Get Off the Dance Floor
Get Off the Dance Floor
There’s a great story about A.W. Tozer, who is probably most famous for writing the spiritual classic The Pursuit of God. He was giving advice to Cliff Westergren, a young man who was preparing to begin theological studies. Tozer said,
My son, when you get to college you’re going to find that all of the boys will be gathered in a room discussing and arguing over Arminianism and Calvinism night after night after night. I’ll tell you what to do, Cliff. Go to your room and meet God and at the end of four years, you’ll be way down the line and they’ll still be where they started, because greater minds than yours have wrestled with this problem and have not come up with satisfactory conclusions. Instead, learn to know God.1
A Harvard Business Review article examined the difficulty of most leaders in maintaining a capacity for reflection and making sound decisions in a high-stress, chaotic environment. The article included a metaphor that comes to my mind when I think about contemplative prayer: “getting off the dance floor and going to the balcony.”2
The dance floor is that noisy, constantly moving trying-to-keep-up-with-everything place in our lives. The balcony is the place where we can look down, even on ourselves, and gain perspective and clarity about our lives.
Prayer, for me, is going up to the balcony.
It’s the place where I experience solitude and quiet in God’s presence. The place where I ask Him questions. The place where I listen. The place where I contemplate my life. Why do I feel the way I do about that situation? What decision should I make? Why did I experience that conflict? I think about my life, my place, and my future while in His presence.
“It is incredible for me to think that I can ask God for advice and expect to be able to hear Him. Communication is more about learning to listen than it is about learning to talk.”
As Stephen Covey told us, we must “seek first to understand, then to be understood.”3
A number of years ago, I toured Winston Churchill’s Cabinet War Rooms in London. Far underneath the ground in that city, a labyrinth of tunnels connected myriad rooms. During WWII, Churchill and other significant leaders assembled in this underground infrastructure—safe from the bombing—to strategize, make crucial decisions, and generate wartime plans. There was also a spartan area where Churchill could refresh himself and rest.
To excavate the depths of God’s presence and gain His wisdom for our lives, we must remove ourselves from life’s overwhelming pandemonium, the distracting noises, the conflicting voices, and the committees in our heads.
We can’t sit around and wait for other people to plan our lives for us. We can’t be idle and hope some corporation, our parents, or a future spouse is going to pave the way to our future. We have to own it, manage it, develop it. No one is going to seize opportunities for me but me.
No one can nurture your spiritual life for you but you.
We are responsible for ourselves. We are responsible to invite God’s presence into our lives. We are responsible for getting ourselves off the dance floor and into a place where we can both talk to Him and hear what He has to say to us.
Where do you go when you need to get off the dance floor? Drop a comment and tell us about it.
1 James L. Snyder, The Life of A. W. Tozer: In Pursuit of God (Ventura, CA: Regal, 2009), 130.
2 Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading (Boston: Harvard Business School, 2002), 51-54.
3 Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (New York: Free Press, 2004), Habit 5, chapter 5, 235.
Adapted from Live Ten (Thomas Nelson) by Terry A. Smith. All rights reserved.
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