Oct 15 2009
All The Transitional Bits
This morning before work, Carolyn, Naomi, Elyssa and I (aka the dancers and writer/narrator for Soli Deo Gloria Ballet) were out in the studio rehearsing Behold the Child, our Christmas production, which is breaking all kinds of new ground for us. (We’re telling a story rather than illustrating a theme — and we’re using props — and the music is, um, less traditional than your average Christmas production.) Telling stories this way teaches me about life (like I expressed in “The God Backstage“), today, in a special way — it reminded me how important all the transitional bits are.
This morning we concentrated on smoothing out the places between songs where people enter or leave the stage, where props are introduced or removed, where dancers need to look alive even when they’re dancing. Transitions don’t look impressive and the audience won’t walk away talking about how smoothly we moved the fake pottery offstage, but without good ones, the whole production would become disjointed, distracted, and ineffective.
So, my life’s lesson for this morning? The little in-between stuff matters. How disciplined I am about things like rising time, prayer time, and bedtime matters. My “insignificant” interactions with people are more signifcant than I think. Like prepositions in a sentence or quiet entrances in a ballet, the small things I do matter just as much as the big things — in fact, without the small things, the big things would never take shape.
