So this is my fall update from Brazil, which is always, really a summer update. Temperatures here are in the 90s, 80% percent humidity. I hope you are also keeping warm there in the great arctic north. I have been struggling to write home since returning to Recife in September. It has been a very intense few months here. There has been a lot of violence and heartbreak, a lot of victory as well while we prepare to open a new safe home before spring. I will write more on that in the upcoming weeks but for now want to focus on the dance classes that we recently held here at the base. A few months ago our media team released a short video that captured the dreams of some of the children we work with in the local slum. Many of the girls in the video shared that their dream was to be a ballerina. From the States, a woman named Colleen Klein saw the broadcast and was moved to respond. You can watch the video here.
Colleen had been a professional dancer for many years. She booked a flight to Recife and spent a week with us. Around twelve children from the slum came to participate in her classes. I have described the living conditions in the slums before. These girls live in abject poverty; tragedy and death are commonplace to their lives, but as they danced I could almost see God stooping down and reforming the pain into something beautiful. Just like in creation, he still hovers over chaos and orders our steps. I have learned to embrace the mess and dirt on a whole new level here in Brazil. In literal terms, there are no screens on our windows and the road is not paved so dust cakes everything. Yet God does not distance himself from our dirt, in fact he carefully formed us from dust. He still dwells with us in these jars of clay and continues to breath into our mess. Slums and mansions alike, surrounded by open sewage, or materialism – it makes no difference to Him, it’s all dirt. While on this earth we have the opportunity to give the unique offering of our momentary pain. Thanksgiving and joy we will offer for all of eternity, but suffering will not exist in heaven.
Teaching the arts is a part of my role and dance is something we have wanted to integrate for a while now. From a clinical perspective, gentle kinesthetics are one of the few activities (aside from art) that rebalance the nervous system after trauma. Colleen taught about dance as vehicle of worship; an offering of our time and space. She also explored technical skills and choreographed the song, No Longer a Slave to Fear. The girls are continuing to meditate on this truth as they practice on their own to perform at the base in the upcoming weeks. Scripture says that God dances over mankind with violent emotion. The whirlwind of His presence remolds our circumstance.
Thank you all for your support. I love what we do here, and it would be impossible without your participation from the states. I hope you truly know as Thanksgiving has just passed, that you take part in our harvest among the poor here in Recife. Your prayer and giving sustains me and richly blesses this nation over and over again. It isn’t about numbers but just so you better know what you are sewing into, we fed over 160 people from the slum and red light district this Thanksgiving.