Take My Feet

I like dusty feet.

I was going to say that I like dirty feet, but that's a little less poetic sounding. It's just as true, I guess. I love looking down at my feet and laughing at my surprise at their color. I love it when my feet are covered in dirt. I love summer, when you can spend your entire day barefoot out in the garden of this Creation and I love the feel of cool bricks in the fall. I mean, I appreciate shoes and I love the way my converses look with my dress pants, but nothing beats standing on grass and feeling the blades stick up between your toes.

I love tired feet, too. I hate the ache, but I love it when I have tired feet. It means that I've been doing something. Right now, I have these awkward blisters from standing all day at a football game (Dinkles, you may be the world's greatest marching shoes, but you have not saved my feet) and all of me aches, but it's an ache that says, "Hey, you accomplished something today. Wear me as a badge of pride and I'll be gone in the morning."

And it might just be this soul that I inherited, but I feel like tired, dirty feet at the end of the day are better than anything else. And sometimes I wonder if my heart got to aching like my feet, would I be more willing to work for  better world around me? Because I can watch the dirt of this world cover my heart and soul with a light dusting as I live and as I love, but I never feel that ache. I never go through the trouble of loving someone the entire day long, until I go to bed with that ache of an overused muscle to accompany my thoughts to sleep. I know I beg for God to create in me a clean heart, to wash the dust off me each day, but maybe I should be asking for a tired heart, a heart that's being used. A living heart. Maybe that's why they sing about hearts of stone.

I don't want to feel guilty, you know? I don't want someone to guilt me into being better, because it's not going to happen. I think I'm pretty awesome right now. I got my senior sticker, I have a job I love, I'm taking classes that are interesting, the football gods have been appeased and have decided to smile down on Chapel Hill and send those pirates and tigers (and bears oh my) back home a little sadder than when they came, the weather has been gorgeous and I've gotten enough sleep. On top of that, my birthday was beautiful (I'm convinced that God allowed Facebook to be invented so that on our birthdays we could all have a mini-reminder of the people who love us), my grandparents and parents came up for the weekend and I had a great show on Friday with awesome friends who came to listen to my Pegasus-baseball joke and a great game on Saturday and an awesome observing session tonight, and this is the second beautiful weekend in a row like this. I got tickets to a talk I wanted to go see, my Europe application is coming together. Life is good. And I feel like I'm getting what I deserve. I'm like Aladdin floating down on the magic carpet. Things are finally starting to turn out right.

So I don't want someone telling me that I can be better. I know that I can, but I don't feel like I need to be. I can only think of one thing that's missing and I am honestly content to just wait and see how life surprises me on the romance front (oh, dear blog readers, I have a story, but I shall have to sneak it in later because if I talk about it, it won't happen). But through all these beautiful things, I have this nagging feeling that my feet aren't tired enough.

I want to make life beautiful for someone else, preferably many someone elses. Now I just need this desire to be strong enough to make me do something about it.