant, “Pretty is as pretty does,” resonated in my young heart… although I only truly understood what my mom was communicating when I was a mother myself.
To those dad’s, like the one my children have, who present the cup of Living Water to God’s children they have been entrusted with, Happy Father’s Day. Continue to do well God’s good and faithful servants. Press on and press in and look out for the devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.
To those fathers who have misplaced or replaced the Living Water in their life, I offer the words of your Father in Heaven of Isaiah 55.
Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. ~Isaiah 55:1
Father’s, as soldiers of the Living God and cup-bearers for the King, once you drink the cup the Lord extends to you, turn and pour a cup for the children He has entrusted to you. Walk in the way of the Lord’s commands and watch as a nation will rise up and praise His Holy Name.
It isn’t too late for the young woman on the dance show. Why not join me now in praying that a full cup of the Living Water would be served up in her presence?
