Professor of Preaching at Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama. He is a Contributing Editor to Preaching.
This Is My Story
As a teenage boy I had the misfortune of not knowing how to dance. I remember giving one of my friends a dollar to teach me. He made a diligent effort but to no avail. As a result, I did not go to community parties or junior high dances after school. I did not even attend our senior high school prom. Although a teenager, I was a preacher, and everyone in my church knew that preachers did not dance. I was attracted to Ian Pitt Watson’s work,
A Primer for Preachers, because in the book I saw a glimpse of my story.
In the chapter “Biblical Truth and Biblical Preaching,” Watson admitted that as a teenage boy of 14, he could not dance. He was awkward and uncoordinated. He missed out on certain social fringe benefits because of his inability to dance. He was envious of his friends who could dance. He decided to master the art of dancing by buying the book
Teach Yourself to Dance and practicing in private until he perfected his dancing skills. Then he would come out of his privacy and step into the public arena with confidence and coordination. The book contained detailed dance instructions and elaborate diagrams, which he learned and memorized. He acknowledged:
Advertisement
I really knew the book. Intellectually, I had mastered the subject. I also spent many hours trying to put what I knew into practice. I did so alone in my bedroom, using a pillow for a partner and studying my progress in the wardrobe mirror. What I saw in the mirror was not reassuring! I was putting my feet in all the right places, for I knew the book, and I was doing what the book said. But something was clearly missing. I was thinking the right things and doing the right things, but I couldn’t get the feel of it, and in consequence everything I did seemed clumsy — graceless.
[vii]Watson said that he attended a party one night and was befriended by a girl who could see that he was having difficulty transferring content into coordination. She invited him to dance with her. He had been accustomed to dancing with a pillow in front of the mirror in his bedroom. Initially, he was quite reluctant to dance because she was so graceful in her movements, and he was so awkward and uncoordinated in his attempts to dance. Finally, he yielded to her invitation. After she began to dance with him, he immediately became aware of a tremendous transformation. He revealed:
Then something strange happened. A little of her grace seemed to pass to me and I began to get the feel of it. For the first time, all I had learned in the book began to make sense, and even the painful practice in front of the mirror started to pay off. What had been contrived now became natural, what had been difficult now became easy, what had been a burden now became a joy—because at last I had got together what I was thinking and what I was feeling and what I was doing. In that moment I experienced a kind of grace, and it was beautiful.
[viii]