Watch this video:
The first time I watched this I giggled and smiled the entire time, almost moved to tears. Such joy and fun! I love how as they danced, more and more people joined in until it was soon a huge crowd of joyful, jumping, dancing people. Joy is contagious! I immediately thought of our walk with Jesus and how it should affect people like this. The joy we have in knowing Him should be contagious, obvious, bubbling over and drawing people in. Jesus promised that if we lift him up He would draw people to Himself. What better way than to be full of joy and hope. People are definitely looking for that. I wish I could have been at this train station, dancing and leaping with these people! How exhilarating! Complete freedom and fun. No worries of what people are thinking. Contagious, beautiful, swelling joy!
How beautiful our world would be if mankind could interact like this – enjoying life, working together, having fun, celebrating…a preview of what heaven will be like.
Or think of yourself wearing black clothes in a moderately dark room. You could be covered in lint and “fuzzies” but none really show because of your dim surroundings. Walk into a bright spotlight, like the ones they use in a play, and suddenly every little speck, hair or particle is visible to everyone. Flaws and smudges you didn’t even realize were there are suddenly glaringly obvious.
Yesterday afternoon I hopped into our gold mini-van with my three daughters and two of their friends. We headed happily down the road toward Ft. Wayne to see “Winter Jam” an annual concert event with 5-6 great Christian bands and a speaker. My girls and I have probably been to 4-5 Winter Jams in the past few years and love it every time. We had been looking forward to it for several months.
At least it was sunny out, even though still chilly. We waited, walked a few steps, waited some more, hoped and hoped as we got closer that before long the line would really start moving and we’d be finding our way to some seats and an awesome evening of music, shouting, standing and clapping, and fun.
A guy came out and started walking from the back of the line up toward where we stood. We heard him telling people something as he walked along. As he got closer we heard him talking about an extra music appearance at a local church following the concert and then he turned to us and said, “You’re not getting in. Sold out show.” After a moment of shock and disbelief, the line started breaking up as the people around us began to wander back to their cars, vans and church buses. We stood there for a moment looking at each other – “What?!” “No way!” 
Has your computer ever crashed? Have you ever had to completely format the hard drive and re-install everything, starting over? I’ve been through this ingratiating process a few times and while it’s aggravating enough to pull some hair and can be a big pain if you lose files or data, it is nice to have a fresh start. When the disk has been completely wiped clean and loaded up anew with the programs it runs so much better and more quickly. There aren’t all those downloaded, uploaded, accumulated files and programs that piled up over the last year or so. All the temp files that were dragging the system down are gone. Any spam or spy ware – gone! It’s clean and zippy – ready to go. You can almost hear your computer sigh a happy “ahhhhh.”
I don’t really know how to let go of this dream. It’s a daily process – trying to remain content and thankful and focus on other things. It’s interesting the things that make us feel settled in our hearts and souls: having a permanent residence, all belongings moved in and in their places, a steady job, a routine we’re used to, comfort zone stuff. Vice versa, temporary situations, not having all your belongings accessible to you, lots of change, living with someone else and feeling like you’re an outsider – like it’s not really your home – all of these seem to keep the contentedness of heart at bay. There seems to be a longing inside most of us to have a place, to have a home, to be settled down.
Along the Narrow Path 