Can you believe the school-year dance session is almost over? Costumes have been handed out, choreography is finished, and we’re just six weeks away from spring recitals. As we begin to pick up steam through peek weeks, in-studio dress rehearsals, portraits and progress reports, it’s important to slow down and keep some perspective through all the end-of-the-year madness. To help us do that, this month our devotional focus is to magnify Him through sacrifice. That can look like many things in these busy months, so let’s take a look at a few together as we celebrate the Turning Pointe difference in recital season.
Magnify Him through Progress Reports
Later this month, each of our students in each class Primary level and above will receive their progress reports. These evaluations measure proficiency in each level’s curriculum targets, and determine each student’s level and class placement for the following year. It can be an emotional time of both celebration and disappointment, be it in our levels or in being separated from classmates and friends one way or the other. But rather than placing our hopes and fears in each piece of paper, let’s join together and place them in the hands of the Lord.
In this month’s memory verse, Luke 7:38, we learn a valuable lesson from a sinful woman:
“And standing behind Him at His feet, weeping, she began to wet His feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hair of her head, and kissed His feet, and anointed them with the ointment.”
It’s a story of profound gratitude for the love and forgiveness of Jesus, but more than that, it teaches us to magnify Him through sacrifice. The woman humbly gave her perfume, but she also sacrificed her pride and her reputation before the other Pharisees. She took her tears, her lips, hair and perfume, and sacrificed them as tools for sin, instead offering them as instruments of righteousness and sincere worship.
As Christians, we’re not called to lives of anxious comparison, yielding worship to worry over this or any other evaluation we’ll face. Rather than using each progress report as a tool for our sinful nature to take hold, we encourage you to sacrifice any expectations or guideposts that aren’t His alone. Sacrifice any self-serving motives, and any motivation that isn’t rooted in serving Him. Sacrifice your plan for your trajectory or your friend group, and offer your training to Him as a means of worship.
He is the reason we dance, and we’re right where He needs us to be! Easier said than done, we know—especially when you’ve been working hard toward a God-given goal all year. But in trusting His perfect plan and His perfect timing, alongside trusting your teacher’s discretion to keep you dancing safely for years to come, we can magnify Him through how we navigate the process—a life lesson far more important than any curriculum target.
Magnify Him through Recitals
Romans 12:1 urges us to offer our bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God, which is our true and proper worship. This means dedicating our entire lives, not just our actions, to God’s service and glorification. This means keeping Him in the heart of why we’re dancing every time we dance, not just on stage or in an outreach performance. That means sacrificing our exhausted grumbling and transforming our hearts to magnify Him through every class, performance detail, scheduling obligation, and rehearsal.
How we carry ourselves in these weeks leading up to the big show can easily entangle us in sin. We’re preparing to celebrate what the Lord has done in a big and mighty way—of course the enemy is going to rise against and try to bring us down! But when we, like the woman in Luke, sacrifice these tools of sin, and transform them into sincere worship, we can magnify Him in even greater ways. Our audience isn’t just the people filling the auditorium seats next month. It’s our weary classmates with us in the trenches of preparation. It’s the photographers, teachers, volunteers and staff we work with ahead of time. It’s the family and friends working alongside us, encouraging us in our dreams. It’s also an audience of one—the one who gave us bodies to dance at all.
When we sacrifice the self-serving grumbles of exhaustion and sore muscles our bodies endure this time of year, and instead see them through the lens of Romans 12:1, it transforms the way we engage with the movement in our dance classes, and in our recital performances. This is our chance to showcase our hard work, practice a performing art, and invite our friends and families into a world we love, but it’s also a chance to sacrifice our own spotlight and magnify Him even brighter.