Trisha Jones: Dancing Her Cares Away

Trisha Jones is a beautiful, creative dancer. You’d never know by looking at her that her greatest fear was being noticed. "From day one, I was always the shy girl… not that I didn’t have anything to say, I didn’t know how to say it, so dance was my way of expressing myself," she now admits. Trisha used to hide behind the camera. "If I had a speech to give in class, I had teachers who would give me special things where I could go home and film it at home. I'd have my mom do it and even then, I was crying on camera doing it. It was not allowed to be shown in class, but the teacher could take it home and then grade it," she says. As Trisha got older, her shyness became crippling. "There’s was a ‘70s party at the church. I was really tired when I got there and said to myself, 'Trisha, just make yourself do it. Grab your stuff. I can’t – I just can’t.' I didn’t know half the people. I went home and cried to myself the whole way home. I was like, 'Trisha, you cannot do this anymore.' In an attempt to overcome her shyness she started taking acting classes, as well as continuing to dance. "It started as something I did to get over my fear. I would go to class and felt like I could throw up every single time before I went, because I’d get so scared at having to stand in front of people and say something. So, I started doing it as the fear breaker." She continues, "I became a Christian about four or five years ago. I wasn’t doing it for the right reasons because I did it through somebody else that happened to be a guy. So I believed, but my heart wasn’t really there. I had a couple months that I just was a complete mess." But it was in her dance class that Trisha noticed a difference in her instructors and discovered that they were Christians. "Once I heard that they were Christians and everytime I would come to their class, I would just leave feeling so good. I didn’t really trust the whole Christianity thing. These people, they read their Bible all the time. This was just weird. And I watched them, and everything that they said, and everything they did. Never once did they ever compromise anything. Never once were they somebody on the outside that they weren’t on the inside." She heard the Scripture that says, 'Life and death are in the power of the tongue,' and she began to realize that she could be free from fear and shyness… "It kinda just clicked one day that I needed to make a choice. I could either let myself have this relationship and let myself grow, or I could sit and act like God doesn’t care, and He doesn’t know that I already have this thing. And I could trust Him.” So she did. Trisha decided that God could be trusted, and He began to amaze her. She started dancing with Tymme and Aury’s dance troupe called Word in Motion. "I know that I’m called to share the Gospel through dance, through my life experiences, and a lot of this stuff that I’ve gone through. I can help out somebody else," she says. Trisha is now newly married. She still is taking steps to walk in freedom from shyness. "It’s not worth it to always let yourself stay in bondage. God would not put us on this earth if the whole thing was just to be... to not have relationships with other people and to not have a relationship with Him. Without God, I don’t even know where I would be. He has so much grace, and He is so faithful."