Theatre student creates dance to share message about foster care and adoption into the family of God

When Liberty University senior Kelsey Dial set out to create a dance for her senior thesis as a musical theatre student, she wanted it to convey a message close to her heart, a personal passion that could impact others. She titled the piece “It’s Always Been You,” set to the song of the same name by Phil Wickham, and used the artform to tell the story of adoption and foster care and the way God welcomes everyone into His heavenly family.

The meaning of her own name, “shelter,” was her inspiration.

“From a very young age I’ve felt like the Lord has told me to be that shelter, I need to be a shelter for people who don’t have one,” she said. “Kids are a group I connect very easily with, so when I think about being a shelter, that’s who I naturally look to care for. I also feel very strongly that showing the love of Christ through adoption is such a powerful image of the way God adopts us into His family.”

In creating the piece, Dial interviewed family, friends, and fellow church members who have experiences involving the foster care system, including her dad’s cousin who was a foster parent, and use their common thread and themes to craft the performance.

Dial’s research revealed how thousands of children in foster care await adoption in the U.S. She said there are over 407,000 foster children in the United States and roughly 7 in 10 Americans (232 million people) profess to be Christians. She said this means that if only 0.18% of U.S. Christians would open their doors and families to a foster child, every foster care child would have a home.

The four-minute piece follows a girl as she is separated from her biological parents by unknown means, finds herself in the foster care system, and is adopted by foster parents before finding her ultimate, eternal adoption by her Heavenly Father.

“She is left on her own and she ends up in the foster care system with a family that’s great, but she won’t let them in; she has all of this trauma she’s carrying, and her foster parents try to point her to God,” Dial explained. “She basically breaks down to a certain point … and Jesus comes into that situation, lifts her up, and reveals to her in saying, ‘I am the one you need, your earthly parents aren’t here but I am the one you need.’”

Professor Aubri Siebert, Dial’s thesis chair, said she loved seeing how Dial used the medium of dance to share her passion and stir the hearts of others.

“Kelsey has a beautiful heart, and she’s really passionate about dance, so I was just happy to jump on the bandwagon and see what she would do with the artform,” Siebert said. “In creating this piece, she was thinking about all the different people that might see this and trying to give something through this piece to everyone, whether they’re someone who has never considered being a foster parent, a child who is currently in the foster care system, or anyone else.”

Dial recently performed the dance during the theatre department’s Spring Break trip to the Bay Area of California. Siebert was a co-leader on the trip, which included 20 students who used their acting and dancing performances to minister to audiences at a youth group, middle school, rehabilitation center, local theatre workshop, and even a neighborhood driveway.

“I would always look out into the audience, and this was a piece that really moved people,” Siebert said. “So many people would sit there and take it all in, and it is in those moments that I see that pieces like this are impacting others in a powerful way.”

“Kelsey has been on three Theatre Department Mission’s trips, and it has been a joy to watch Kelsey develop into a spiritual leader, and superior performer and creator within the department,” said trip co-leader Professor Barry Gawinski. “When she first showed the team the piece, we had an immediate visceral response to the connection between this specific story of adoption, and the eternal story of adoption into God’s family.  The audience had many different ways to receive this emotional story.”

At a middle school, Dial recalled that she asked God to move through her piece and help her make an impact despite not feeling mentally prepared that day. Afterward, a girl came forward, tears streaming down her face, asking to talk to Dial because the piece had deeply impacted her.

“It was really touching to see that instance of the Lord moving somebody somehow through what He allowed me to create, especially because it came on a day where I wasn’t in the best mental space, so I know it was God that did everything,” Dial said. “It was literally the Holy Spirit that did all the work.”

“It’s been very cool to be able to use what I know how to do, what I’m studying, and what I feel the Lord has gifted me in, to share the Gospel,” she added. “We always talk about glorifying God with everything we do, and that is absolutely important, but there is also something important about taking the gifts that you’ve been given and using them explicitly for the purpose of telling others about God.”

Graduating next month during Liberty’s 49^th Commencement, Dial said she is approaching life after college with an openness to whatever God has in store for her next.

“Something I learned on these ministry trips is that we really have no control in life, but God does have control and He has a better plan for us,” Dial said. “It’s like (Proverbs 16:9) says: ‘In their hearts, humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps.’ God has a plan, and I don’t even need to worry about what it is. I’m just going to take things step by step and do what I feel He is calling me to do each day.”