Toeing the Line
For the body is not
one member, but many.
If the foot shall say,
Because I am not the hand,
I am not of the body;
is it therefore not of
the body?
And if the ear shall
say,
Because I am not the
eye,
I am not of the body;
is it therefore not of
the body?
If the whole body were
an eye,
Where were the
hearing?
If the whole were
hearing,
where were the
smelling?
But now hath God set
the members
every one of them in
the body,
as it hath pleased
him. . . .
Nay, much more those
members of the body,
which seem to be more
feeble,
are necessary. . . .
—
1 Corinthians 12:14-18,22
As usual, I was trying to do 42,000 things and had allotted
enough time to do 41,999. It was mid-afternoon. I had slogged about 30 big,
limestone landscaping rocks into the back of my trusty old Suburban. I heard a
few of them slip off the stacks I'd tried to make as I rumbled along on the
Interstate, but promptly forgot.
This had . . . implications.
I was taking the rocks down to the inner-city after-school
program where I've been volunteering. The kids and I were going to fix a
longtime erosion problem that was blocking a fire exit. We were going to build
a few simple terraces and a short retaining wall.
Then we were going to plant a whole bunch of hostas that I
got for a song off www.CraigsList.com
as a microenterprise venture. In a year or two, they'll be potting up and
selling the offshoots. Hosta La Vista!
Meanwhile, I had about an hour to get all the way down there,
offload the rocks, and get all the way back out to the 'burbs to pick up The
Marvelous Miss Maddy after school.
So, yes, I was in a hurry.
I was also wondering what, if anything, we had in the house
that was edible for that evening's dinner, and how, if possible, I was going to
return the 92 phone calls that I owed people before the end of the day.
En route, Daughter #3, the Excellent Miss Eden, called on my
cell phone, and we were chatting about new vistas of excitement that were
before her as she graduates from college: her job hunt, a possible first
apartment, the twenty bucks she has to her name to begin adult life. . . .
So, yes, I got distracted.
I arrived at the after-school, backed up so that the
Suburban would be as close as humanly possible to the place the rocks were
going to go, failed to notice that it was a little downhill, hopped out, and,
with my left hand holding the cell phone up to my eager ear to catch every
word, my right hand opened up the tailgate. . .
. . . AND A BIG, HONKIN' ROCK FELL OUT AND TOTALLY SQUASHED
MY LEFT FOOT!!!!!
I mean, it had to weigh 4,000 pounds. Maybe 5,000! I swear,
it pushed my foot into the pavement and back up again. Owwwww! Did it hurt! Who
knew how much pain one little toe could produce? We usually take our tootsies
so much for granted. Not any more. Yowsa!
But here I was at a youth-serving organization, and a
Christian one at that. So I couldn't even cuss!
I did a really funky dance, though. I'm sure the kids are
grateful that their style is sophisticated hip-hop these days, and not weird one-foot-hopping
dances like mine.
My podiatrist thinks
he's Andy Warhol . . . the little break
at top left is not
important, but the big break diagonally
down the middle of the
middle bone is the one that got the screw.
I seemed to be able to walk on it, though. So after a
moment, the kids arrived and helped me safely place all the rest of the rocks without
incident.
Then I sped home, got Miss Maddy, went about my mom'ing, and
assumed that my foot was just bruised and hurt. It was purple. It was eggplant.
It was mauve. It was plum. It was raspberry. It was swelling up, but I'm a
tough German frau. Hadn't I birthed four babies by just biting on a rag?
Surely, I could tough this one out, too.
Well, Daughter #2, Miss Neely the Wise, insisted that I get
an x-ray. So I went to one of those quickie places. They all had on scrubs that
exactly matched the colors of my toe. It was unreal!
They got a load of the stuffed sausage that my toe now
resembled, and gave me a lot of most lovely sympathy. They said, however, that
it wasn't broken, or maybe it was - they'd have to wait 'til after the weekend
to be sure.
They gave me what they called a "Reese's Boot" the size of a
lumberjack's foot, and they didn't even give me any Reese's Peanut Butter Cups
to go with it. So I was miffed.
Eventually, they called back, and yeah, it was broken. But I
had a lot of things going on, so I let two more weeks go by. Eventually, I
hobbled to a podiatrist. By now, the toe had swollen from sausage size to
watermelon size. Without surgery, the nice podiatrist explained, the toe would
probably hurt for a long, long time, and would never heal right.
So finally, the other day, I had outpatient surgery, using a
local anesthetic, to place a screw in the middle bone of the left great toe so
that it would fuse together well. It was a real trip to walk on that foot with
half of it totally numb. It felt like it wasn't even there, like I was a
peg-legged pirate.
They gave me most lovely narcotics, a souped-up Reese's Boot
which I even have to wear to bed, and a note which said I absolutely,
positively could not POSSIBLY vacuum for at least six months.
That, I liked. But what I DIDN'T like is realizing how much
money that one moment of distraction is costing society, even though insurance
will cover it. That accident will suck up 'way too much money that might have
gone to more productive pursuits instead of fixing the results of a careless
accident.
The whole reason I'm helping this after-school is that I am
part of the Body of Christ, and these kids really need financial and material
help to be the best they can be. They live in poverty, often forgotten and
neglected, kind of like a toe. So in a way, my clumsiness is taking resources
AWAY from them when the whole idea is to try to bring resources TO them.
Footing that bill really makes me want to . . . TOE THE LINE
from now on, in terms of avoiding distractions . . . TOE-tally focused on doing
one thing at a time . . . wherever the needs of the Body of Christ are AFOOT. †
