Bad things happen when you wear socks and sandals.

So today I committed a fashion crime of truly incredible proportions.

My weak defence is that it happened at 7.20am on a Sunday morning, when it was a little too chilly to wear just sandals on my early morning skate to church and I didn’t anticipate seeing anybody at all.

I wore socks. With Birkenstocks.

Yep.

Socks. And sandals.

A true fashion faux-paux of middle-age-man-style-disasters.

It looked like this.

I know. I know. Haters gonna hate and all that jazz.

But that’s the way it was. They even had frogs on them just to give me even more cool points.

I was warm and I was happy.

So, I hopped on my skateboard, and headed off to church for an early morning praise team practice.

But being a normally fashion-conscious-soul (of sorts), I’d actually not anticipated the level of difficulty that skateboarding in socks and Birkenstocks could bring.

I definitely had not anticipated the potential damage that I could do to myself.

But it turns out that you can’t grip properly when you turn corners if your socks slide on your Birkenstocks…

I mean, who knew? Right?

It meant that at the bottom of my street there was this horrible moment where my skateboard went one way and I went the other. And kind of rolled across the street in a very melodramatic movie-style action scene.

I did later consider that it was God’s judgement against me for committing fashion-crimes against humanity.

The result was a few minor injuries that I’m now thinking are going to bruise up in the purple-variety tomorrow.

In credit to my incredible bravery *cough*, I still made it to church on time and ready to sing… Just bleeding a little…

But as always when these ‘interesting’ experiences happen to me, I did think that I could pull a blog post out of this one with relative ease…

Because the thing is, that I wore socks this morning because I was scared of being cold.

The thing that made my journey treacherous was that I didn’t fully commit to what (if I had stopped for even one minute I would have realised) I really needed to do.

I wore what was comfortable. But it lead to a great deal of discomfort.

And then I remembered the really well known passage in Romans 12.

Take your everyday, ordinary life – your sleeping, eating, going-towork, and walking-around life – and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out.

And I thought that this whole following-Jesus thing is as it’s core about total sacrifice.

Fully committing to the journey.

Even when we’re scared of the cold.

And I know this. And I talk about this all the time. And I pray this.

But sometimes, I know the ALL that Jesus is asking me to give Him, and I still want to try and do it wearing socks.

I want to follow him and still wear something of my own comfort.

I’m scared that He’s going to ask too much of me. That He’s going to take me into places that I can’t handle. I don’t trust Him enough.

And so I try and follow Him spiritually in socks and sandals.

And it leads to a crazy-action-movie-style disaster that reminds me that this is about fully committing.

So, that’s my days reflections.

I’m taking off my socks.

And I’m learning, one step at a time.