Fresh New Shoes

My son received a fresh new pair of Jordan shoes. This was enough to turn my attention towards his outfit this morning as he has sworn off Jordan shoes for years.  He has also stayed away from mostly white shoes, especially after I preached that white shoes only have value as long as they are stay white.  I am teaching him to weight his decisions against the responsibility and consequences of his choices, and in the case of white shoes that means cleaning them with each wear. Obviously, something about this pair of shoes caught his attention when he and his mother made the purchase, as the brand and color stand in complete opposition to all of his previous choices.

He treated these shoes as if they were a rare discovery, like a fragile flower found in some remote deserted island, presumed to cure all the world’s diseases.  I wish you could see how carefully he handled these shoes as they were removed from the box.  If I didn’t know any better, I would testify that I heard harps and a choir of young angels singing as he admired the fresh pair of shoes before sliding them on top his custom NBA player screen printed, three quartered socks.  His normal routine of getting dressed for school took an extra ordinary amount of patience while he handled his new  ‘wheels’ with care.

It happened to storm on this morning, the day that he chose to introduce his world, a large middle school campus where he claims a fair amount of popularity, to his fresh new shoes.  A reasonable mind would have restock the coveted purchase and waited for better weather, but my son is committed to his ideals, if nothing else. We discussed his plan of keeping these fresh new shoes clean on a day when the environment was a clear threat against the whitewalls of his fresh new shoes. He proudly exclaimed, “I will just have to be very careful where I step and how I climb the stairs.”  The most comical part of the morning was when we arrived to his school watching him step out of the vehicle and walk across the courtyard in his fresh new shoes.  I have never seen a kid walk so delicately.

I literally laughed out loud while driving away from his campus. However, suddenly, I found myself in a deep contemplative decline over the parallel of those fresh new shoes and brand new relationships. I know my son fairly well.  He will make one or two attempts to recover the whiteness of those shoes.  Once they experience a few run ins with their natural environments and the nature win as it does what it is supposed to – a pre-teen will do what he is supposed to and neglect to clean his shoes.  After a few attempts to resuscitate the feeling he held in the beginning, these shoes will lose the grip that it once held on his attention span.

I wondered how many of us treat new relationships, friendships, career opportunities, ministry appointments or other endeavors that involve human feelings, interactions or commitments in the same manner as these fresh new shoes.  It feels good to encounter someone that captures your attention, especially when it is a relationship that has taken a while to develop.  There is a high degree of caution used in new relationships, possibly to avoid offending, scarring, or marking the newness of the relationship.  Maybe the motivation is to earn a fair chance to show ones best side before a firm opinion is made.  It could be that caution is exercised to avoid  over-doing or saying something that might cause the other person to shut down.  In either case, the opportunity is initially handled with extreme care, as in the case of fresh new shoes.

My son will surely continue to enjoy his newest acquisition.  I look forward to hearing about how his friends and classmates responded to the fresh new shoes.  Equally, I await the opportunity to see if he will work to maintain their whiteness.  And when the moment is right, I will use his actions towards the shoes as a chance to share a lesson on friendships and other types of relationships.  His friends are certainly very important to him.  The evidence of their importance was present in each in everyone of those delicate steps across the wet and slightly muddy concrete pavers on the courtyard in front of his large middle school.

His shoes will get tested time and again.  As time and nature will test all of our relationships. Once life has its way we find out how much we really appreciate the relationships or the opportunities. Through the occupancy of natural tests, the true committed person is separated from those that are involved as long as it just feels good to them.