Check this out…

I saw this lonely shoe the other day as I was on my way to the gym. Something compelled me to circle back around the block and take its picture.

There it was… just sitting there. All by itself. No mate in sight. Apparently waiting patiently at the corner for the light to change so it could cross the street.

“There’s a story here,” I said to myself as I crossed the street and got back into my car. “I wonder what it is.”

So I began to speculate… 

• “Maybe a guy was being chased by a bunch of bullies and his shoe fell off as he was running and he couldn’t go back and retrieve it.”

• “Or maybe it was a guy (because it looks very distinctly like a guy’s shoe, don’t you think? I mean, can you see a woman wearing a shoe like this?) riding his bicycle to the gym with his gear in a bag on the back of the bike and he hit a bump and this shoe fell out.”

• “Or maybe somebody’s dog went into their closet, grabbed the shoe and ran down the street with it, dropping it here when said dog realized no one was chasing it.”

By some mysterious mechanism, this abandoned black tennis shoe became a key that opened some kind of cosmic door to a world of infinite possibilities for me. It was just a quirky enough sight to trigger my rambunctious brain to launch off through that door to see what lay behind it.

Odd sights do that to us. A thing out of its customary place makes us stop… take notice… wonder… conjecture.

What I finally came to realize though – after spending WAAAYY too much time puzzling over this shoe – is that EVERYTHING and EVERYONE we encounter has a story, too. Even the most prosaic, quotidian parts of our world hide entire universes of multilevel, complex, rich, and beautiful stories. 

That sullen-faced young woman who just tallied up your groceries at the store?  Behind that bored expression lurks a lush tapestry of experiences, relationships, and emotions. 

That faded blue/green front door at 4615 Elm Street* that you pass every day on your morning walk? It opens into a deep treasure chest of stories you will never get to the bottom of in this lifetime. 

I think at some level we know that we each live our lives enveloped by webs of wonder. And so, as a way of getting through the daily requirements of our lives, we develop a hefty set of blinders… for our eyes and for our hearts. We know somehow that if we stop to marvel at everything around us that is indeed marvelous, we will never move off square one. We will end up looking like a bunch of stoners sitting around on our paisley futons saying, “Wow, man! Far out! Look at that bird, man. Is he cool or what?”

But in pursuit of practical daily functioning, we often forget and leave those blinders on permanently. When we do that, we quickly lose the ability to be wonderstruck by the unique and unrepeatable world we live in. 

I don’t know what made the psalmist pause and “bliss out” on his/her surroundings (probably not an abandoned tennis shoe, I’d wager), but Psalm 8 certainly captures the state of mind: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are humans that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” (Psalm 8:3-4, NRSVU). 

The same writer continues in that state of amazement at the status of human beings amid this Creation Extravaganza, saying: “Yet you have made them a little lower than God and crowned them with glory and honor.” (Psalm 8:5, NRSVU). 

We live in a world today filled with people yearning to be reminded of their significance. The unspoken question behind many of their (our) actions seems to be, “Am I important? Does my life really matter?” I think about this every time I see a car festooned with stickers boasting about the team they support, the school they attended, the mountain they climbed, or the famous vacation spot they visited. It is just another way of saying, “See? I really AM somebody!”

That is why we are reminded over and over in the words of scripture: the best way to BE noticed is to notice. The best way to BE important is to CONFER importance. The best way to RECEIVE is to GIVE.

So, make eye contact with that barista. Say hello and ask the panhandler what his name is. Wave at your grumpy neighbor. Listen to the lonely little lady at church. 

Do what you can to let every one of them know they are SEEN, that they MATTER, and that they are LOVED.

Abundant blessings;

• A totally made up address, by the way.