the music enters the scene with a thrill rippling along the crowd...

someone stands and begins to do something not to be done on normal circumstances.

"turn around.."

the dancing begins, some are driven looney with anticipation of being pointed at, others approach paranoia with trying to weasel their way outta the dining area-turned nut house. it's hard to stay calm when the flurry of fun, laughs, shyness and awkwardness begin to steal the scene in your head. when it's your turn to face the music, anything goes; whatever you did, you'd look at it afterwards with second-guessing eyes.

"nothing i can say. A total eclipse of the heart."

the tradition of 'Total Eclipse' may be just fun but senseless shenanigans, but the last line has some grain of truth in it, truth with applications reaching as far as the serious Christian walk of the people in camps who dance to it.

during a total eclipse, there's a shortage of light as the moon drifts into place where it obstructs the sunshine supposed to fall on the place it looms over.

but the sky isn't the only place where a total eclipse can happen; a person can also experience the total eclipse sung about in the song when emotion obstructs the mind, keeping clear Spirit-led thought and action nigh-impossible. the prophet Jeremiah knew what he was talking about when he mentioned the heart in chapter 17 verse 9 in his book:

"⁹The heart is deceitful above all things

and beyond cure.

Who can understand it?"

During a Total Eclipse of the heart, one usually doesn't function well, if at all. sound Judgment is out and away while sentiment comes out to play. some people see everything in a haze and others get a dark cloud over their heads. Out of sorts, imbalanced, lahat na, but it's a storm very few people can see. I speak from 1st & 2nd-hand info that a Total Eclipse is something no one wants to be in but happens to find themselves in when they're too involved with someone (or something) at one point or another.

So now what? Total Eclipses play themselves out, same with the crazy sashaying during camp mealtimes, but this is where the analogy breaks down. you can totally predict when the next Total Eclipse will be, both outside the planet and inside camps (well, maybe less certainty at the camps XD), but when the Total Eclipse within will happen and for how long is anybody's guess. the natural & Youth L.I.V.E. versions can pass by with no one the wiser and it's perfectly fine, but its counterpart in the heart will only bring emotional fatigue & all the baggage associated with the drama in increasing measure if we let it pass us by without us learning from it.

hey, even i have my share of drama too. Let it not be said that God hadn't used my Total Eclipses to teach me lessons i would have learned only there, cuz i'd stand for the sappy drama episodes of my Ride with Him no matter how uncharacteristic/ill-suited those days are with who I appear to be. Everyone can be brought down to a seemingly sorry state when they're under a total eclipse, but what matters is that they emerge stronger than yesterday (woo, britney! XD) after the whole ordeal. of course, when i say 'stronger than yesterday' i mean a heightened sense of willingness to cast off every misaligned desire, unnecessary anxiety, irrational fear, notions of entitlement; anything and everything that can hamper living life as God wants it lived at whatever cost.

i guess all i'm saying is that if we are willing to just bare ourselves before God and submit to His twists and turns, the Total Eclipse of the heart can turn out to be so much more that what we crank it up to be. A nasty storm that casts a shadow in our perfect 'Christian existences' might actually turn out to be a stage setup for an encounter with the One who can calm storms with just His words.