Last week, I wrote about dancing, romancing, and “killing grooves.” Today, it is occurring to me that there are some fundamentalist religious communities that seemingly exist to “kill the groove,” who don’t want us dancing and certainly would not encourage romancing. I don’t know why.

We make tons of rules and laws for living proper Christian lives, a simple remake of the Torah, based on our modern societal and moral characteristics. Am I allowed to dance? How close? How fast? How long? And with whom? My instinct is, obviously, to say, “YES!!! Dance!!! Dance now, today, and forever, for as long as we can!” But maybe that’s also pretty simplistic. Maybe none of this is that easy. Or maybe it’s even simpler.

We really like complex, and that’s probably so we have plenty of excuses and exit ramps. And we also love the idea that we are the ones who understand the complex, like a 2024 Gnosticism. “I have the special knowledge required to be a “good” Christian.”

[Here’s something I just noticed: I have never used the word “Christian” before without much consideration. It’s a loaded word with baggage in many of our lives. And we’ve somehow shoehorned it into a completely different part of speech, making it an adjective. It’s not, it’s a noun. It is a follower of Jesus Christ. And, like many other words – like church, sin, etc – to leave it behind because it’s been misunderstood as problematic is foolish and in desperate need of reclamation. We follow Christ, we are Christians. Nice.]

Ephesians 4:1 says, “live a life worthy of the calling you have received.” It is, at the same time, simpler and heavier, clearer and more open to interpretation. The question we all are invited to ask, through this verse, is, “is this (action, thought, word, post, meal, practice) worthy of my call?” And maybe it is, and maybe it’s not. Maybe you can have a drink with dinner and I can’t, based on a host of different factors. Maybe I can dance in a hot sweaty small room with flashing strobe lights, and maybe that’s a horrible idea for you. Maybe you can have an Oreo and I can’t. And timing is important, too. Maybe it’s time for you to add and maybe it’s time for you to subtract, and maybe the thing to be added or subtracted is the same thing.

I can’t tell you if you can dance or how close or for how long. I can’t say if those things hurt your soul and heart and take you farther from Your Creator. Maybe they do. And maybe they do today.

Of course, some things are always beneath us. Addiction, abuse, objectification, oppression, deceit, infidelity, and on and on, are unworthy of our status as children of The King. There is no circumstance where they are not, and that’s why we feel so gross when we participate in them.

This maybe business, this “live a life worthy” of your call, is not easy. It’s not a handbook that tells us in black and white. That might be frustrating, but that’s purposeful, too.

We can never forget that the point of all of this is relationship, a life lived WITH Him. We can’t do it on our own, weren’t supposed to, so we hold His (and each other’s) hand and say, “is this worthy?” We rely on Him to guide us, to show us where we’ve compromised, to tell us again and again who we are.

Then, we just have to believe Him. And dance. Or not. But probably dance.