Living on the Edge: Letting go
Stephanie Davis, Part 2
Stephanie Davis
One of my favorite events this week was our night of Salsa dancing. As an edge family we dressed up, and went out on the town! This was a unique opportunity to enjoy the local music, people and culture of Spanish dance in all of its glory with beautiful live music and a wonderfully diverse group of people. I have never been salsa dancing in my life and I had no idea how many different type of salsa moves there could be. Yet one funny thing about salsa is you can execute all the steps with extreme precision or lack of precision and still miss the point of salsa all together.
Salsa dancing is about FEELING the music and enjoying the person you are with; it’s not about executing the moves perfectly. Now I tend to be a very shy person and I thought if I could just execute the moves I could get by, but after some frustration I learned my lesson.
Now for lesson number two of salsa… there is only one leader! Dancing Salsa with a
partner can either be wonderful or unnecessarily difficult depending on if you are willing to let the other person lead. Overall, what I learned is that you can only truly “Salsa” when you learn how to let go. Learning to let go is one of the hardest lesson I’ve learned these past two weeks of Edge. In order to “live on the edge” you have to let go of your insecurities, your comforts and fears. Instead choosing, to fall into strengthening your relationship with Christ, others, and embracing your passions.
There is this beautiful aspect of individual development that comes along with Edge. I don’t know the story behind how the program became titled “Edge” but I assume it has to do with the abundant amount of risk it takes to live in a new country, share a house with strangers and bare your soul through art. These are all very vulnerable things…things I’d rather leave to adrenaline junkies, which I certainly am not. It really does feel like jumping off the “edge” and hoping you make it to the bottom alive …but the sweet thing is that God promises to be our parachute when we step off the rigid edge and choose to trust him.
Coming into Edge the prayer of my heart was that my artistic passions would be made clear and developed and I am blessed to say that they have been. All this to say …when I signed up for Edge
