CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT: Every day brings the chance to learn new steps
Drew Kuzma told me: “I think God wants us to live a full life.”
For the Canadian-born minister of the Church of Scotland in Kirkhill and Kiltarlity, the resolve to live life to the full took him to the final of the recent Strictly Inverness charity contest along with his dance partner Gail Robertson.
Drew’s wife Margie and a parishioner ‘roped him in’ to Strictly, which raised money for Highland Hospice and Inverness Ice Centre. Both his father and father-in-law in Canada have terminal cancer, and he realised he could help families here facing the same issues his folks are going through back home – he raised nearly £6000.
Somehow I don’t think Drew needed much persuasion to take part. This man loves life – he’s ‘sporty and outdoorsy’; he laughs a lot; he loves spending time with his wife and three children. He’s energised by meeting people, passing the time of day, hearing their stories, unfazed by their deep questions.
Drew’s passionate about church. He realises some Highlanders have unpleasant memories of judgemental strictness in church with little or no joy. But for Drew ever since he started attending Pentecostal church aged 12 with a pal, church has almost always been like a family to him. There, he has found support and forgiveness, and community: this is the ethos he fosters in Kirkhill and Kiltarlity.
“I am overwhelmed by the love of God,” Drew says. This love, and his response to it is fundamental to his zest for life – he often mentions his ‘relationship with Jesus’. “How does that work?” I ask.
Drew describes Jesus building close relationships with his first followers, teaching them, showing them by example. He imagines Jesus saying to them in comradely exasperation when they’re slow to catch on: “Are you still so thick, lads?”
This same Jesus, he believes, is with him as a spiritual presence. Daily, even when he doesn’t particularly feel like it, Drew spends time reading the Bible and conversing with the Jesus-who-is-with-him. He aims, in a relaxed joyful way, to ‘pray without ceasing’. To live each day, whatever he’s doing – whether in pulpit, ice hockey rink, at home or learning steps in the ballroom – in the light of God’s presence within him.
The name Strictly, coming originally from Strictly Ballroom, a 1992 film, sounds like the ‘strictness’ Drew detects in some former approaches to doing church. In Strictly Ballroom two maverick dancers persuade those in charge that it’s wrong to say ‘there are no new steps’.
In one sense, as Christians, we follow in the steps of Jesus. But it’s also true that every day brings the opportunity of learning new steps, dancing with Jesus. Not strictly, but freely, joyfully.
