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Originally from: Tami Skarin <tskarin@denison.ia.frontiercomm.net>
Originally dated: Thu, 28 Aug 1997 00:48:34 -0500
The Lord has been really dealing with me regarding the balance between
"sitting at His feet" and "washing His feet". Mary did both of these
things! I have always been the Mary sort who loved to sit at His feet,
soak in His Word and pray. It is such a wonderful, "ivory tower" sort of
experience. The past several years, He has taken me to work in a variety
of nursing homes, hospitals, and home health situations as a speech and
swallowing therapist in which I am being called to wash His feet. He is
showing me that true prayer takes me out of the ivory tower into the
streets, so to speak. It is so much easier to pray for the lost from the
comfort of that footstool, than to get one's hands dirty, washing the
stained, calloused, smelly feet of a beloved child of God who has strayed
from His path. In other words, He has shown me that the true test of my
prayers is being willing to walk out the love in actual performance of acts
of love.
One day it hit me so strongly. A friend and I had each driven about an
hour to meet in a nursing home parking lot for a few hours of prayer before
I went to work. The Lord had strongly led us into prayer for the elderly,
asking Him to move mightily in the nursing homes of this country to bring
revival, to bring hope and to use the elderly saints in a place of
fruitfulness in His Church.
As time came to an end for prayer, I closed by
saying, Lord, I wish I could stay here and pray, I don't want to go in
there with all those old people... oops!! Just how sincere, He asked were
those high and lofty prayers? Ouch!! Again we come back to the fact that
it is not our words alone, but our lives that become prayer and
intercession before His throne. That which we do unto the least of these,
we have done unto Him. Is our service to others worship to Him? Is it
done with joy?
It is certainly one thing to pray with open Bible, eyes
heavenward, another to hold the calloused, gross, dirty foot of a dying,
alcoholic with lung cancer and trim their crusty, deformed toe nails or to
wash the mucous out of mouth filled with sores...
Sorry, I don't want to
be gross, but the Lord has been showing me how neat and tidy I want things
to be, but Mary washed His feet and anointed Him for burial... Sometimes
the realities aren't all as romantic as we envision them to be from our
ivory tower!!
Only by His grace,
Tami
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