My niece Courtney got married not long ago, and at the wedding reception they had a dance for married couples in which they would eliminate couples from the dance floor based on the length of their marriage. At the beginning we were all on the floor. Courtney and Patrick were the first to leave, then all the couples married less than one year left, then those married less than five years, and so on. Nancy and I made it to the twenty-five-year cut, and by that time the crowd had thinned out considerably.
Finally, there was only one couple left on the dance floor, and they had been married fifty-three years. Everybody watched them — a tall, courtly, silver-haired man who stood a foot taller than his wife — but they watched only each other. They danced with joy, not in the skill of their dancing, but in the love they radiated for each other. What a contrast between the newlyweds, fresh in the health and beauty of their marriage, and the beauty of another kind of love that shone from the last couple on the floor! Perhaps part of why we appreciate such beauty is that it speaks to us of an inner flourishing not visible to the eye.
When the dancing ended, the master of ceremonies turned to Courtney and Patrick and said to them, “Take a good look at that couple on that dance floor. Your task now is to live and love together in such a way that fifty-three years from now that’s you. That dance is your dance. Now it begins.”
At that moment we all were struck by the mystery of the brevity of life. When that bride of fifty-three years looked at her husband, she didn’t just see an aging grandfather. She saw the young, tanned tennis champion she married five decades earlier. He did not see only a grandmother in her seventies. He saw the lovely, effervescent belle he had loved since she was a teenager. I know, because they are my parents, Courtney’s grandparents. And I thought of how, to my mom and dad, their wedding probably seems like yesterday. Time is that way.
Life is that way.
I projected my thoughts to about fifty-three years from now, when Courtney and Patrick will have been married as long as that couple. In fifty-three years my mother and my father will be gone. Nancy will be gone. And I will be 105 years old.
I don’t want to miss the dance. I get hung up on so many things in life, worrying about what I will never do or achieve or have. But I don’t want to miss the dance. I want to love my wife, care for my kids, and give life to my friends. I want to do the work God made me to do. I want to love God and the world he made. I want to do my part to help it flourish, for my spiritual maturity is not measured by following rules. “The me God made me to be” is measured by my capacity to love. When we live in love, we flourish. That is the dance.
The time to love is now. When we love, we enter into the mystery of eternity. Nothing offered in love is ever lost, for this mortal life is not the whole story. This life is to the next a kind of school, a kind of preparation for the me you were meant to be. That person will go into eternity. What matters most is not what you accomplish; it is who you become.
“The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come!’ And let all who hear say, ‘Come!’ ” It is the last, best invitation in the Bible.
Don’t miss the wedding, God says. Save the last dance for me.
John Ortberg, The Me I Want to Be: Becoming God’s Best Version of You (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009).
We have just completed a Bible study based on John Ortberg’s book, The Me I Want to Be. It consists of 7 lessons with ready-to-use questions suitable for groups. It can be purchased on Amazon and is also available as part of Good Questions Have Groups Talking Subscription Service.
