Nobody ever told me not to raise my hands in a worship service. 

But a.) I never got moved enough emotionally to want to and b.) one word: distraction. 

We’ve all seen the parodies by Tim Hawkins and John Crist about church worship. We’ve seen the side eyes glanced at that one lady who dares to dance a little in the back of the church sanctuary. And we’re stuck in a formal, Western culture where we don’t let our control loose. “Dance like no one is watching” really means “Only dance WHEN nobody is watching.” 

I grew up in a family of strong, loud singers. You could hear us all over the room. My mom loved singing alto and in between Sundays I would plunk out the high tenor line on hymns on our piano to learn how to harmonize. We learned hymns by heart and belted them out unashamed. 

But we didn’t raise our hands. Or kneel spontaneously. Or…dance. 

I mean, let’s be real. We are white Midwestern farmers from pure Russian and German stock. Not much of an aptitude toward moving our bodies. But somehow, unspoken, a message of fear started lying to me. It said that if I sang loud, if I raised my hands, if I dared to be myself in joy before God, I’d distract someone, somewhere, and they might think I was weird or even worse, insincere. 

So the joy of singing and enjoying God in vocal and physical worship was stolen from me.   

I’m a visual person. Pictures, descriptions, stories – they make me come alive. One year in college I watched the film The Passion of the Christ. All the church people said, “Don’t watch it because it cheapens what Jesus did for us. It focuses on the physical side and downplays the spiritual.” But watching that movie awakened the reality of Jesus for me. I finally saw Christ as fully man, and what his death and life really meant for me.

See, Jesus didn’t save us in some kind of neat, clean, churchy way. His first cradle was a feeding trough. He hammered nails in a workshop, walked down dusty streets with sweat running down his face, touched scabby, dirty faces to heal them, and preached in a field of weeds. And when it came time to save us, he let men shove him and punch his jaw and whip his body with leather straps. His blood really rolled down his arms and legs and dripped onto the ground. He actually quit breathing. And then really breathed again for the first time on Sunday morning.

All because he loves us.

He physically saved us. He redeemed my body as well as my soul. Not everyone loves hugs and physical touch, but what would we be as humans if we couldn’t touch each other? I can’t touch God physically right now, but I can reach out to him as if I could. Sometimes I picture myself grabbing onto his feet like Mary Magdalene, or touching his foot nailed to the cross like Mary his mother must have done. 

Knowing God shouldn’t sterilize our emotions. Music evokes feelings in us because God designed it that way. The Old Testament tells story after story of God’s people dancing, waving their hands and tambourines in worship. Kings used music in their courts when making decisions, when they experienced spiritual darkness, when they worshiped God. 

Culture shapes us more than we care to admit as a church. That’s okay. It’s how God designed the world. As humans we don’t live the same way we did centuries or even decades ago. So why do we think Christianity needs to keep looking a certain way?

We accept that certain things about being a Christian lead us to be counter-cultural. So we can let ourselves respond to God with our hands and whole bodies in worship. It may look weird to people but why is that not okay? 

I won a ticket to a conference called She Speaks once. Really it was a gift straight from God to my heart. When I walked into the conference room just as worship time began, I felt the Spirit wrap his arms around my heart in a tangible way. That weekend, I was raising my hands a bit, still nervous about it, and God gave me a vision. I was in front of his throne, just me, everything white and shining, and I was dancing out my heart in this crazy little-girl way. No one else watched. Only God. An audience of one. 

He set me free. 

When I praise God, the last thing in my mind should be the people around me. It’s not my job to influence what people think of me. If I raise my hands and someone judges me, I haven’t done anything wrong. Maybe, God might even use my freedom in worship to set others free.

And yet I don’t have to be obligated to move or respond in a certain way. Sometimes I hug myself like he’s right there with me. Sometimes I reach out my hands like I could touch him. If I feel led to surrender, I hold my hands out, palm up, saying with my body, not just my voice, “Take it all, Lord.” When we sing songs of victory, I’ll often pump the air or shoot my hands up as high as I can. Sometimes I kneel. Sometimes I sit, because it just feels right to sit in his presence. And at times, my hands hang down silently, not doing a thing. 

In 2 Samuel 6, King David has this moment where he’s overcome by worship after a huge victory and he dances like a crazy man in the street. His wife Michal judged him for doing it (she’d been hurt deeply in her life and understandably wasn’t feeling the joy at this moment), and David responded to her, “I was dancing before the Lord…so I celebrate before him. Yes, and I am willing to look even more foolish than this, even to be humiliated in my own eyes!” 

David made a lot of mistakes but he has so much to teach us about the heart of worship. It’s not about me, about the church, or about what people think of me, the church, or God. Worship is responding to God, body, heart and soul. It takes time and it takes listening to our feelings and opening ourselves to God’s Spirit as a way to move closer to God. 

•