Or Can I?

"You believe at last!" Jesus answered. 

John 16:31

Sierra and I watched every single episode of "So You Think You Can Dance" this season.  Except the very last one.  The one where the winner was announced.  Sierra says Amy and Aaron won.  I just can't predict.  The final competitors were all so very good.  And I wanted to know who won.  Really.  I thought I had the show recorded, and I've looked it up on my On Demand listings, but either it's not there or I'm looking in all the wrong places.  I suppose I could just google the results, but that seems kind of anti-climatic.  I want to see the winners.  I want to share in their triumph.  I want to feel like I'm there with them - in time and place with them.

Time and place and shared experience.  They're part of relationship.  During the season, I felt like there was some kind of relationship between me and the contestants on the show.  The producers were pretty darned strategic about building connections - by showing us back story, by prompting the dancers to describe themselves in 15 seconds or less, by catching bloopers and rehearsals.  By helping us, sitting at home, to relate to the competitors.  Giving us shared time, shared place, and shared experience.  It was important to the show because the audience got to vote.  And votes weren't always based on the best technician.  The show was designed that way. 

So, I don't know who won.  And it hasn't made one, single difference in my life.  All of that strategic connection-making hasn't made one difference in how I live, in what I say, in how I think...  Because it wasn't real.  It was manipulated.  The magic of television brought the show into my living room each week - but I could watch a recording of it at anytime and in anyplace.  Fifty years from now, a hundred years from now someone could watch these recordings and the dancers would seem just as young and just as vital, and the show would be just as much about false relationship as it is today.

I say false relationship and it sounds negative.  I don't mean it that way.  I simply mean it is not.  The simplest definition of relationship is "the way in which two or more people or things are connected". (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/relationship)  I'm not connected to these dancers - except through the window of television.

So, what does that say about a relationship with Jesus?  Where's the connections?  Time.  Place.  Experience.  He lived over two-thousand years ago and I can't watch reruns.  Not even through the magic of television can I share time with him.  He lived in Roman-ruled Israel.  His place simply doesn't exist anymore.  And experience?  Good grief - he was fully God and fully man - I can't possibly connect to that.

Or can I?

Heavenly Father, Awesome God, 

Did you intend the world to be in relationship with You through Your Son? 

What a vision!  Help me to do my part - to see Jesus in the world, to know Jesus in the world,

 to connect to Jesus in the world, to follow Jesus in the world.  

Linking With:
Three Word Wednesday