Parables 1 (Ways God Speaks)

A friend of mine has pneumonia. Not life-threatening, just a set-back in day-to-day living.

I have learned to listen to these physical annoyances as a way that God speaks. God speaks in a still small voice and I don't always listen. I get busy. Other noises drown Him out. So to get my attention, He touches me in a way I have to notice. That brings us to physical affliction.

I broke my toe a few years back. I can't even remember now why I felt the need to run through the dining room. (Was probably running to the bathroom, as I sometimes do. I hate to waste time on things that seem unimportant like taking a potty break.) My next to the last little toe clipped the edge of a heavy wooden chair that sent me hobbling down the hallway. That night as I lay in bed the throbbing brought me to tears. How could such a little toe bring about this enormous pain? The pain was all-consuming. I could not sleep.

After returning from the doctor the next day, with a bag of little pills to ease the pain, I sat down to ask God what this could mean. Nothing. Okay, okay, so I am impatient. I honestly didn't really want to hear what He thought about a toe. The thoughts that were already in my brain were saying things like, "well, that will teach you to run in the house. You need to be more careful. Maybe you are too hard on the kids. Maybe you are not hard enough on the kids, afterall, if the chairs had been pushed in properly, you probaby wouldn't have kicked the darn thing."

Then I quieted my thoughts. I didn't come to this place to hear my own thoughts, but to hear His. As always, in gentleness, He began to show me that I was neglecting some seemingly insignificant areas of my life. A card of encouragement I bought for a friend lay unsent on my desk. I'd been meaning to call another friend to see how she was but hadn't gotten around to it. The papers to sign my daughter up for soccer hadn't been signed. Procrastination. Ugh! Eventually these things would be done. Okay, maybe the card would never get mailed, the call not made, and the deadline would pass before I got a chance to fill them out. Was it that big of a deal?

1 Corinthians 12:26 "And if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; or if one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it."

My toe was definately making it difficult to carry out simple tasks during the day. I got up from the table to put some things away. I had forgotten about that toe, but was reminded as soon as I put weight on it. It slowed me down. I had no idea I used that particular toe to walk, but I did. I walked more carefully. More slowly. And I saw that those little things do matter. They are huge.

So for 8 weeks I had a physical reminder to help me remember to take care of those little details where I tend to procratinate. Each time I bumped it and pain shot through my foot, I looked around to see if there was anything obvious that I needed to take care of that I'd been putting off. And every night as I lay in bed with my toe throbbing making it impossible to sleep, I'd make a list of the little things that could easily be left undone but were important enough to the Lord that He would be so kind as to let me run in the house catching that little toe.