Nate and I didn’t know how to dance. The first reason was that he struggled to find any sense of rhythm or beat. When he was in the Army, I remember attending a parade demonstration at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Hundreds of uniformed soldiers passed in front of us, marching in perfect step to the leader’s cadence…. except one. Despite all those soldiers wearing identical clothes, I found Nate immediately.

The second reason we were dance-ignorant was that I was raised to believe dancing was wrong. I had to sign a statement when I became a 16 year old member of my church, promising not to dance (among other things). Later when I chose a conservative Christian college, I signed a similar pledge.

Throughout my childhood, I wasn’t allowed to attend dance classes or school dances, nor could I listen to dance music. It mystified me, since Mom was adventuresome and loved music herself.

Then one day, while I was jumping around to “oldies” music at home, the real truth came out. Mom was watching me cavort to the beat and said, “It’s too bad we don’t believe in dancing. You’d be good at it.”

I realized then that all the no-dancing rules were just that: written rules she was trying to obey on the outside while on the inside she’d been dancing all those years. Though the policy didn’t change, figuring that out made me feel a lot better.

The bottom line was that neither Nate nor I ever learned to dance, not even after we decided it wasn’t really wrong. But we did learn to fake it enough to shuffle around a wedding reception dance floor, at least on the slower tunes.

All of us can get caught up in the letter of a law and then miss the spirit of it. That’s  a serious offense, as Jesus pointed out to the biblical Pharisees. Their 600 rigid religious laws had strayed far from what God had intended when he gave the 10 commandments. So Jesus straightened it out with 2 new commands that swept away all the pharisaical add-ons. “Love God, and love others.”

Those aren’t always easy to do, but they’re easy to understand. And if we put all our actions through that grid, the result will be lives lived in the gracious spirit of the law.

These days I still don’t know how to dance, but a year ago, my cousin Calvin and I decided to try our luck at jitterbugging. Jumping around a wedding reception dance floor in no particular pattern might not have been real dancing, but for the two of us non-dancers, it turned out to be an awful lot of fun.

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:37-40)