Living Life in God’s Time Signature
I do a daily workout with a walking program I can do in my living room. It’s not that I do not like to walk outside. I do that as well, but my program seems to fit well with my schedule and the weather, so I tend to shuffle my feet, lift my knees and flex my muscles with a resistance band to the beat on the big screen. The music is the key to the work out. The faster the music, the better the burn. The work out begins with a warmup with a good steady beat to get the heart pumping. It will then shift to a quicker beat to get the work out to its maximum level. To me, it is all about hearing the rhythm of the music. The 2 and the 4.
Occasionally, in this work out program there will be a few instructors who can be rhythmically challenged. It is not that they can’t do the workout. Their biceps and the ability to talk through a 30-minute workout tells me they are in better shape than me. They are in the video shouting the encouragement, I am in my living room doing my best to keep in step. But when they get off the beat, that messes with my steps. The transitions from the one set of exercise to the other need to happen on the 1, not the 2. Let me explain.
Imagine yourself doing jumping jacks and the beat to the music is 1-2-3-4. Keep counting that as you imagine your hand over your heads on 1 and 3. You do that for 8 measures. Then you are ready to transition into side steps. When is the best time to transition? On 1! On your last measure you count it off to your next exercise. “1-2-3-4” sounds like “Here we go and step”. “Here” is 1. “we” is 2. “go” is 3. “and” is 4 and then “step” is 1. It’s on the 1. Everything is moving and in rhythm.
Now some of you are saying to yourself, this guy really needs to get out of his living room. He has been walking to the oldies for too long. I can understand your reaction. I am thinking the same thing as I write this. But, hear me out, or I guess I should say read me out. It does give us a picture of how we move with God. It is not about going through the motions. It is about going in the rhythm of His heart. I understand God is not always 1-2-3-4. I wrote about that earlier. Life can get complicated and messy, but it does not need to knock you out of rhythm. Jesus gives us so many examples of this.
He is sleeping in the boat, and it is storming so hard that the disciples think they are going to die. They wake Jesus up and accuse him of not caring if they perish. Jesus was sleeping hard. He was probably in that good rhythm of breathing when you are in La La Land. The disciples grab him and accuse him of not caring. How does Jesus respond? He gets in sync with God. He listens for the 1, and with that beat he rebukes the storm, and it is stilled. Jesus was not caught off balance or off beat. He simply responded in the rhythm of where His heavenly Father was at that moment. He did not panic, he instead listened for the 1.
Go to the time when Jesus is minding His own business and all of the sudden a woman who was caught in the act of adultery was thrown at His feet. It was supposed to be a trap that would cause Him to cast judgement on the woman, or let her go, only then to be accused of not following the law. Scripture tells us that Jesus did not say a word at first. He didn’t react on the 2 count. He waited, he drew something on the ground with His finger then He stood up and dropped a beat on the angry crowd that left them speechless. “He who has not sinned, throw the first stone.” That was the “Here we go and step”. It was not religious motions or an angry response. It was waiting for the 1, and with that new measure of life, the woman was now living in the time signature of the Kingdom, not the world.
When life tries to start you out on 3, it doesn’t mean you have to keep in step with it. Find the beat! Find the flow of the soundtrack of your Heavenly Father and move to it. Work in it. Wait for it, and on the 1, start a new measure of life.
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