The Bee Girl - Part 1

In 1992 a music group named Blind Lemon recorded a song called No Rain. As famous as that song became, the music video became even more so. In the video a pudgy little girl with glasses saw life very differently than her audience. The video begins with her, alone, on a stage where she was dressed in a cute little bee outfit. In that outfit she performed a tap dance routine that was much better than anything I could muster from these clumsy feet of mine. Well, when she was done, there was a single man laughing and what followed was nothing less than a chorus of laughter that rattled her. It impacted her so much that, saddened, she ran from the stage. The next time we see her she is peering around a door (presumably the door to the theater) and into the bright light of the sun.

Reflecting on the happenings in the first part of the video I cannot help but think of her reaction to the laughing as a rejection of the counterfeit community for which she performed. Simply, she rejected its rejection. And she was right to do such a thing. The support and encouragement that she sought and, as an image-bearer of God, deserved would not be hers in that moment in that day. And she ran from it.

She ran from it.

She was repulsed by the lack of affection; the lack of kindness; the discontinuity between what she faced and what she craved. Her subsequent journey would be an attempt to take her far from that place that bore the image of something, or someone, else and into one where desires would be met. Maybe even shared.

It is in her journey where I see more darkness than light.