CassieOften, we leave a situation with a different outcome than we expected it to have.
As a dance teacher, I go into work with lesson plans in mind. This is part of the job, and part of what makes my classes successful. With a plan for how the kids will proceed through their classes in a fashion by which they are learning and growing in their craft, lesson plans are indeed a significant part of my job.
However, a lesson plan serves no purpose if it doesnt have room for change.
I taught a hip hop class a few moths ago that had a 12-year-old boy with a huge passion for the dance. One day, he came in to class and excitably asked, “Miss Cassie, can we learn the moon walk today?!”
Teaching the moon walk was not a part of the plan for the day, but I recognized that this class was successful so long as the students were having fun, learning, and proud of their skills. Discipline is something important to me for learning, too, but stringency and discipline are two different things.
So I taught the moon walk that day, and the kids were engaged and rewarded.
Sometimes we are caught up in a false-god cycle that suggests that we were made to be masters, to provide ultimate love and leading to others, and to “keep it all together.”
Jesus reminds us that we were created for love, to be loved, and to submit to God, a God who loves us more than we can fathom, and whose ways are perfect. Our joy is in what brings glory to His name– and He can make that known to us in an instant, and little by little, all at the same time. Sometimes full understanding of this involves the uprooting of things or ways of understanding in our lives not in alignment with this that God made to be true.
“For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, and love, and self-discipline.” 2 TIMOTHY 1:7
Accessing His Holy Spirit means we do not fear obstacles or what is seen by the world as unorderly; we are self-disciplined, delighting in the Truth; we have power that isn’t dangerous or self-willing, but accomplishes His always only good purposes.
It is in moments that the Spirit reminds us that we are not lord over anyone, but that He is Lord, that radical and Kingdom-impacting, groundbreaking shifts occur.
When I taught Mitchell and the rest of his also-eager hip hop class the moon walk, I was simultaneously abandoning my own agenda for the better. Planning is often necessary and fruitful, but only insofar as it is ready to shift everything at the sound of the Father’s voice.
But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the Law. GALATIANS 5:18
