The class is an assortment of older retired women and young(ish) mamas. We start the class off slow moving and grooving to whatever song the instructor spins first. I look thrilled at this point, utterly beside myself with glee over the twisting, turning, shimmying and shaking.
Ok, that might be an overstatement.
About a quarter of the way through the class a few of the older ladies with the determination and grit of a thousand of us young women start hamming it up. They shimmy. They shake. Their joy just starts spilling out all over the place and pretty soon we're all laughing and hollering and the spell of glum ho-hum Monday life is broken.
They smile and show off the crows feet and laugh lines and they are intensely beautiful.
I catch one of their eyes and she casts her grin my direction with a little shimmy thrown in to boot.
I turn all misty and feel silly and a bit crazy because it is just the everyday.
Two weeks ago a young woman who seems to me was only a short time ago a little girl Disney star shook her business on television to the shock and awe of the general public.
Don't bother going to look at the video. It won't improve your life.
Some things you just can't unsee and the twerking and jerking that Miley Cyrus did and the stone faced Robin Thicke (another topic for another day) who stood there and let it happen is not something that any of us really need to see.
I told myself not to write about it. It just seemed too expected and as if I couldn't bring an ounce of nuance to the discussion so quietly I excused myself from the conversation.
Until this morning when those older ladies let loose on the rest of us with their joy. Until their smiles and their paving the pathway to glee happened to me on a Monday morning.
As I watched (yes, I did watch it on the internet the next day) Miley humiliate herself in front of millions I grieved our culture and what it does to young women, particularly celebrities. It was like watching a controlled experiment gone horribly wrong. I was watching how the deadly sins of greed, self-indulgence, false liberation and pride can kill someone in real time and it made me sick to my stomach that we as a culture let that happen and often cheer it on.
The bottom line is that the biggest need of any of us is for Jesus to wreck and rearrange us and for the Holy Spirit to indwell and change us from the inside out.
Jesus is the canvas for change in our lives, but people are often the paint He uses to make a gorgeous work of art out of us. I watched those older ladies this morning dancing like no one was looking and it blessed me and all I could think was, "We need more of these types of ladies in the Body."
We need older women who cup joy in their hands and throw it around like confetti.
We need women who bear the lines of age and wisdom and smile through them and tell us to keep going that it only gets better and better the closer we get to Jesus.
We need ladies who believe in modesty and self-control and who don't even know what twerking is.
We need women with silver in their hair to show us how to speak with grace and walk with Jesus.
I realize that Miley Cyrus is a grown woman. All of us at some point begin to make our own decisions and forge our own way, but I am so grateful for the women that have lined my path with encouragement and whispers of grace. I'm afraid for those who don't have that in their lives.
It is easy to say that we live in a different world from years ago. It is easy to throw up our hands and let the world ride the cultural steam engine straight to hell, but we don't get to say that we had no part in it. If we truly want to say that then we best be clinging to the timeless truths of Scripture AND showing the women behind us how to do the same.
If we don't want our daughters to emulate Miley, Ke$ha or Lindsey then we have to give them something worth far more than fame and fortune. We have to teach them the value of a daughter of the King and we have to long for it, live for it and cling to it more than anything else in our own lives.
We have to embody it to the point that our daughters, biological and in the faith, can't help but start following our lead.
There will always be Miley Cyrus's in this upside down world. Our job as warrior women is to fight for the daughters that will come behind us. Our job is to clear a path so that they can run up next to us and say thank you for showing me how to get to the light.
I was feeling dark this morning and the white haired women in my exercise class grabbed my hand and ran for the light.
Miley is just one of many young women groping in the dark.
I want to be a woman whose hand she can grab.
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