As A and I went for our walk yesterday we saw these boots left abandoned, sitting on the grass:
I looked at them as we walked past, laughing that God was showing me something, just not knowing what. Having walked past the spot, I felt a gentle nudge to go back and take a photo…
I asked the Father what He was trying to tell me about them. I felt He said that it was time for us to change our shoes, to change our walk. I feel He is saying that to the Bride of Christ – He is saying to us all that we have had our work boots on for so long, and now it’s time to take them off and stop working so hard for Him.
We have been doing and doing and doing… without knowing who we are first…
These abandoned boots say it’s time to change our walk, and hence, take our work boot off and get ready for a change of shoes. The boots had done well in the past, but now they needed exchanging for an upgrade, for a fresh way to walk.
What I found particularly interesting was the direction they were facing:
Boots facing out to sea © Beth Kennedy 2020
If someone was standing in these boots, they would look out to sea – one of my favourite places to look. Noting the direction I felt God whisper again:
It’s important what direction we face in these times. It really matters what we are fixing our gaze upon in this season of transition.
It was as if the wearer had seen the beauty of the view, and had discarded the boots for a walk of simplicity and purity, a bare-footed walk with a focus on God’s goodness, God’s beauty. It resonates of Moses stopping for the burning bush, removing his shoes in the desert, for he was standing on Holy Ground:
‘Do not come any closer,’ God said. ‘Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground’
It is at this point God gives Moses his commissioning, but first Moses had to stop, take off his work boots, and listen!
So we take off our work boots (our works) and in simplicity (bare-footed) we go to Him, sit, wait, linger and hear His heartbeat for ourselves, and as we hear the heartbeat for ourselves, we will also hear His heartbeat for those around us. As we do both: hear Him for us; hear Him for them, He will equip us afresh with new shoes, and these shoes will look quite different to the old.
I don’t know what my new shoes will look like.
I don’t know what your new shoes will look like.
But for now we need not know, we need simply to stop and take off our shoes.
Come to me and be still.
Rest a while and know that I am good.
Breathe and allow me to take you through the storm and on the other side of all this, then, having rested, you will be ready to run the race set before you.
Yes, we are in ‘unprecedented’ times. Yes, we are in a ‘reset’ (even the nonChristian world is using this phrase). Yes, it is challenging, and confusing, and different… but God!
If we can all collectively stop, take off our work boots, ‘be still and know (experientially) that [He is] God’ (Ps 46:10), breathe, rest and listen… and then go with Him rather than for Him, then I believe that the world will see that…
God is Good!
Tell me:
How has God been talking to you in these last few days?
Have you seen similar ‘burning bushes’ or ‘signs’?