I’m posting this FMF post super late, because my laptop charger went kaput last week. Blah. I’m still without charger, so I’m attempting this via the WordPress app. Weee.
Anyway, the prompt for the post was dance.
I love this prompt! You can go so many directions, and I love to dance. I was a ballet kid throughout elementary and middle school, and still take every opportunity I can to dance. It’s fun!

Go.

When I first thought of this prompt, all the dance related songs and movies kept passing in my head. I finally settled on one, a scene from one of my favorite movies, Silver Linings Playbook.

If you’ve never seen it, it’s one of the best portrayals of mental illness I’ve seen in a movie. My best friend introduced it to me mid-mental hell last Thanksgiving and I fell in love with it. I may have cried a little.

Jennifer Lawrence got an Oscar for this role (and Bradley Cooper deserved one). Basically Lawrence and Cooper are both struggling to come to terms with their mental illness. Tiffany (Lawrence) uses dance to cope, and enlists Pat (Cooper) as her dance partner in exchange for her helping him get through to his estranged wife.

The ending scene is the dance competition they entered. It’s full of professional dancers that are there to compete and win.

Tiffany and Pat compete just to do it- to prove they can dance and get the score they wanted.

I won’t spoil the ending for you (but the video above might!), but the dance was hilarious and awkward. The dance was nowhere up to caliber with the other competitors. But they didn’t care about that.

they just gave it their all. They worked, they practiced, and they tried.That was all that mattered to them.

They just wanted to prove to themselves they could do it– no one else on that floor mattered.

 We aren’t going to be perfect. We arent going to get all the moves and motions perfect in this life– sometimes they’re going to come out awkward and sloppy and funny to look back at. But God just wants us to try. He wants us to keep going even if we misstep or screw up. He promises to be with us through it all– He just wants us to try. To keep going, keep moving- and to keep being His as we do so. He’s a lot less concerned about the ending and the score life gives us than we are.

So, we dance. We try our hardest to dance through this life, knowing God is with us when we nail the moves, and when we take a wrong step. All we have to do is try. And that’s what dance is all about: learning, trying, and keeping moving, even when you mess up.
* longer than five minutes, cause typing on my phone sucks royally