My Father's Shoes

Such a large crowd of witnesses is all around us!

When you live and work in another culture, you’re bound to unconsciously bump up against people’s expectations, even with the best of intentions. You might as well not spend too much time worrying what others think. My father is the sort of person who carries off magnificently unselfconscious eccentricities in his own culture. Thirty-six years in Japan did little to alter this tendency.

Once, in my 6th grade, a friend told me she’d seen my father running in the rain across the CAJ parking lot in his sock feet, clutching his shoes in one hand, big black umbrella in the other. I asked my dad that night if he’d been at my school, hoping my friend had somehow been mistaken. “Well, yes,” he confirmed. Driving from the suburbs to downtown Tokyo is inefficient, so he parked at school and walked to Higashi Kurume station to take the train. On his way back he got caught in a downpour. Of course no sensible person goes out without an umbrella, but the puddles were deep so he carried his shoes because, he told me, “I didn’t want them to get wet.”

How can you argue with logic like that?

Granted, if you consider that his next pair of shoes was three years and ten thousand miles away, he behaved quite sensibly – but how many people do you know who do the sensible thing even if it makes them appear undignified?

When Dad first went to the mission field in 1957, at 5’11” he stood well above other men. When you ride the subway, thousands of people stand packed nose to nose, so it’s easy to tell whose head sticks out. (Tokyo dwellers colloquially refer to a subway like this one as “empty.”) By the time my parents left Japan in 1993, the Japanese people grew so much taller that the government enlarged the standard size of first graders’ desks three times. So my father got squeezed face to face like all the rest.

But in the ‘50s, in the coastal collection of fishing and farming villages known as Choshi, Dad stood tall. With a population of 90,000, and one American man, it’s a safe bet everyone watched Dad wherever he went.

They say in Japan only children, Christians and drunks sing in public. Put children and Christians together and you get Sunday School – up to 140 giggling Japanese kids squeezed into my family’s tiny home each week. (Among my own childhood memories is searching for my shoes among many dozens tumbled in a doormat-sized space.) Once, as the last adult helpers began their leisurely leave-taking, my mother opened her entryway door to find a church teen standing on the tile, his feet in Dad’s shoes, wearing Dad’s coat. The sleeves draped well below his fingertips.

“I just wanted to see what it felt like to be in Sensei’s shoes,” he explained simply.

After graduation, this young man headed off to Canada, ambitious to study clothing design. Although “fashion industry mentor” would not be one of my father’s top 100 descriptors, I’d like to think his friend caught Dad’s gift for following one’s dream no matter who is looking.

In 1962, my folks left Choshi to furlough back in U.S. They couldn’t take everything, and invited neighbors to help themselves to leftover clothing – including some of Dad’s shoes. (The same young man wrote my parents later and told them he’d tried them on again. Still no fit. )

Which, if you know anything at all about Japan, squarely dates this incident in the tail-end of post-war poverty. Later on, missionary kids dumpster-dived for locals’ castoffs, never the other way around. When my father attempted the same generosity seven years later, the neighbor stared dubiously, then offered, “I suppose I could use them for rags.” Talk about feeling like the bottom of the missionary barrel!

Even so, in 1979, someone again thought my father’s shoes worth wearing.

Dad always brought slippers when visiting a tuberculosis patient in a local hospital. Traditional hotels and hospitals provide an entryway where you can trade your shoes for their slippers, just like homes. Since Dad’s entire heel hung off the native-sized slippers, he didn’t mind carrying his own. Ministry is unhurried everywhere but America, and my father took his time, ministering to the sick man with prayer, Scripture, and a heart full of Jesus.

When he came out, his shoes were gone. At least he had his own slippers to wear home.
We teased Dad that perhaps a local collector needed just the right accent piece for a display shelf. It’s not like someone could easily mistake his size 11’s for their own.

Once, walking home, a neighbor stopped my Mom and me and made us stand in the street several minutes for a recitation of Sensei’s virtues. “Your father is a great man,” she said to me in English. My Sunday sandals raising a blister, I shifted from foot to foot, hoping she’d conclude her rhapsody so I could get home. The phrase “great man” lingered in our household lore, but Dad paid no attention.

These days, Dad laces on hiking boots and heads up the hill behind his North Georgia home. When we talk, he lets me know his time that day – 19 minutes. Never mind the collapsed disk, sciatica and whatever else tries to ail him.

I remind him he’s grown almost as young as Caleb when that octogenarian claimed his mountain. I tell him I’ve heard a great song I’d like to play at his funeral, preferably in another 40 years or so, and recite the lyrics:

I won’t bend and I won’t break
I won’t water down my faith . . .
I want to be a light for future generations

He mumbles a quick “Oh!” which I interpret as pleasure, then changes the subject.

Like Max Lucado’s Wemmicks, the stars and dots just don’t stick to a man who spends time with His Master. Once in a while, he stubs his emotional toe on someone’s attitude, just like the rest of us. Most of the time, though, Dad remains oblivious.

Watched by many, watching only One.

We’re always in somebody’s viewfinder. Tell you what, next time we feel stressed by who’s looking, what they’re thinking – let’s do ourselves a favor. Let’s take off our Sunday shoes and go running in the rain. As long as we protect what’s irreplaceable, we can let our socks get wet.

What’s it gonna take to lay your burdens down, it’s a beautiful sound
And they all fall, like a million raindrops,
falling from a blue sky, kissing your cares goodbye. –The Newsboys