When the Shoe’s on My Foot

One act of forgetfulness can have serious consequences.  I stopped by The Home Depot to pick up some material for the job I was working on.  One of the things I had to get was a 16’ piece of decking.  It was the composite type, which is very flimsy compared to real wood.  I only needed short lengths, so I cut 6’ off the end, putting that piece in the back of my truck, and strapped the remaining 10’ piece to the cap rack.  I also bought 5 sections of railing, which fit into the back of the truck as well.  So far, so good.  Much to my irritation, The Home Depot did not have the type of screws I needed for the job, so I had to make a trip to Lowes.  The two stores are only about a mile apart. 

When I came out of Lowes and approached my truck, the act of forgetfulness became apparent.  I had left The Home Depot with the door of the cap open.  One of the sections of railing was hanging out about a foot.  I did a quick count, and was relieved that all five sections were still in the truck.  However, the 6’ piece of decking had fallen out.  At close to $2.00 a foot, my first thought was to backtrack and hopefully find the missing piece.  It would be a small miracle if it had survived undamaged.

I was not even back on the main highway when I spotted the escapee.  It had landed in the crossover in my next to the last turn into Lowes.  I stopped my truck at the intersection and dashed out to retrieve the decking.  Traffic was light, and the retrieval was successful and uneventful.  However, when I returned to my truck, someone had pulled up behind me.  I didn't want to keep the person waiting, and went into high gear to put the piece back inside.  It would just barely fit, and I fidgeted with it a little to get it in, conscious all along of the possibly impatient driver no doubt staring and wondering what in the world I was doing and how I got myself into this situation.

At last I managed to get the piece in far enough to close the cap.  I turned to run to get back in the truck, and ran squarely into the 10’ piece of decking hanging off the end.  The first thing I noticed was the bend to the earpiece of my glasses which were still clinging to my head.  Without missing a step, I grabbed them before they fell off and continued to the driver’s seat.  It is important to look as if nothing has happened in a situation like this.  I looked for traffic, and pulled away.

The clunk to my head wasn’t all that hard, but my glasses caused a cut near my eyebrow.  I pulled out a handkerchief and applied direct pressure, all the while looking for a place to pull over which was far enough away from the scene of the crime so as not to look like, as I said, anything serious had happened. 

Once off the road, I could see that the cut was fairly insignificant, and it stopped bleeding within a couple of minutes.  But the area just under my eyebrow began to swell, enough that I could feel it began to encroach on my eyelash.  I pulled an ice pack from my lunch box and put it over the area. 

It wasn’t the actual injury that bothered me, as much as the thought of the potential for a more severe injury.  What if my eye swelled to the point that I couldn’t see out of it for a few days?  That was really going to screw up my work week.  Or even worse, let’s just say the lens of my glasses had shattered and punctured my eye, rendering me blind.  In a heartbeat, my life would have changed dramatically.  I pondered on these thoughts briefly, and then something hit me (perhaps it was God who had already hit me with the board hanging off my cap).  I realized that I had a small cut near my eyebrow, the same eyebrow that my son Asher had cut only months before. (see related story)

I thought of how it shook me to consider the idea of living the rest of my life with one eye.  I compared that feeling to what was going on in my head when Asher cut his head.  Certainly I was concerned, but it appeared to be a manageable situation.  Asher’s life with only one eye had not flashed before my eyes.  Living with a scar over his eye did in fact occur to me, but I did not really consider what he would think of his  scar.  In all actuality, my biggest concern was just getting through the crisis.  We were very intent on comforting him in that moment, but I was not terribly concerned about what was going on in Asher’s head about the future.

When it came to my own eye, I am ashamed to say, I attached a different level of concern to it.  I was quick to consider all that could have possibly happened.  My first response was to give a great amount of consideration to the possible implications.  When the shoe was on my foot, as much as I would like to think otherwise, it was different.

The knock on my head reminded me that it is extremely difficult to put yourself in someone else’s shoes.  As much as we would like to empathize, unless we have actually been there, we really don’t know exactly what is going on in someone’s head.  And we are very unlikely to put the amount of importance on their situation that we, in fact, would if we were walking in their shoes.

We really don’t know how their experiences have affected them.  We don’t know how their lives have been molded by their experience.  But perhaps once I become aware of how my own experience has molded my thinking, then perhaps I can understand a little better how much that experience affects the way we live. 

With an extraordinary amount of effort and empathy, perhaps we can put ourselves in the shoes of others.  But that is unlikely for most of us.  We were not gifted with that kind of empathy.  So if I am fortunate, I’ll get a big knock in the head, and that knock will remind me that I really don’t know what someone else is going through, because I haven’t been there.  If I am fortunate, one day I’ll get a taste of someone else’s situation, and I’ll learn something about compassion I didn’t know before.

All this to say that God has His ways (which are not my ways) of working the character of Christ into my hard head.

First appeared in the July 2008 edition of the Manna. http://readthemanna.org