I was despondent as I pulled out the mop and started working on cleaning up the floors. The white tracks were all over the wood parquet in the front hall and the dining room. The footprints were unmistakable, they were imprints from the tread on the bottom of shoes. The tracks also wove an unwelcome modern abstract pattern of white on the grey slate of the kitchen floor. The unfortunate prints decorated our home all the way to the garage. It took me three attempts to completely clean the mess up. Every track solemnly bearing witness to the uninvited misfortunes for my family that had been deposited, unlike their boots and shoes, at our door.
The snow storm and the bitter Michigan temperatures have completely upended our normal lives this week. One of our cars slid into a snowbank, leaving a broken bumper on the side of I-196. The car’s left headlight had also required emergency surgery in our garage with zip tie sutures. The other car had refused to start, even with attempts at a jump start from the plow truck of a very kind neighbor. It now sat, unmoving, like a 3300-pound reluctant blue toddler in our driveway. Our plans for the day now included unpleasant tasks like impatiently waiting for a call back from the towing company and rescheduling appointments.
As I wiped the dirty marks from our floors, I was reminded of another time when I had left snowy tracks somewhere. Once as a young child, I had walked into my grandmother’s mobile home with snow all over my boots. My mother began scolding me as big hunks of the white icy stuff made melting marshmallow blobs on Oma’s oval rag rug. But my Oma hushed my mother’s reprimand. She said, “Na, na! Du must das nicht eir sagen. Es ist nur wasser, nich blut.” (No, no, you must not say that to her. It is only water, not blood.) –My German Oma, sent to Siberia with her family during World War I, who fled with her own young family as a refugee from Ukraine during World War II, rarely spoke this forcefully. But we all knew that her tired brown eyes had seen some truly terrible things in her life. She had survived a world where there were boots covered in blood, quite possibly even human blood. Oma understood through her own sufferings that it was the people in your lives that really mattered. Not the state and condition of your floors.
Philippians 2:3-5 says, “Don’t do anything only to get ahead. Don’t do it because you are proud. Instead, be humble. Value others more than yourselves. 4 None of you should look out just for your own good. Each of you should also look out for the good of others.” (NIRV)
May the love that is in Christ fill us all with love for each other.
Article in Rockford Squire Newspaper February 1st, 2024
