If I Could Dance With You Once Again

It was in another lifetime in another world.

You, the girl, would come up to me, the guy, and ask me to ask you to dance. I remember the look in your eyes as you stood there making your request.

Pain. Frustration. A cry for recognition and attention; for validation as a human being with a place of value among the other human beings of the world; for affirmation that you were a woman, and at least one guy in the world valued you as a woman.

It did not bother me to oblige you. My acquiescence was not coerced or given grudgingly, but was willingly and freely given. If I agreed to ask you to dance with me it was because I wanted to; because as I look back, I enjoyed doing so.

And it may be in my acquiescence I also was looking for validation and affirmation.

Then we went our separate ways.

You found love and companionship. Then your whole world fell apart; shattered by bullets in a far off land on the other side of the world.

A year after he was killed you came to me, just as you had done at the high school dances a few short years before. I still see the pain and grief written all over your countenance. You were still deeply mourning. You told me how you had gone to church and had prayed for him, and then he was gone. The implied question being, "Where was God in all of that?"

I didn't know what to say. I didn't know what to do. I look back at that time as a time of failure; a time when I let you down. You may have expected more from me then what was reasonable given my inexperience with life and youthful immaturity. I couldn't help you, and the burden of that failure has stayed with me over the lifetime that has since intervened.

If I could dance with you once again, just one more time, this is what I would say.

"You are a human being. You have worth and value as a human being created in the image of the God you may or may not believe in. Your life has a purpose. That purpose is found in bringing glory to this God who made you."

There is much more that would need to be said to more fully explain this brief summery. And how much help such conversation would be to you as we dance across the floor I do not pretend to know.

It could be that at the end of the dance, once more you would walk away feeling and thinking it was no help at all, just words containing no relevance to what you believe is the reality of your life.

But then again, just maybe possibly, you would find Him, and in finding Him you truly would indeed "live happily ever after".

For you see, over all the lifetime that has gone by since those days in another lifetime in another world, that has been my prayer for you; that you would truly indeed live "happily ever after".

Thank you for the dance...

Peace...