Put On Your Dancin' Boots

I've told you about some of the things my daughter Megan has taught me. Now I'd like to share one of the many thing I learned from my daughter Dana...

Remember the Peanuts cartoons where Snoopy is doing his happy dance? Life is just so good that he can't help but dance for joy. Dana's that kind of person. Oh, not all the time, of course. But when she's in a dancing mood, she has a way of making you want to dance, too.

That's why we chose Frank Sinatra's uptempo swing tune "Come Dance With Me" for the father/daughter dance at her wedding reception. No slow ballad for us, no way. When she was growing up, I'd put on that song, and when the music would come blazing out of the speakers, we just had to get up and dance. (And besides, you gotta love a song with the opening line "Hey there, cutes, put on your dancin' boots and come dance with me!" Only Sinatra could get away with a line like that.)

So can I swing dance? No, not really. Can Dana? Better than I. But when it came to the father/daughter dance, whether we could swing dance was secondary. The main thing was hitting the dance floor and celebrating life together. Didn't matter what people thought. We were doing our happy dance.

As our pastor John Ortberg has reminded us on many occasions, life is a gift. Every day you wake up and your eyes see, and your ears hear, and your lungs fill with air, that's a gift, and an opportunity to thank God.

Well, I've got my eyes and ears and lungs and a whole lot more. I have so much to be thankful for. And one of them is a daughter who taught me to dance.