The Introduction

The introduction…

It was 2022. I was invited to help with a children’s camp here in Belize called Hearing God in Living Color. I was asked to teach dance sessions and tell of my experiences of getting to know God and using dance as communication with him. This is what I do on a weekly basis in my ballet classes, so I (of course) said yes. It was also one of the first things I agreed to help with after the loss of our son in 2021. 

Half the day we, the facilitators,spent teaching each other what we would teach the kids before we spent the other half day teaching the children. It turned out to be a powerful time for everyone involved, and little did I know this would be a turning point for me personally. This is where true healing would begin for me and I would come back to life. This is when the light was turned back on after sitting in the dark with my grief for over a year. 

What most of the facilitators didn’t know about me was that I used to connect with God through pictures and images, and sometimes, it felt like a movie played in my head. God would meet with me as I prayed quietly in my room as a teen, I would dance with him as I closed my eyes in worship – that’s how I felt closest to him. But after such a devastating loss, and after years of a series of losses, all I saw was darkness. All I heard was silence. I knew God was sitting there with me in the dark whispering his love to me, but I think I stopped believing there would be more than that. I chose to believe and accept that it was enough and not reject the quiet love in the shadows, but in 2022 my faith and hope started to come back to life. 

It was more than the therapy could do, it was more than the journaling could accomplish, it brought back a spark in me that the medication couldn’t do (and that medication saved my life and gave my kids their mom back). I needed the therapy, journaling, and the medication, don’t get me wrong. But these encounters with Jesus changed me and saved me. They brought me into an alignment with who I was meant to be and created to be long before trauma and loss entered my life.I contemplated telling someone of these encounters I experienced and began to second-guess myself. It doesn’t make sense to some people. These encounters are solely mine and in my head, how can they believe it’s real? As I was still thinking this, a quote came to mind, from Harry Potter. In the final battle scene in the Deathly Hallows Harry is speaking to Albus Dumbledore and seeing things that don’t make sense, he’s on a train platform between the present and the next.  Before he leaves to go back to his life in the present he asks, “…professor? is this all real? or is it just happening inside my head?” Dumbledore replies, “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean it is not real?” 

In one of my most recent encounters with Jesus I was told to write again, and to share these experiences. So, without further ado, welcome to my series, Adventures with Jesus.