The Boots I Kept

The boots are by the mudroom door, on the left, under the coat pegs, where they have been for twenty-two months.

They are farrier boots. Steel toe, high top, the leather across the instep gone shiny and rippled from thirty years of an apron laid over it and a hoof laid on top of that. The right one has a rasp mark down the outside from a horse that did not care for the whole arrangement in the fall of some year he could tell you exactly. They are still laced the way he laces them, doubled back through the top two eyes, because that is how he took them off the last night he took them off, sitting on that bench, tired, thinking about a mare on Thursday.

He walks fine. That surprises people. There was a truck across the center line on a highway in February and there was a good deal after that and he walks, and if you saw him in the feed store you would not necessarily know.

What he cannot do is hold a hoof between his knees for eight hours. He cannot take a horse's weight through a leg that is not there when the horse decides to lean, and he cannot come off the ground sideways in a quarter second when a two year old goes up, which is the thing that keeps a farrier alive. He knows more about feet than nearly anybody in that part of the state and he cannot shoe a horse and he is not going to be able to shoe a horse.

His wife has never moved the boots. He has never moved the boots. Nobody has said anything about the boots. Every so often somebody comes into the mudroom, a niece, a man delivering feed, and sees them there under the pegs and does the arithmetic and goes very quiet, and he says something to move things along, because he has gotten good at that too.

And here is what he cannot stand, and he would not say this out loud to anybody. He cannot stand the sentence people reach for. God has something better for you. Everything happens for a reason. He must have big plans, taking a man's whole trade like that. He nods at every one of them. And then he goes out to the mudroom at nine at night and stands there looking at a pair of boots that nobody is ever going to wear again, and thinks: whatever this is, that is not it.

You have your own boots by your own door. It may be a leg. It may be a hand, a back, a voice, a set of lungs, a mind that will not do what it used to do, or a trade that walked off with your body. You know what you cannot do now, precisely, in the detail only you have. And you have heard the sentences too, and nodded at them too. You are looking at something that is not coming back, and God has never asked you to call it anything other than what it is. 2 Samuel 9:13 is a written verse that ends on a permanent thing and does not flinch at the last clause, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been standing in that mudroom with you at nine at night while you looked at a pair of boots and told the truth in your own head.

The last clause of the sentence

Here is the verse. Read the end of it. The end is the whole point.

So Mephibosheth dwelt in Jerusalem: for he did eat continually at the king's table; and was lame on both his feet.2 Samuel 9:13

Think about how that chapter could have ended and did not. A king goes looking for anyone left of the house of the man he loved. He finds a man nobody had thought about in years, living in a place at the edge of nowhere. He gives him land back. He gives him a household, a servant, a name spoken in the palace, and a seat at the king's own table, continually, which in that world meant among the sons.

And then the man who wrote it down had the whole rest of the line to work with, and he wrote: and was lame on both his feet.

He could have stopped at the table. Every instinct we have would stop at the table. He does not. He puts the permanent thing in the last clause, after the restoration, in the same sentence, and lets it stand there forever.

You have a verse that ends on the lameness and does not blink at the last clause. That is written into 2 Samuel 9:13 exactly that way, in that order, on purpose, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept that clause in the book through three thousand years of people who would have preferred it edited out.

Both feet. Not one. The text is specific about it the way you are specific about what you cannot do now. Whoever wrote that had listened to somebody.

Restored is not repaired

So look at what he actually got, because it is a real list and it is not a small one.

He got a name that was said out loud in a king's house. He got land that had belonged to his grandfather, and a household to work it. He got a seat, not near the table, at it, continually, which is a word about every single day and not about an occasion. He got a place among the king's sons, and a boy of his own is mentioned in the next breath, which means there was a life after that verse and not just a footnote.

He did not get feet.

Restored is not the same word as repaired, and this is the page in this whole site where that has to be said the most plainly, so I am going to say it plainly and then I am not going to walk it back at the end. Nowhere in that chapter does God fix Mephibosheth's body. Nowhere in the rest of his story either. The restoration in 2 Samuel 9 is a person taken up into a household. The feet stay exactly as they are.

You are being restored as a person, and it is not on hold waiting for a repair. His word puts the table and the lameness in the same sentence without needing one of them to cancel the other, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that work in a person, which is why it can start on a Tuesday in a mudroom with nothing at all changed about a body.

And let me be careful with you here, because carelessness in this spot does real damage. I am not telling you what God will or will not do with your body. That is His, and it was never mine to announce, and anybody who announces it is speaking past what is written. What I am telling you is what the verse says, and the verse says a man ate at the king's table every day of his life and was lame on both his feet, and the writer of Scripture saw no contradiction there at all.

It is already settled, the seat and the name, and neither one was issued to you as payment for what was taken. He promised in His word that those who are His are brought into the household and set at the table as sons and daughters, with nothing in that promise priced against a working body, and it is the same Spirit who bears witness with your own spirit about it on the days you do not feel like anybody's son.