Insomnia (Change Me)

If sleep makes everything better, does that mean that the lack of it makes everything worse?

I just finished my last performance season with Turning Pointe, and yesterday after the last show, I was perfectly fine. But now it’s finally hit, and I’m really sad and disappointed. I feel like for all four shows, I was present, but not all the way—they went by far too fast. The times during those performances that I really felt like I could lay it all down before God’s throne was when I was watching my peers from the wings—and that makes me sad. Maybe it’s just that now that I’m one of the “leaders” it suddenly becomes harder for me to participate as fully. I don’t know.

I don’t want to be done yet. 

It also doesn’t help that I finally chose a college (and not a day too soon). And of course it wasn’t the school that was the most academic or the farthest away or had the most beautiful campus. Nope. It’s the college that everyone from my school goes to, the college where wingnuts abound and where most of my friends are going. So now I’ll be in much the same atmosphere that I was in all my life, the sheltered CRC West Michigan feel. And I’m really angry, because now I don’t get bragging rights—it’s not like Calvin is a bad school; it’s just not anywhere near as choosy or prestigious as the other two I was considering.

But it’s the right place for a number of reasons. Mostly because I have a passion for my peers at Turning Pointe and I want to make myself available to them as much as I can, to mentor them as well as to learn from them. I feel like we have so many graduates who leave and only come back every once in awhile (even the ones who are at Hope). I don’t want to just leave—I want to continue to lift my friends up and to minister to their needs.

Basically, it’s a case of My Way versus God’s Way—because I don’t want to acknowledge that it’s not about me or my ego. I had this grand plan of being a light in a secular, academically-focused college setting instead of simply growing where I’ve been planted.

I’ve always hated making decisions. And I never really needed to, because there were always clear-cut answers: there were smart decisions and common sense decisions and decisions that just kind of happened—but never anything big like this. So I’ve never had to compromise or give up what I wanted for what God had for me. And I guess it’s a good thing that I’m experiencing it now instead of later, but it hurts. Being chiseled by God isn’t a comfortable experience.

Surrender is something we like to talk about a lot and pray about a lot, but we so often don’t really mean it. It’s so much easier to say, “God, your will be done—but only as long as it matches up with what I want.” But that’s not the way it works. It’s so much easier for me to give a performance up to God and then to go out on stage and hold some of myself back thinking about my next fast change or my technique or whatever.

What’s hard is standing in the wings, watching and worshipping, unseen by everyone except God.

There aren’t any easy answers, so I suppose I’ll just have to do what everyone else does and muddle through somehow. 

Almost

I have performances coming up this weekend, and they’re going to be my last ones. So I’m not exactly sure how I should feel. On the one hand, I love this ballet and it’s going to be so awesome and such, but on the other hand, I’m a little sad that I’m not in that many pieces—and only in a couple that I really wanted to be in. So while the performance will be phenomenal no matter what, I’m a bit disappointed. And that’s kind of my own fault.

It’s not that I’m a bad dancer (you don’t get to be in level V of VI when you’re as tall as I am without trying pretty hard); it’s just that I’m not as good as I wish I was—I’m not nearly as good as some of my friends are. Don’t get me wrong—I love my friends and I love watching them dance, but sometimes I wish I could be in some of the pieces they’re in. I want to be part of the process, not because I want to be some prima ballerina or anything, but simply because I want to join in on the meshing together of technique and artistry to create worship.

It’s hard to stand on the sidelines when the thing you want to do most is be in the midst of the game. It’s even harder when you know that if (due to some fluke) you were to be put in the game, things wouldn’t go all that well. I love the choreography of the pieces, and I would love to learn it and be able to perform it, but it wouldn’t end up looking as nice as it does when my friends do it.

Every person doing that last whatever-it-is wants it to be an amazing experience. And that’s how I feel about The Deliverer: I wanted to grow in my technique, to be able to have more than just 110 degrees of turnout and a 90ish degree arabesque; I wanted my pointework to get stronger and to be able to whip out solid triple pirouettes instead of only half-hearted doubles. I had reasonable goals. I just wanted to be like some of the others and be able to be worthy of dancing in some of the harder/fun pieces.

But I’m not like Zoë or Lexie or Jessie or Anna—I don’t have crazy extension (or any extension for that matter) or solid turns en pointe. I’m not bad—I’m just not amazing. Instead of all the technique in the world, I’ve got artistry and a passion for worship—whether I’m onstage or offstage.

So I’ve had to learn humility (humility bordering on low self-esteem sometimes, but humility nonetheless)—and through that humility, I’ve learned to appreciate the gifts of my peers all the more. It’s such a blessing to watch them and support them from the wings.

Because the thing is, it’s not about me. The point of performing in The Deliverer is not so that I can get in the pieces I wanted to and perform in front of an audience; the point is to share the gospel and to take part in the story. It isn’t the audience members who make the dancers onstage feel strong and blessed and covered in protection—it’s the knowledge that there are people like me praying for them in the wings.