Is Your Shoe Buried In The Sand?

To celebrate our 4th of July we were out at a lakefront close to where we live. There were booths set up in fair style and the booth for our church that we were helping at was right next to the beach area of the lakefront.

My girls were playing in the sand and Dan and I kept an eye on them. All seemed well. They were happy playing and we could do what we had to do.

Until I looked over and saw the girls were frantically searching for something. My youngest daughter had buried someone else’s shoe in the sand and forgot where she buried it. Fortunately the owner of the shoe wasn’t a random stranger but the shoe was missing no where to be seen.

“What?” I started to panic as I glance on to the rolls of beach before me. “What do you mean you forgot where it is? You can’t just loose peoples shoes in the beach!”

I stopped what I was doing and began searching. A perfect stranger who was setting on the ledge started to search with me. I could only guess that she was a mother and understood what was going through my mind at the moment. Her support of my cause surprised me. She didn’t know who we were but was willing to dig around wherever my kids had been playing to look for the missing shoe. The shoe had really been buried it took us both several minutes to find. Alas we pulled the green flip flop out of several inches of sand.

The woman’s generosity to help surprised me. She didn’t know us, but she cared enough to help. What she did was just the nice thing to do, but sadly it seems to be something that is dripping out of our culture like a leaking water balloon.

Matthew 7:12 (MSG)
12"Here is a simple, rule-of-thumb guide for behavior: Ask yourself what you want people to do for you, then grab the initiative and do it for them. Add up God's Law and Prophets and this is what you get.

Jesus put a lot of stock into doing for others what you would want others to do to you. He said it was the ‘summation of all the commandments’ (that’s in my own words). He said first to love people and then to do to them what you would want them to do to you. He also says several times in the word that you will reap what you sow.

So why is politeness, common courtesy and genuine love for people so lacking in our world? I don’t have all the answers. I do think that we get so caught up in our own drama that we forget to see the world around us. What that woman did for us by helping us find the missing shoe was so simple, but yet she was fulfilling the very words of Jesus. She was being nice to the world around her. It could have been easy for her to just watch us look for the shoe. I probably would have found it anyway eventually, but she cared enough to lend a hand.

Sometimes it’s the simple things in life that can mean all the difference to the world around you. Are you treating people the way you want to be treated or are you walking by them with vague indifference?

God does have awesome plans for you, but he has awesome plans for the world around you too. What can you do to make a difference?

*BTW that is grammatically accurate because only one shoe was buried in the sand. We knew where the other one was. :-)