Ten Toes Down

One of my Father’s favorite pieces of advice to my brothers and I was to always “keep your feet on the ground.” Across the years, I have heard different variations of the same adage, but two versions of it have stuck to me like velcro. I once heard a character in a movie tell her Boss that “no one can knock you off the ground.” Then, one of my favorite college professors would encourage us to “be where your feet are.”  As I have matured, the more I understand how valuable, how necessary and unfortunately how often that counsel goes unheeded.

The idea behind “keeping your feet on the ground” is that there is great and lasting value in maintaining a vital connection to reality. This is what we mean when we say that someone is grounded. It means that they have not allowed their pain or their privilege to distort their basic humanity. Howard Thurman used to say that once you accept that you are from “somewhere” you can be comfortable “anywhere.” Grounded people exude the quiet, attractive strength of being deeply rooted in people and places. You feel comfortable in their presence because they are comfortable with who they are, where they are, and what they have.

Here’s today question: How connected are you to your reality?

Ever since I read a line from an 18th century poem written by Jean La Fontaine, that question has been nagging me. Fontaine wondered:

How many folks, in country and in town

Neglect their principal affair,

And let, for want of due repair,

A real house fall down,

To build a castle in the Air?

All of us are guilty of building castles in the air. We are often disconnected from our reality. Far too many of us are busy living other people’s lives, raising other people’s children, concerned about other people’s bills, managing other people’s careers, and worried about other’s people’s salvation.  We yearn to be anyone else but who we are, anywhere but where we are, doing anything else than what we are doing.  Like Lady MacBeth, we pine to be transported beyond the “ignorant present.”  But while we build castles in the air, our real lives, our real marriages, and our real careers are falling apart.

God is always trying to focus our attention on where we are, what we have, and what we are doing. Every miracle that God ever performed was always done with objects that were already present or resources that were near at hand. When Moses was summoned to alter the course of history, he was in an unlikely place: on the backside of the desert. Moreover, he was performing an unlikely task: he was tending his Father in law’s sheep. Furthermore, he was in an unlikely stage: Moses was 80.

But in that unlikely place, while performing that unlikely task and in that unlikely stage, God asks Moses a strange question. The question that God asked Moses in Exodus 4:2 is the one he is always asking us: what is that you have in your hand?” And before God asked Moses that strange question, he made an even stranger statement. In Exodus 3:5, God tells Moses that the “place that he is standing on is Holy Ground.”

But perhaps Gods ways are strange to us is because we are estranged from ourselves, our resources, and our environment. However uncomfortable, inconvenient or unappealing your current reality is, let me remind you of a glorious and stupendous truth: the place where you currently stand is Holy Ground!

Put Ten Toes Down.

God wants to tell you something.