SHOES & LOVE [M, 8-9-21]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

[If you came to read the column on the “Pray Away” movie, just scroll down.]

We heard an elderly couple talking about their new, smaller, one-story house. “It’s our ‘shuffle’ house,” they said.

Yes, old people need a house where they can do “the safety shuffle.” [I don’t know why I put that in quotes, since I just thought it up myself. But a quote seems to have more credibility.]

I don’t pick up my feet very well as I walk. Mostly I shuffle and scrape. It’s not just because of old age. I never was good at picking up my feet, even as a child. I know because I remember well my parents saying, “Pick up your feet! You’ll wear out your shoes! We can’t afford any more! You’ll have to go barefoot.”

I liked having shoes. I never enjoyed going barefoot. In part, that was because my mother often told the story of her uncle, Ellis Dill, who stepped on a rusty nail and died of tetanus. So I didn’t mind taking care of my shoes. Thus I tried to pick up my feet. I really did. Never got any good at it, though. Even in basketball, and baseball, and pickle ball, and long-distance running. When our daughters were in high school, their friends called me “The Red Phantom,” because they saw me in the park, wearing red running shoes and just gliding along, barely above the ground.

I never wanted a lot of shoes. Because I learned early to take good care of my shoes, they last a long time. Some that I wear regularly now are more than 40 years old. So, I never was a “shoes horse,” although we had a horse, Prince, that got new shoes more often than I did growing up. He deserved them; he picked up his feet very nicely, especially when he saw my father coming with the harness. Then he would pick up those shoes and run to the middle of the pond, where Daddy could not get him. [Yes, we always called him Daddy, even when we were in our 60s.] Of course, Daddy would get mad, and wade in after him. Prince would wait until he was almost there, then pick up those feet with a great splashing and run out the other side of the pond, where I was supposed to dodge those flashing metal shoes, and his big yellow teeth, and grab him around the neck and hold him. Needless to say, that didn’t work, and then Daddy was mad at both of us.

 

There was an inconsistency there that befuddled both Prince and me, since Daddy wanted low stepping for Prince and high stepping for me.

I preferred to think of my low-foot gait not as laziness or inability but as efficiency. Maybe that’s why personal efficiency has always been a hobby for me. I try to button my shirt and tie my shoes and put stuff in my pockets in just the right order and manner for minimum outlay of energy and use of time. No, it’s not OCD--or CDO, the way it should be—but a hobby.

Love is hardly ever efficient, which is why God, who is Love, is so hard to understand. We humans want efficiency, even when it looks like the opposite, such as more effective booze and drugs that will help us escape our own lives in the most efficient way. God, Love, does not come in orderly fashion, just pops up whenever our efficiency—in either righteousness or profligacy-- has broken down. When our souls have gotten holes and we need new shoes.

“When I get to heaven, gonna put on my shoes, gonna walk all over God’s heaven…”

John Robert McFarland