Feet

the REST of the week (#134)

It’s Thanksgiving here in the U.S. and I’d like to offer you an invitation to take off your shoes and rest in your own feet.

Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash

The past two years I have shared a colleague’s Thanksgiving blessing for your hands. This year, I’ve been thinking about feet.

Shoes protect our feet and can be a fun way to express our personal style. The right shoes improve our effectiveness for an activity or job. However (as intimated by last week’s poem), shoes can take on a life all their own—symbolizing the ways in which concern for externals can sidetrack us from being ourselves and living freely from the inside out.

You can lose your feet for all the shoes out there.

You can lose your soul for all the roles and expectations out there.

Before God called Moses and explained his plan to deliver the Israelites out of slavery, he first attracted Moses’ attention by appearing as “flames of fire from within a bush”. Then, after Moses noticed and came near, God called his name and told him to, “take off your sandals for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” (see Exodus 3 NIV).

Shoes symbolize the profane and secular and removing shoes prior to entering a sacred space is common in many of the world’s religions.

Taking off our shoes, however, also offers a profound metaphor for letting go of our defenses and reliance on externals—of getting honest with God (and ourselves).

Recognizing who God is and who we are facilitates letting go of pretense and performance—which frees us to live in authenticity and abundance rather than in shame and scarcity.

Taking off our shoes is a way of remembering that we are not on our own, dependent on ourselves to save ourselves.

The ancient words of David, the “servant of the Lord”, recorded in Psalm 18 describe his gratitude to God for delivering him from his distress, pulling him “up out of the pit” and bringing him into “a spacious place… because he delighted in me.”

David praises God for all of the ways in which he has helped him—declaring that:

“It is God who arms me with strength
and keeps my way secure. He makes my feet like the feet of a deer;
he causes me to stand on the heights…

[He provides] a broad path for my feet,
so that my ankles do not give way.”

(Psalm 18:32,33,36)

May your soul be unfettered and your feet as strong and free as those of a deer on the mountains.

And may your rest be sweet.

Alicia