To Hell With The Hustle, A 5-Day Devotional from Jefferson Bethke Sample

Day 3: 

The most fundamental building block to music is rhythm. And rhythm is a funny thing if you think about it. It’s the force that keeps the music going forward, but it’s also something the music keeps coming back to.

Rhythm is everything.

Have you ever heard someone learn to play a new instrument? Usually they produce a collection of random notes that sound terrible. The noise is grating. It hurts your ears. There are sounds, but there’s no rhythm. So, the first step is creating a tempo. Learning timing.

It reminds me of those students at high school dances whose moves made me think, What on earth are you doing right now? The irony is that dancing is self-expression. You can do whatever you want. There’s freedom in dancing—to a point. Because you still have to submit to the rhythm or your moves look weird, haphazard, and cringeworthy. You have to feel the beat and find yourself in the cadence.

What if our lives are like that? What if we are dancing through life, believing we’re moving to a smooth rhythm when we’re actually out of sync with the beat, missing steps and bumbling along with no recognizable form? We’re telling everyone how free we are, but no sane person would look at our dancing and call it beautiful. It looks and feels off, and we all know it when we do it ourselves. . . .

Have you ever heard music so beautiful you could hardly bear to listen to it?

That’s the music God is playing. And He’s inviting us to dance to it. But here’s the thing we have to acknowledge about dancing before we can keep moving forward on this journey together: Learning to dance takes work.

Learning to dance may feel clumsy at first. Practice is necessary if you’re going to be able to dance well. You may step on someone else’s toes. You may even step on your own toes. . . .

It takes dedication to show up at the same time and same place every week. To do it just one more time. Knowing that you learn to dance simply by practicing. But you’ll get to a place where you stop looking down at your feet and start looking up into the eyes of Jesus as you walk through life with Him in a graceful rhythm.