The Dance

By Bobby Neal Winters

God’s talking to us all the time, from many directions. Occasionally we are listening and hear Him from an unexpected direction, like Garth Brooks, for example:

And now, I'm glad I didn't know/

The way it all would end, the way it all would go/

Our lives are better left to chance/

I could have missed the pain, but I'd’ve had to miss

The dance.

This is from Brooks’ song “The Dance.” Garth Brooks hit it big during a period when I wasn't listening to country music or, maybe, any music at all.  So the other day when I heard this line, I didn’t even know who was singing.  I had to look it up.

There have been things in my life that had a quality that matched this.  There have been things that I’ve chosen to do that, had I known how hard they were going to be, I would not have done, but having done them, I wouldn't've skipped them.  In each case, there was a good deal of pain and discomfort involved, but, along with those, a great deal of growth.

I’ve written about the Rotary Group Study Exchange I took to Russia in the year 2000.  I’ve mostly written about the things that were heart-warming, thought-provoking, or humorous.  I left out the parts where there was discomfort, anger, fear, or culture-shock.  There were times when these were all going on at once.  Had I known only the feelings I was going to experience, I never would’ve gone.  

But that trip changed my life.  I started writing seriously because of that trip, and there have been few things--other than my marriage or the births of my children--that have changed and improved my life in such a positive way.

This brings to mind the 2016 movie “Arrival” which is based on Ted Chaing’s science fiction short story “The Story of Your Life.”  In it, the story's hero learns an alien language that rewires her brain so that she can remember the future in addition to the past.  She sees that she is going to have a wonderful daughter who becomes sick and dies at a young age.  She sees that the daughter’s father will become alienated from her and divorce her.  Nevertheless, regardless of these unpleasant truths, she goes ahead and marries the man and gives birth to the daughter who is doomed to die.

The message is that it is all worth it.

While presented in the science fiction format, it presents a truth. When you get married, either the marriage will end in a divorce or one of you is going to die.  There may be some exceptions I’ve not thought of like alien abduction, but that’s about it.  When you give birth to a child, that child will one day die. When you were born, the one thing that was certain about your life at the beginning was that one day it would end.

But we do it anyway: We marry and are given in marriage; we birth children; because there are precious moments in life, precious people who we meet that are worth it.

In C.S. Lewis' book “A Grief Observed” he says: “We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accept it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for.”  In the movie “Shadowlands” about the relationship between Lewis and his wife Joy, the dying Joy puts it this way: “It’s all part of the deal.”

Poets, even those of the country-western variety like Garth Brooks, are able to capture in a few lines what it takes hours in a movie, pages of a short story, or a whole book of theology to capture:

Holding you, I held everything/

For a moment, wasn't I the king/

But if I'd only known how the king would fall/

Hey, who's to say, you know I might have changed it all

Very few of us are like the translator in “Arrival” who chose the path knowing what it held for her.  The people who do that sort of thing are usually saints.  For the rest of us, there is ignorance and chance:

And now, I'm glad I didn't know/

The way it all would end, the way it all would go/

Our lives are better left to chance/

I could have missed the pain, but I'd’ve had to miss

The dance.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.