Shoe Polish

By Matt

So, I've completely fallen out of service with my writing, my reading, and my prayer time. Yesterday especially I could feel it as at church I just felt "there," not participating, not really even worshipping, just pretty much taking up pew space. Not that I have a very particular routine, but last week was very out of routine with extra days off and I felt very spiritually out of sorts since I wasn't doing any of the things that I usually do. At a certain point apathy set in and I just wasn't getting any of it done. But then it didn't feel like there was anything I could really do.

In mid-February I began getting interested in WWII reenacting and have since started accumulating the gear for my own personal impression. The very first thing I acquired were my Corcoran Jump Boots, a goofy looking pair of boots manufactured by the same company that made them for our paratroopers in WWII. It wasn't long before I took them out in the field and got them pretty dirty and then accidentally forgot them in the trunk of my car, mud and all, during a fairly warm week. A few days later I realized my forgetfulness and fished them out and cleaned them off. The combination of mud and heat did a number on them and the leather had dried out and the scuffs on the toecap were fairly evident. So, I did what any good soldier would do, washed them up, dried them off, and began to polish them. Except that I didn't have a very good idea of what I was doing and polishing was an ungainly and tiring enterprise. Achieving that mirror-like gloss of the vaunted G.I. spit shine wasn't as easy as I thought. And boy was it time-consuming. However, I got through a few TheForce.net podcasts and enjoyed those.

Since then I've spent some time lamenting the dried-out leather on my left boot and trying to do something about it. One day last week, Friday I think, I decided to try my hand again at getting my boots back into shape. I had plannded on listening to a Harry Potter audiobook or maybe watching some TV but something moved me to go out on the porch, enjoy the nice day, and polish my boots without distraction. Despite the distractions, I found myself enjoying the process, despite the fact that I still don't know what I'm doing and it can be a tad frustrating at times. I'm not going to go down the road of saying it was a spiritual time for me, but there is a point to all this that is spiritually related.

Anyways, a website I found recommended just getting a good brush shine going with four or five layers of polish before you even try to spit shine. That makes sense. So, in my own bumbling way I got a good layer of polish on (with the recommended hairdryering to melt the wax into the boots) and acheived a shiny enough luster to warrant a friend to take pictures of my boots when I showed up to play Call of Duty in them. THAT was a satisfying feeling. And that was only the first of four layers! And I haven't even started spit shining yet!

This morning the alarm buzzed at 7 and I realized that I hadn't even cracked open my Bible for my usual A.M. Psalms reading in a long, long time (partly because of the Lenten devotional). I sayed a quick prayer that became quite curious. Instead of the usual "help me . . . " blather I do, I simply prayed, "God, equip me for today." In that offhand statement I found something fairly empowering. Instead of enlisting God's aid in my half-hearted attempts to help myself, I was saying something much more powerful. Sometimes you need hand-holding, sometimes you need to know to rely on the gifts God's given you. God has equipped me, so why am I praying for handholding? What I really need is to know what to take with me during the day, what skills/gifts/passions I am going to need to use. There's an analogy here for paratroopers packing their musette bags and stuffing their pockets with the right ammunition, provisions, and extra socks, but I won't go there ;)

Somewhere in that prayer time and reading of Psalm 148 I hit upon the shoe polish analogy. Polishing isn't a one time thing that's done and that's it. It's a process, one that requires layer after layer and then constant maintenance to retain that coveted shine. For several weeks now I have been neglecting my spiritual disciplines, my reading, my praying, and my writing. By not polishing I was opening myself up to spiritual dryness, to kicking into things that were going to leave scuffs and scratches. All of a sudden I felt an urgent need to repolish, to rebuild those lost layers that were protecting my soul.

Sure, it's a corny analogy, but for me it drives home the point that reading, prayer, and writing aren't just something I do to tick off a to-do list for the day. They are vital and essential to my soul, to my being, to my identity as a child of God. They are protection and revitalization and, umm, shiny. I need to keep up my layering and not let the leather get destroyed by my neglect. So, maybe after all polishing my boots is a strangely spiritual practice :)