Beautiful Feet
Dan Kunz
About a month ago, I was walking outside on our driveway after dark in my bare feet. I stepped squarely on a stone with my right heel. It’s still a little sore! Isn’t it funny how there are some parts of our body that we rarely think about unless they are causing a problem? For the last month I’ve thought about my right foot every time I take a step.
Unlike the romantic poets of long ago, I’m not that enamored by the beauty of someone’s feet. Although it’s true some people have long, slender feet which might be considered “beautiful”, the fact is most people’s feet just aren’t very attractive. They can have corns and bunions and blisters and calluses. They can be rather short and wide and flat. They can have toenails which don’t look much like toenails.
When I was a growing up, my maternal grandmother spent a lot of time at our house. She had a hard life, and so did her feet. Her husband, my grandfather, died when he was only thirty years old of a rare liver disorder. She was left to provide for four children six-years-old and younger. (My mom was the oldest.) She didn’t drive. They lived about a mile outside of a small town in farming country. I can’t imagine the amount of miles her feet walked as she walked the floor with a sick child, worked outside in the garden, took her little flock to the church in town, or ministered to a sick friend. Even in old age, she would walk from her little house on one side of town, to our house on the other side, to help my mom with a project or babysit me. She also walked to church – every Sunday, often being the first to arrive, in order to have time to pray in God’s house.
Her feet were not beautiful. She wasn’t tall and she wasn’t slender, neither were her feet. Even this many years later, I remember them being short and wide, with large bunions and stubby toenails. But her feet were beautiful. They were the ones the Apostle Paul had in mind when he wrote Romans 10:15 “And how can anyone preach unless they are sent? As it is written: "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!" I loved my grandma. Three of my grandparents died either before or during my infancy, so I never knew them. Maybe that’s why my grandma was so special to me, but, in reality, there was a lot more.
I would sit on my grandma’s lap in an old rocking chair that I still have. She would tell me about Jesus. She would sing hymns. As I mentioned earlier, she was in church every Sunday (sitting on the lower level, right side, about five pews from the front). As a widowed mom of four young children about the time of World War I, she worked to provide for them and see to it that they grew up to be hardworking, kind, loving Christian men and women. (My mom quit school when she was thirteen to get a job and help provide for her younger brothers and sister.) Through her words and through her actions, Grandma Ullman brought the “good news” of faith and resiliency to all who knew her. Her feet weren’t beautiful, but they were beautiful!
Is there someone who could use good news delivered by your feet today?