Jammin' for Jesus

It was during my time at The New Rainbow that I started to participate in an aspect of Christianity that I had not tried before. In Charismatic circles, dancing in church is a customary practice. At The New Rainbow they strongly encouraged it. There is plenty of Biblical evidence for dancing but one of the practical arguments for it is that if you can dance at a music concert or anywhere else, why would you be embarrassed to dance for God?

There were a lot of chairs set up at the New Rainbow but as it was so big, there was still plenty of empty space. The unofficial dancing spot was down at the front left and it was mostly filled with young people. Week after week, as we were encouraged to dance again and again, I would look over at the dancers with uncertainty. 

I could see the Biblical evidence of it and I understood the reasoning for it. What I kept coming up against was my own self-consciousness. I thought that if I actually did go ahead and make the leap, I would be so self-focused that I wouldn’t even be thinking about God so what would be the point? 

Then one day I just pushed all that aside and went for it. I did still feel self-conscious but as I danced, there was a freedom that came over me that helped me rise above myself and just enjoy jamming for God. From then on, it became a regular practice for me until I left that church.

One of the sons of one of the pastors was getting married and they were converting a place at the top of the theatre for them to live in. I thought that was a brilliant location and hoped that, once we were married, maybe they would let me and Laura do that too. Laura had other ideas. 

My good friend from the ship, Ted McKenzie had moved to a YWAM base up north so I went to pay him a visit. While I was up there, Loren Cunningham, the founder and leader of YWAM was going to be speaking nearby. Ted idolized Loren so we decided to go.

It was a large auditorium and even though we sat on the front row, we were still a good distance from the stage. Loren knew who I was from when we had lived in Hawaii in those early years but I didn’t see him very often anymore. I didn’t know if he would still even recognize me.

As he was talking, he began to talk about what we called the “fish miracle” in Greece when the fish jumped out of the water onto the shore in front of where we were living at the time. As he did so, he suddenly said,

                “And I think we have someone here tonight who was actually there during the miracle.                             Stephen, can you come tell us what you saw.” 

I was stunned. Not only did he recognize me, he was asking me to come up to the stage. Ted was even more stunned. I went up and told everyone that even though I hated fish, I was glad to get the day off school to help haul and clean them. They laughed and afterwards I introduced Ted to his idol.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Bit of A Wander

That summer our family went travelling. My father had a speaking engagement at a YWAM base on the island of Cyprus so he took us with him. Cyprus is an island in the eastern Mediterranean that has been contested by Greece and Turkey for many years. It is now an independent country but Turkey still controls the northeast. The YWAM base was right near the border between the two sides. We were told not to go up into the nearby hills because there were land mines. From there we traveled to Israel. We stayed in an apartment in the new part of Jerusalem, arranged for by a Messianic Jewish friend we had known in Hawaii. For some reason, Samuel and I spent a lot of time at the apartment playing cards but we did get to see a lot of the sights.  We got to run on the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. We went inside the Dome of the Rock or Al Aqsa Mosque, which is built on the site of the destroyed Jewish temple. It is holy to the Muslims because that is where Muhammed was supposed to have a...
Read more

A Challenge

Image
That first vacation in the Outer Banks began a seven-year tradition. As the kids got bigger, we moved on to a six-bedroom house in the same neighborhood so the girls could split up into two rooms. I found different adventures to break up the week each year like jet-skiing and go-carting or a trip down to the southern-most island. We also started a mini-golf night tradition for the dads and kids. The ladies were only too happy to have a night to themselves. As the kids got too big for my sand pools, I started to take them out boogie boarding, until we eventually held boogie-boarding competitions with me as the judge. I tried to not show favoritism but my kids usually won. In the later years, everyone started getting into surfing. We would play various games on the beach and made teams to compete in relay races. One year, inspired by the Summer Olympics, we set up all the boogie and skim boards to create hurdles. Back at the house, we began to teach the older girls how to play strategy g...
Read more

Outer Banksious

Image
We finally moved into our new house and just as we were getting settled in, we went on what was to become a vacation tradition. Just south of where we live, there is a string of barrier islands in North Carolina called the Outer Banks, which is a big vacation spot. For years we had been talking about getting together with some other families to rent a big house all together for a week. Our friend and pastor, Eric Hughes told us and our other good friends, the Waskos that, despite the fact that none of us had a whole lot of money, we should finally just go for it. We all agreed and I went to work. While Eric and Brian Wasko are the more visionary types, I am good at the details. I researched finding a house to rent at a price we could all manage. Both the Hughes’s and Waskos have four children so there were 17 of us all together, with 8 girls and 3 boys. The houses have a maximum occupancy so I had to find something with the right configuration of rooms and beds to handle all of us. I f...
Read more