These Shoes Were Made for Reassurance

God moves in mysterious ways. A bit of a cliche, but a fact that I recognize more and more as I advance along through this thing called life.

Those throat-tightening moments when someone you love walks away, receives a dreaded diagnosis or is involved in a life-altering accident. You pray. Beg God to move, to restore, to heal. PLEAD. Cry tears of desperation. Pray more and more...and yet God doesn’t seem to budge. At least, not in the way you want Him to.

Then there are other times; times when a teeny-tiny detail thing happens. Something so minute and unimportant that you don’t even think to pray about it. Like a pair of shoes.

She wanted a pair of sneakers. Yet their use for traipsing around the inner city of San Francisco, loving on homeless people, didn’t seem to justify the extravagance of spending money on a new pair. When a sibling invited her to come along to some neighborhood garage sales one morning, she went, on the slim chance that she might find a pair of sneakers she liked.

Not only did she find them. They were at the very first garage sale. Just her size. In one of her favorite colors. The previous owner had already christened them, who knows how many years before, with these words from a worship song written on the side of the sole:

“I wanna be your hands, I wanna be your feet. I’ll go where you send me!”

And all of that for the bargain price of one buck.

Wow. When God moves - He really does it up right. Yet I can’t help wondering why. Why remain quiet and unmoving at times - times when we’re desperately looking for Him to move? Other times when we least expect it, BOOM, He shows up. I’ll never figure it out.

That’s what makes God...God. His ways higher than our ways and all that stuff. I just have to keep trusting that in those lowest moments, when it FEELS like He’s not budging an inch to help out...He has a different plan that I don’t understand. 

Therefore, what is there to do but press on? Expecting that eventually He'll show up with showers of blessings...or shoes, as the case may be.

1 “Come, let us return to the LORD;

for he has torn us, that he may heal us;

he has struck us down, and he will bind us up.

2 After two days he will revive us;

on the third day he will raise us up,

that we may live before him.

3 Let us know; let us press on to know the LORD;

his going out is sure as the dawn;

he will come to us as the showers,

as the spring rains that water the earth.”

Hosea 6:1-3