My children love to dance. It happens in our house and the house of friends. Where two or three are gathered, there is a dance. The Brazilian poet and writer, Paulo Coelho, notes that “When you dance, you can enjoy the luxury of being you.” Dancing becomes an extension of who you are, but you can only discover who you are the more you dance. Dancing becomes a luxury of self-learning. The opposite is also true. If there is no investment in the practice, the less you know about yourself. The continuation of movements—the poetry of the bones—is a pre-requisite to knowing thyself.
As parents, training our children is always a challenge. We may succeed here or there, but consistency is a constant struggle. Sometimes the dances are left incomplete at the end of the day. But the key is the continuation of rehearsal and communal gatherings. Even when the dances don’t happen formally, they can happen in the casualness of the front yard or a living room.
Proverbs lays out the principle of long-term faithfulness:
Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
Lent is a great training camp. It is a season for dance practice leading to the dancing concerto of Easter morn. In this Lenten-tide, we learn that we need to be trained by our Father in heaven even as we train our children in truth. Our children will build in our sophisticated or uncoordinated dance habits, but they will build and perfect our incoherencies on the floor. What parents wish to learn and pass on are patterns that children will carry throughout life. You become what you practice.
Much like worship, parenting is the art of instilling life-long rituals. The same is applied to mentors and teachers. Training is more than memorizing or learning new things; training is catechizing our children in the way of truth. It is formational from beginning to end. It is teaching the dance even when the bones hurt.
Lent gives us the perfect training theme: the cross of Jesus. The cross instructs those under our care that there is no glory before the crown; no victory before the war and no feast before the fast. The cross teaches that in serving one another, we are truly free.
Our children need habits more than facts. They need to see the cross of Jesus as the center of their formation. They need the crucified Lord as their Savior. Once the cross becomes the great marker in their journey, they will not depart from it. They will live their lives feasting in the empty tomb. Lent is ultimately a season where our Father in heaven trains us in the way we should go. We commune with the Triune God because he leads our steps, moves, and lives to the green pastures where there is dancing forevermore.
Prayer: O great Father, who carried us in the wilderness, do not cease to train us to serve you, to form us to love you and to prepare us to endure this journey well. We long to learn from your ways and we ask that you would give us hearts of wisdom that we might not depart from your ways through Christ our Lord, amen.