LAUS DEO

Caught in flip-flops

This year’s weather pattern seemed to skip spring as it hyperdrived from winter’s Icelandic chill to a Tropic steamy summer.

Despite this heat you won't catch me in flip-flop footwear. Even back in third world Nepal, I wouldn’t wear the rubber ones imported en masse from China, sandals Nepalese and even MBH, my beloved husband, often donned.

Feet on Savannah street

These days in the first world nation of America, I note flip-flop wear from cheap to deluxe is THE fashion statement. Slaps and slides echo not just at the poolside but also around frigid grocery aisles and warm church aisles. But not for me. Though I disdain stifling regulations, I resonate with the PA state law forbidding drivers from wearing flip-flops after a gal's loose flip-flop caused her foot to accelerate her car into a store. Crash and sirens at that mall!

At many American shopping areas one finds pedicurists busily buffing feet and brushing toenails barn or blood red to look their best in open footwear. “If the barn needs painting, paint it,” is a proverb I first heard in my Deep South Sunday Class. My toes tend to curl together and under as if to revert en point to the one ballet class I took as a child. Polish and buffing might be my extremities’ necessity, but I refuse to indulge and often hide my tootsies in shoes. If I have to wear open-toed footwear it would be sandals that hide as much of my foot shortcomings as possible.

Jesus, who probably wore sandals, would have willingly worked on feet like mine. History records that Jesus kneeled with a towel and water basin to wash, at least a dozen sets of feet. He scrubbed the dirt, the camel, cattle, donkey and horse dung of the ancient roads off his followers’ feet. Feet certainly as dirt challenged as a Nepali on a steep Himalaya goat trail.

One monsoon summer my beloved hubby trekked one of those narrow trails, wearing blue flip-flops. A civil engineer he along with his co-workers went to inspect the extent of flood damage on the Tinau River Hydroelectric Dam upstream from our village. The trail perhaps was still muddy and, of course, narrow, 100 meters above the raging river gorge.

Tinau River Gorge and Dam

In an instant MBH slipped. Out of his coworkers’ eyesight he vanished. Over the edge of a steep gorge he tumbled.

A meter or so below, a tree stayed his fall. Correction, my analytical husband would state that our Creator stayed his fall with a tree. Not just any tree, but one Nepali tree that God seeded, one tree God watered, one tree God photosynthesized to grow stuck over a gorge to catch my beloved husband, God’s beloved child. Then the Perfect Hand of Mercy helped coworkers’ to pull MBH up, dirty, bruised, alive. Laus Deo!

Ultimate Good, Your Creator, the Perfect Hand of Mercy--God exists. Into our fallen, divisive world God sent his perfect Son to cleanse, to serve, to rescue and save us just as we are ... with or without curled in toes. God loves us so!