Dancing?

 The devotion I shared with Rhonda this morning used a verse from 2 Samuel as the focus: "David was dancing before the Lord with all his might, while he and all Israel were bringing up the ark of the Lord with shouts and the sound of trumpets." 2 Samuel 6: 14-15

The narrative was also interesting since it focused on dancing and showing enthusiasm for the Lord in the process.  The following I copied from what I wrote in our forum on FB this morning.  I always marveled at Great-Grandma Eva Cattell.  She always seemed so OLD to me.  Maybe it was because her hair turned white when she was in her 20s and hair dye was not something a Quaker lady did.  She always wore those house dresses, long sleeved, buttons, lacy collars.  They looked really hot.  Stocking that she would roll up her legs and those great-grandma shoes always adorned her feet.  I adored her, though, because she always let me sit at the head of the table in the dining room with her when she entertained her Sunday School ladies.  Aunt Myrtle Cattell.  Anna Chilson.   Effie Pettet.  Those are the ones I remember.  My most vivid memories though are not really of her but of things associated with her.  The old piano by the French doors as we walked into the living room from the dining room.  The bottle of Blue Waltz that sat on top of the piano and was one of those things that showed up as a birthday or Christmas gag gift (it stunk to high heaven).   The books in the fireplace room with the characters of Jamie and Johnnie (I wonder what happened to those books).  The quilt frame set up in the living room.   The wrap around front porch that had many doors from it into the house. Her closed up bedroom, with the heavy drapes drawn and the door to the closet shut as she lay in the big bed, dying.   Hers for the first calling hours I can ever remember attending.  She died in May 1962 so I was finishing 5th grade and probably had just turned 11, a little older than Landon is right now.  Mom wouldn't let us go to the funeral.  Anyway....here is my post from our devotions this morning...

My maternal grandmother was raised in the Society of Friends church - she was a Quaker. She was a more modern Quaker, but my great-grandmother was rather old school. I remember when I was probably 4-5 having lunch with Great-Grandma and the ladies from her Sunday School class. It might have been a Bible study of sorts. All of them wore the longer dresses, old lady dresses, and they all wore what my sister and I called "Great-Grandma shoes" - black, laced up, slight heel. Ugly. Anyway...I remember that the Quakers did not approve of movies, but Grandma took me to see Cinderella in the theatre (she was a rebel). They did not approve or alcohol (but I found out later that my great-grandfather --who died a few months before I was born---had a large bottle of whiskey under the kitchen sink....for medicinal purposes). Grandma rubbed some of that whiskey on my sister's gums when she was teething (and told me not to tell my mother). They definitely didn't approve of any dancing or contorting the bodies to music. My mother insisted that they did not approve of serving food inside a church building, yet after my uncle's funeral we returned to the church for a dinner in the church basement. I remember going to Yearly Meeting with my great-grandmother and grandmother and sitting on the left side of the huge room and then men sitting on the right side. At the break for lunch we ate on the lawn at long pieces of plywood atop sawhorses and sat on folding chairs. All this time my parents and I and my sister attended a different church down the road, a congregational Christian church which had looser restrictions. My dad was raised a Nazarene so I guess this was a happy medium? Anyway...one of my mom's cousins who is actually about 10 years older than I am became a Quaker minister. His daughter was a cheerleader, and they served food in their church! I guess the restrictions were not as strict as they were when I was a little girl. I always wondered about dancing and how some people could not think that we could dance and enjoy music when there is musical praise in the Bible. Yes I know some dancing is not tasteful, but still. Praise comes in many forms, and I think dancing is one of those. I wonder what my great-grandmother would think of that?