Keeping the Beat of The Spirit
Synchronized walking with the Lord, the Giver of Life
I love a good beat—who doesn’t? The best are the ones that sync with life. Any moment can become cinematic if an unexpected rhythm gives just the right feeling to what’s happening.
The Christian life is like keeping a good beat. Sometimes it takes effort, but it always feels more natural to find rhythm and keep it. Like walking itself is a beat, and when our steps aren’t evenly paced, we can find ourselves ever-so-slightly irritated until we put the effort in to get one foot landing in the cadence with the other.
As a kid in Burkina Faso, I remember watching women pound grain in a giant wooden bowl. They had tree trunks fashioned into giant pestles. Sometimes I’d see a lone woman pounding out the raw material of that day’s meal. More often it was two or three women, each with their own pestles pounding grain in the same over-sized mortar. In perfect harmony, they’d hit the grain just as the previous woman’s tree trunk would rise skyward for its next turn. It always turned into a beat, and sometimes the women would release the pestles from their hands on the upward swing to perform a few syncopated claps as their implement hung suspended mid-air.
This video demonstrates what I’m talking about. Note that the two women on the right land their pestles on what percussionists call a “flam.”
Giving the hum-drum chores of the day a beat is what gives life an intrinsic joy, and it’s no different in the Christian walk.
Paul tells the Galatian church that they need to “walk by the Spirit” (Gal 5:16). We should understand the preposition “by” to mean that the Spirit is the One who enables us to walk in a Christian fashion. As Paul says in v. 25, we “live by the Spirit,” which is to say the Spirit is the One who gives us resurrected life. So to walk by him is to walk because he’s the only reason we can.
But Paul also tells us that to walk “by” the Spirit is to walk in proximity to him. Like the Israelites being led by the pillar of cloud and fire in the wilderness, we should be “led by the Spirit” (Gal 5:18).
I remember being led by my father’s steps when I was just a little boy. He didn’t always know it, but I'd try to make my right foot land just as his right foot did, and the same with the left. If I could catch up beside him and stretch my legs as far as they could reach, I could step in such way that, looking at us from the side, our legs created a doubly-aligned underpass. A delight, like this:
To walk by the Spirit is to keep the Spirit’s beat. In Gal 5:25, Paul restates the task of walking by the Spirit as keeping “in step” with the Spirit, which I imagined like synchronized walking.
So, keep the beat of the Spirit. It begins with synchronous walking. You might then try skip-skip-skipping-to-your-lou with him. Run, dance, jump. Stop—always on beat.
Then add the rhythm of the Spirit to all of life, like prepping dinner. You might gather two or three in Jesus’s name to prepare good works together, adding your own syncopated claps to the beat the Spirit gives. Just so, life by the Spirit is the life of intrinsic joy.
