Yeah, so, it happened again. For years I've been trying to choreograph this ballet piece -- since even before I lost my faith in God. I've worked on this thing in fits and starts. I've made a Pinterest board with pictures of costumes, poses, and corps formations. I've journaled eleven pages and counting of looseleaf. I've scrapped at least three versions.
This week I've been nibbling at it again and this is the farthest I've gotten on it. I tripled the amount of dancers and finally a storyline began to take shape. The individual steps aren't there yet, but the mood progression is there now, and that's half the battle sometimes.
That storyline follows a suicide survivor alone with her grief. Guilt, shame, frustration, and anger (personified by the other dancers) dog her every move, until finally she decides to trust God with the situation though she doesn't understand it.
Clearly this last phase is the part I'm sticking at. The part I have never gotten to -- the part where the protagonist trusts. And it's for the same reason I got stuck in the novel -- the character must trust God, but I have not. How can I believably take a character where even I emotionally fear to tread? My imagination can take me a lot of places I will never be in real life, but it balks when asked to picture what trusting God would be like. My experience with trusting God is equal to the experience of betrayal. You pray for a child's life to be spared. The child dies. How do you respond to that? How do you look at the God who let this happen and say, 'yes, I will still trust Your plan?'
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