His Feet

Saturday, October 23, 2010




HIS FEET

We spend our lives doing things our own way. All our own way. We suffer hurts. We take wrong turns. We run into walls. Pain rakes its nails across our souls leaving gashes that bleed mercilessly.



We spend our lives looking for love; a person to fill the needs, fill in the holes, smooth our rough edges. It leaves a criss-cross of scars. Our hearts bear a crazy quilt of zippered mistakes.



So, we stumble on, thinking we know who we are.



In prayer this morning God brought the woman who washed the feet of Jesus to mind. All we know is that she was a sinner. No name. No rank. No serial number. Just a sinner---someone who had spent her life, up until that point, doing things her own way.



"Now one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, so he went to the Pharisee's house and reclined at the table. When a woman who had lived a sinful life in that town learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisees's house, she brought an alabaster jar of perfume, and as she stood behind Him at His feet weeping, she began to wet His feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them" (Luke 7:36-38).



Now, do you suppose she had her day planned out that way? Wake up, go for water, wash and style hair, parade through town with her pretty jar, turn heads while her luxurious hair rippled down her back, wash the dirty, smelly feet of a man she had never met before? I don't think so.



It seems that that is exactly how we walk through life (when we don't have the feet of Jesus in our face). This woman was more than humbled by the washing. She truly saw. She was no more or less than we. She was just willing and able, needful and willing to admit to it, hurting and hurt. She gave her most precious items to Jesus that day: her tears of repentance, her extremely valuable jar of perfume, and her hair---the very hair that was her crowning glory. The lesson, well, that was unplanned but very, very necessary.



It was about seeing who she really was in the light of who HE really is. Her tears flowed from that place. They fell freely when the person she thought she was came into contact with who she was without Him.



And that's it. The crux. What we all need to learn in our hearts. That. we. are. nothing. without. His. feet.



c 10/23/2010 M. LaPointe