Strange title, you may think to yourself. Isn't the Hoedown Throwdown from the Hannah Montana movie? Why, yes… yes it is. You may be wondering how this dance became part of my excursions in England; this is a completely natural reaction. Let me regale you with the story.
I suppose I should start by telling you that this weekend I went on "The Big Adventure" which is a retreat that the student group at New Life Church in Lincoln takes every year. Jonas (the pastor of New Life Grantham) came to Mosaic (our Bible study at Harlaxton) and invited us to come along. So Amber, Audrey, Melody, Erika, and I packed our bags and headed to Norwich (pronounced Nor-rich… the English like to make letters silent. For example, Leicester is pronounced "Lester". But I digress…) Anyway, so we went to Norwich and met up with the group there. We were warned on the way that a big talent show is traditionally part of the weekend. The girls and I began discussing our options and I threw out "Well, I mean, I can teach them how to line dance…" and the girls decided that would be great. Then I thought, "How can we possibly make this any more Americanized?" Answer: add Miley Cyrus. So I said, "Actually… I know the dance to the Hoedown Throwdown song," which excited everyone (except Audrey, who chooses to associate more with lil Wayne rather than Miley) and so I started teaching it to our group as soon as we got there. Saturday night rolled around, and the closer to time to do the dance, the more we thought, "I hope they think it's as funny as we do… otherwise, this could be ugly." Thankfully, they did think it was as funny as we did.

After we performed, they wanted me to teach them more dances, so I broke out the Tush Push and the Hitchhiker. Surprisingly, English people catch on a lot faster than do Americans. We ended Saturday night with a spontaneous dance party that lasted until 2:30 am, the playlist for which included Down, Bye Bye Bye, I Want it That Way, A Whole New World, Low, Don't Cha, The Hoedown Throwdown, and Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. It was pretty great. Sunday morning, I skipped out on breakfast in favor of sleeping and when I woke up, the following conversation ensued:

Erika: "Have you seen Audrey and Melody?"
Me: "Um… no."
Erika: "Oh, well everyone's looking for you."
Me: "Um… ok. Why?"
Erika: "They all want you to teach another line dance."

It made my heart happy for the British to be adopting my so beloved line dances. :) So that morning, as part of the morning wake-up routine, (Whitney's Workout as Antonia put it) I taught Slappin' Leather and busted out "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy" just for the occasion.

When we weren't having dance parties, we were learning about the Lord. :) It was so refreshing to be in such a great, Christian environment for even just a few days. We talked about Elijah and the faith that he had. It was really cool to be reminded about how one day he was calling down God's fire from heaven and completely beasting it for Jesus, then the next day he was on the run from Jezebel, in a complete spiritual depression. Even holy men like Elijah had seasons where they felt far from God, you know? It was just an encouragement to think that even if I feel far from God, He is still RIGHT beside me, and also that the feeling of distance is in a way normal. We're all going to experience times of drought, but that's when we really need to dig in.

So, that was my weekend. It was great and I have lots of new friends now! :)