love-on-love
Mid-morning, and my friend and I wander to the table, navigating around stacks of books and piles of tools, cardboard boxes, the basket of beach towels that belongs in the linen closet. The innards of several rooms sit on my living room floor, as though we turned the walls inside out and shook loose the contents. Renovations look this way, no matter what kind–a mess of tools and treasure and debris; an odd mashup of new and old, bright floors and scarred walls ready for paint. For years, my soul has also been under renovation. I know it looks exactly this way, scrubbed clean, and also dusty, and I know my family and friends must always walk along the careful path carved through the middle.
“Pardon our mess,” I say, even though I know it’s an unnecessary request. My friend chuckles and waves her hand in dismissal. “Today will be a little unconventional,” I continue, though the comment carries certain irony since our household has never really met with convention.
Adam sits in a chair at the spot in the kitchen we affectionately call “his office.” Sits, only because ten minutes before my friend arrived, I had plunged his left foot into an Epsom salt soak. He prefers to stand, more often, to pace. Adam walks for miles, on pilgrimage around our home, always barefoot, always on the balls of his feet.
“I need to tend to Adam’s feet,” I say, glancing over my shoulder as my friend slides into a chair at the table.
We’re sisters, really; I know she loves me. I know she can handle my impropriety.
“Oh? What’s going on with his feet?” She asks, settling in. “Hi, Adam.”
Adam shifts in his chair to see her, laughter flooding his voice as he returns the greeting.
I explain how it came to be that today our visit would be the life-on-life we intended, or really, the love-on-love; how instead of sitting with pretty cups at a polished table, we would share fellowship at my life-marked one, in my renovating space, while I wash my son’s feet.
“Well, last night I noticed him limping around,” I tell my friend, “and of course, he could not answer my questions about why. So, I pulled his feet up into my lap to take a look.” I told her how at first I focused on his joints and muscles, watching Adam’s face for clues as I moved his feet and toes around. “But I saw no evidence of pain, no wincing, except from his sister.” While I had been watching Adam’s face, Zoe had spied the bottoms of his feet, which look like the bottoms of bare feet that have walked for miles without tender care. His feet wear their need for renovation.
“I don’t like feet, anyway,” Zoe had said, “but those are nasty.”
I smiled over the grace God gives mothers, because although I could admit Adam’s feet needed attention, I only saw, with honest affection, parts of the son I love. All those miles had earned my son some serious calluses, and as I examined things further, I discovered that, on the foot he now favored, the calluses had cracked in two places.
“This is why I could never be a pedicurist,” Zoe had said on her way out of the room, and I understood. I had always felt similarly, detracted from foot-washing not only by the idea of touching someone else’s feet but by the idea of smelling them.
In fact, these kinds of thoughts had helped me understand some of the lessons of John 13. When Jesus washes his disciples’ feet, he demonstrates kingship by serving. He lowers himself to love. All this I had understood, but as I looked down at Adam’s feet, I had suddenly understood something new. I had always read that passage drawing in a wary breath, thinking love could help me set aside disgust. I could pinch my nose. I could look away. I could steel myself against repulsion. But as I tenderly examined my son’s feet, I realized the truth, that love can actually replace disgust.
“I told Adam, ‘Tomorrow, we will start repairing your feet,'” I tell my friend now, gesturing toward where Adam sits, his left foot resting in a bucket. “So, here we are.”
“Well, I don’t mind a bit,” my friend says, smiling as I settle in at the table across from her. And so it is that we begin to reminisce with joy about the miles we’ve walked with God these last few weeks, about opportunities and challenges and love, about her family and mine.
When the timer chimes, I tell Adam to put his left foot on the towel beside him on the floor. I lift the bucket and go to dump the water, refilling with fresh, stirring in the salts. I return to soak his other foot, to sit on the floor beside him, to dry and exfoliate and medicate, to rub his injured foot with lotion, drawing a clean sock over it. All this feels easy and light to me, as though I’m giving Adam a hug of a different kind, because I am really only loving him. My friend laughs and speaks to me of unearthly things, of what Jesus called “greater things,” feeling in no way appalled, because, after all, she is only loving me too. She prays for me before she leaves; she prays for Adam, and she thanks God for all our washed feet, for all the miles they carry us. All the while, she has not turned away from our disrepair; she has watched me work; she has asked engaging questions.
“This will take a while,” I tell her as I pull on Adam’s sock, but of course I have only stated the obvious. It always does take time to transform things.
“I’m so glad you feel able to do that while I was here,” she says as I finish, as we finish. She grins, all grace, as we get up from the table. “I’m so thankful we have that kind of relationship.”
I lay a gentle hand flat against her back as she moves toward the door, and I am smiling too, thinking, “Oh, yes,” because I am also grateful, because while I have washed Adam’s feet, she has washed mine, and another part of me has finally begun to heal.
