If the Shoe Fits......

Not only did it take us 3 months to find with much rending of garments and gnashing of teeth, but after wearing the lovely silver shoes once, she grew out of them. You all who follow my blog know who she is. She is the shopper from H-E- double toothpicks. She is the one who has a range of 1.003 colors she will agree to wear, and a list of the parameters of what she will refuse to consider that is even fatter than the Obama health care rules. After the equivalent of crossing the Sahara without water to find her the perfect shoe, which we did find, and she did wear....ONCE....she had the audacity to grow out of them.

"Do you want me to give these to Goodwill?" she asked.
Those shoes represented more than just shoes to me. They were as rare as diamonds, as long searched for as the origin of the universe.
"No, we can't just give them to Goodwill. It took us months to find them! They are the perfect shoe."
"Not if they don't fit."
"Are you sure you can't cram your feet in them?"
She glared at me.
"Well then how about this, we could cut out a hole for your little toe. You could cover it with duct tape...." I suggested.
She dangled them over the Goodwill Box.
:No! Let me think. They have to go to someplace special. Those aren't just shoes."
"What are they then, Mom?"
"They are victory."
Asherel creased her forehead and looked at me out of the corner of her eye.
"Fine, take Victory out of my room, please. Do whatever you like with them."

I held the precious, lovely silver shoes. I tried them on my own feet. Nope, too big. I panned my sisters' shoe sizes in my head. Wrong size on all of them. I put them on a shelf in my room. The box went to Goodwill without them. When Karissa, Matt's fiancee came to visit, I had her try them on.Too big.

Two weeks ago, dear neighbor Kristin emailed that she had visited Comer and Evelyn in the Alzheimer unit. She was horrified at how tight Evelyn's shoes were, how swollen her feet, how long her toe nails. She took Evelyn and Comer that very day for shoes, but it was an outing beyond sweet Evelyn's tolerance, and they ended up with shoes that ultimately fell off Evelyn's heels. When the daughter returned to town, she got a pair of different shoes. They didn't fit either. When I saw my old friends Thursday, I noticed her feet still swollen, still cramped in shoes too small.

I walked by the shelf with my silver shoes.
"Psssst," they said.
I paused.
"You who claim to hear God speaking all the time.... yeh, you....."
"Me?" I asked the shoes.
"How can you hear the voice of God and not hear the obvious voice of a shoe that has a destiny, a purpose that even the most inattentive blog reader figured out about 3 paragraphs before."
"You are pretty disrespectful for a shoe," I admonished.
"Call Comer, oh ye of thickened head. Ask him Evelyn's shoe size."
I obeyed the shoe.

Of course, they were the correct size.
"I'll drop them off," I told Comer, "But I can't stay. Since your daughter will be there today, can you have her try the shoes on Evelyn?"
I brought the silver shoes and gave them to Comer.
He held them in his hands like they were Cinderella's glass slippers.
"I feel quite certain these will be perfect." he said, "They are beautiful shoes."

I haven't heard if the shoes fit or not. I don't like my fairy tales ending unhappily so I don't really want to know if they don't fit. It makes a much better story if they do. Most of the time life doesn't work that way, however. Most of the time we are squeezing our souls into very uncomfortable situations that pinch, and blister, and hurt. Sometimes we have to bust out of the old, once comfortable places we had walked in, and chart new paths in shoes that have not been broken in yet. It seems that life is often one of discarding what we thought we loved, that fit us perfectly....but no longer does. There are thousands of examples, but the plight of our old friends in the Senior Home strikes me as one of the most poignant.

When Saul was first annointed King of Israel, Samuel who was God's messenger, told him that he would become a changed person with God's spirit upon him. Later, Saul was undone by his own foolish clinging to the things of his past, the prideful tendencies to ignore God's directives. While God Himself is unchanging, He seems to be perpetually shoving us into new shoes.

I am resting today in a vision of Evelyn sitting with a smile on her face, spreading out her toes in silver shoes that sparkle in that dreary place.

1 Samuel 10: 6-7
⁶ The Spirit of the LORD will come powerfully upon you, and you will prophesy with them; and you will be changed into a different person. ⁷ Once these signs are fulfilled, do whatever your hand finds to do, for God is with you.