Dirty Feet
“How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news.”
Isaiah 52:7 (NIV)
It must be the right thing to do. A billion Chinese could not be wrong. My mother could not be wrong. After all, she was the one who always told me to, “Take off your dirty shoes before you come in here. I just finished mopping this floor and I don’t want mud tracked all over my clean house.” It became a normal ritual around our house to put the dozen or so shoes away before company was expected. My mother didn’t want dirty floors, but she also did not want dirty shoes piled-up beside the door. The unexpected company just had to experience our shoe-laden entryway while my mother begged them to excuse her immaculately clean, yet somehow still messy house.
Living in Mississippi for eight years of my childhood was great for a shoe weary child. Nobody wears shoes in Mississippi. People go to school barefoot. They go to church barefoot. They even work outside barefoot. Well, maybe that is not the true picture of Mississippi, but it is the perception that everyone has about the state and I am not about to educate the entire country to the contrary. Regardless, I spent many days walking around our yard barefoot. Walking on a sticker weed or having fire ant bites was a small annoyance for the freedom and pure joy of the act. Then one day I nearly stepped on a water moccasin and decided that shoes—no make that boots—were rather stylish and comfortable outside.
Walking barefoot is a luxury to a little boy. My brother and I always took off our shoes before playing in our rain soaked yard in Virginia. It would have pleased my mother more if we had taken them off inside the house rather than leaving them beside the ditch in which we were currently wallowing, or more likely waterboarding with our father’s real estate signs (that is another story). I can even remember walking through the snow when we lived in Maryland so that I could feed our dog. I figured that the dog was barefooted, so why couldn’t I do the same. Not sure if the dog experienced the same burning sensation that I got or not. I do remember wondering how your feet could burn from walking on snow.
Needless to say, I often had some very dirty feet. If there is a plus to this, at least my socks rarely smelled like a boys locker room. I could probably have worn the same pair all week and they still would have been clean. But with all of my dirty feet I merely had to rinse them off and perhaps use a bit of soap. My mother would have preferred I use the water hose outside of the house instead of leaving child size footprints through the house. Looking back, she should have received a merit badge for tracking because she always seemed to know which one of us left the footprints. After a few minutes of basic cleaning my feet looked clean as a whistle, albeit a whistle that had been drug through the mud and then rinsed it off.
Here is the thing about feet: when they belong to you, they are not that disgusting to clean. But if somebody outside of my immediate family asked me to wash their feet, my response would most likely be, “ARE YOU CRAZY? Me wash someone’s feet? Feet are dirty. They are stinky. They have toe jam on them. I am not about to touch anyone’s dirty, stinking feet.” But Jesus did not hesitate to wash the feet of His disciples. In fact, He insisted.
I never fully understood just how humble Christ was when He washed those twenty-four dirty feet. Even when I did my best to explain the servant attitude to a room full of teenagers who would rather eat a slug than touch a dirty toe, I never quite got the real picture myself. It took what I call my desert experience before I finally grasped the real picture.
In February 1995, we moved to Jerash, Jordan. I walked the same hills and valleys that the Israelites wandered through for forty years. I sat on the mountain where Moses is buried. I walked on the stone streets of a Roman civilization that have existed for more than two millennia. I encountered some of the same dirt that Jesus encountered as He walked among the people.
At first I tried to wear socks with my American-style sandals, just like the teens back in America did at that time. The nationals would ask why I wore socks when it was so hot outside. And while the socks were helping to keep my feet clean, they created another problem. Our “washing machine” was not exactly something you would find in America, and while we were thankful to have one, we quickly learned that all of our under clothes were beginning to have a brown tinge from washing them with those dirty socks.
So I decided to go sans socks, or badoon socks (badoon is Arabic for sans, uh, I mean without). I soon discovered the true meaning of the phrase “older than dirt.” My feet began to evolve, not in the metaphysical sense or even in the anti-creation sense. Those once easy to clean, thirty-second jobbies, had become hardened, cracked, crusty, filthy, leathery lumps of clay that took many minutes of scrubbing to clean.
Then summer came, and with summer came the desert winds, and with the desert winds came the desert sand. In Jordan it was impossible to dust your house. The wind does that for you, spreading dust everywhere just minutes after you clean. We would clean our marble floors by throwing water on them and using a squeegee to push the water and dirt down drains. Yeah, I know that it sounds nice in our comfortable homes in America to think about having marble floors, but no matter how much we cleaned our floors we would still have dirty floors.
It took us six months to get used to the final ritual of the day—washing our feet in the tub. And then by the time we walked from the bathroom to the bedroom, our feet would have dust and dirt caked in the cracked skin of our feet. I even tried using lotion on my feet to soften them and remove some of the cracks. But the lotion would simply turn a muddy brown color before it would be absorbed into my skin, and it never helped soften my skin.
I slowly came to realize that my feet were the feet that Jesus washed. Not the feet of a filthy, muddy kid from Mississippi, but the hardened, crusty feet of a man who walked the same dusty streets that I had walked throughout Jordan and Israel. It was not done so we could look back and say, “Wasn’t Jesus special? He humbled Himself in such a generous way.” He did something that was necessary. It was important. It was a normal, everyday action.
As Christians, we often desire to do the highly praiseworthy acts. But few want to do the necessary, everyday things that are needed. Everyone wants to be the star, but few are willing to do the work behind the glitz and glamour. God needs people who are willing to do the mundane, sometimes dirty, jobs. We should all want to share the Good News, yet we should also desire to clean the church, cook food for the hungry, provide clothes and other items for the homeless or hurting, visit those in prison, serve on a committee, help with the sound team, change babies diapers in the nursery, and many, many other just as important jobs at each church. Remember that feet only get dirty when you get up from your easy chair and actually do something.
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