Why Dry Bones Dancing in Samaria?

I loved writing "Walking The Passage," my previous blog.  I loved the journey through vulnerability and learning that I actually wasn't the vulnerable person I thought I was, touching the fact that I calibrated my vulnerability and transparency based on my own comfort levels and was exposed by our Father as the hypocrite at times.

But I loved that journey. Loved touching beyond the culturally relevant terms of vulnerability and transparency and pushing forward to their more true places. I use the term, "love," with tender remembrances of the angst and arguments I had with our Creator as He would say things like, "that, write about that." In hindsight I love the journey I was on... while walking it I loved Him.

 I loved writing to those struggling with mental illness and to those who supported them, I loved writing to those exhausted by the religiosity and pains of modern day ministry, I loved writing to the seers and the dreamers and the imaginators.  I loved writing whimsically and I do believe that will always follow me as will those other topics.

But as things do we outgrow our closets and need to find a different wardrobe. 

I look upon who I was when I started writing WTP and who I have become and am so grateful for the role it has played in my journey.


I was a pile of dry bones for a very long time.  I thought I had awoken only to come to the place of realizing I was still a walking daydream.  Am I awake now? I don't fully know.  But I am stretching and feeling the new sinews that have been placed upon these muscles and I have never felt more breath in me then I do now.  Awake to awake is what I tell myself right now and I am ok with that.....

Why Dancing?

I can't dance.

 I am not coordinated.

 I get embarrassed easily.

People don't think that of me but I do...  But I am physically shy. Not emotionally shy but shy in my body, with my body and the Lord is in the business of changing that up right now and so I have chartered new ground in my life.  I place myself daily into a space where I use my body. Where I recognize that this is something I don't understand, this aspect of having a body, and am curious in my journey as to where God will bring me into understanding His desire in this regard.

As one who had been abused I learned very early and with great skill to extricate myself from my body.. ie, dissociate.  I didn't for the longest time understand, Why the body?" As Ruth Haley Barton, puts brilliantly in Invitation to Solitude and Silence,  " It can be hard and humbling to pay attention to your body, whatever state it is in, because it brings you face to face with your finiteness, your vulnerability. That in itself doesn't seem very relevant to the spiritual life.  You may resist giving any kind of attention to the body because somewhere along the line you have learned to put the spiritual and the physical in separate compartments. You may believe that the spiritual journey takes place in a realm completely separate from the body.  But the truth is that the spiritual journey is taken in a physical body, and there is a very real connection between caring for our body and deepening our relationship with God"

"What a surprise," she goes on to write, "it has been to find that, in the mist of my spiritual journey, I have been forced to face my profound ambivalence about life in a body.  Intent on trying to live up to a misguided spiritual ideal, I had relegated life in the body to some lesser category that warranted very little attention."

So dancing for me is very metaphoric about the reality of trust.

So dancing for me is very metaphoric about the reality of trust.

Will I trust God? Do I trust God?

I've been on this journey, to I have known not where, but I have followed...  I followed when He spoke to enter and touch silence, solitude, REST.. I followed when He asked me to withdraw and followed Him into a secret garden where He wanted me to meet me as He knew me not as I had tried to refashion me....  I followed and remembered how much I loved that He was a dancer.  (Go read the lyrics to one of my favorite songs.) I followed and I discovered beauty and phenomenal grace and mercy, and the largeness of God and the both the smallness and largeness of humanity.  He is the dancer poet gardener.  He is utterly magnificent and He is the best teacher I have ever had.

The Samaria business has been very new and yet it is all He will say to me as I journey into unknown places, He will whisper, laugh, roar..  "Mims, I went to Samaria...  trust me there is much to be found and salvaged there.. GO!"

In realizing He was taking me new places I did what I would normally do, try and create a road map.  With each topic I would quickly go to Amazon.Com and purchase books on the topic, Google search quotes, grope for understanding.  He would thwart my efforts and each time a new book would arrive, He would graciously say, "No," or "please not now.. trust me."

Tonight as I read in Invitation to Solitude and Silence, I wept.  I wept.. because again very deliberately He showed me how He has been leading, teaching and instructing me... Passage after passage I would read words as if they were jumping up from pages of my own journal.  And my soul exhaled and exclaimed, "You are God! You are leading me."  The understanding of having asked for bread He would not give me a stone landed deep, and trust sunk ever deeper.

My Samarias will not be yours.. But they are places I journey where the religious crowds of the day say things like, "we don't go there," "we don't touch that," (that being a human being at times), "we don't ____________"

My Samarias are the places where religious fear and the hidden agenda of  spiritual superiority expresses that the "real" people of faith don't travel to such a place or do such a thing. 

So I am dancing upon my own fears and treading at time upon ground I wouldn't necessarily have found on my own, but my Lord has beckoned me to follow Him to the ends of the earth.. and that includes all the Samarias.

I didn't outgrow Walking the Passage per se, as much as I grew into a new place... a new passage that for now needed a new space..............  follow me here and like this blog and journey with me as we dance our way with the Lord of the Dance.  The light is increasing upon the way and the door is wide open for discovery.. Perfect love is casting out fear and bringing forth quite the journey.