Each of Us Is So Freaking Full of Life

I was on a date with a girl who grew up in Florida and now lives in California.
She had never seen snow in her life.

We got dinner and while we ate, Colorado surprised us with a fluke September blizzard after a 90 degree day. As we drove from the restaurant, she asked me to pull over so she could throw her first snowball. I obliged and watched as she danced out of the passenger seat and over to the nearest bank of 6-inch powder.

At the ripe old age of 25, she balled it up and flung her first snowball at a stop sign.

I enjoyed sitting there watching this moment. It was a dizzying display of wonder which I realized had been lacking from my life recently.

She climbed back into the car, shivering but ecstatic.

“Look at this!” she nearly screamed in my face, waving her arms all around.

“Look at what?” I asked.

“This! Life! It’s in each of us and it’s wonderful!”

For some reason, the way she worded that sentence had been adhered to the inside of my mind the past week and I can’t shake it.

Life.

It’s inside each of us.

I began thinking of all humans as bottles filled to the brim with frothy rich milk. The thing is, there is no half-filled. You can’t pour out some of your life and keep some for later. You’re either filled with life or you’re dead.

Maybe a better analogy is a light bulb. It’s either singing its loud song of light which fills entire rooms, or it’s off.

Some people use the analogy of flickering flames. “His light was flickering out,” they may say about an old man.

I don’t see it this way.
There are two degrees of life: alive or dead.

“Everyone who is among the living has hope!” the writer of Ecclesiastes proclaims. “A sick dog is better than a dead lion.”

Why play dead in the land of the living?

Here’s an exercise I’ve been working through the past week: What activities move us toward death and which toward life? (Hint: if you’re sweating, you’re probably doing something right) Which activities push us toward isolation and stagnation, and which ones toward community and liveliness? In some ways, is absorbing gratuitous Netflix, video games, and porn practicing for death?

As Wendell Berry said, we should instead practice resurrection.

I witnessed firsthand the effects of life the other night when my friends and I went swing dancing. We walked into the dimly lit bar as the folksy band rattled off their timeless melodies from the stage. Before the band were a hundred people smiling and moving their bodies.

Here’s the thing: No one is ever sad on the dance floor.

You take the life inside of you and turn it into awkward gyrations of your limbs and feet and before you know it, you’re living. You’re dancing. Sad people don’t dance.

You inhale the sweaty air of the dance floor, and can’t help but smile.

This is life.

This is what happens to our little bottles of skin when a joyful God breathes life into our bodies and says “go!” Why would God invent music and bodies if He didn’t have dancing in mind?