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My Saturday Night Foot Washing Equivalent May 21, 2007 By Alicia Becton
The idea of serving someone and being humble is taught by Jesus with one specific example of this concept being foot washing. As Jesus said, “If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you. Verily, verily, I say unto you, the servant is not greater than his lord; neither he that is sent greater than he that sent him. If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them” (John 13:14-17).
Not my favorite practice, but it is in the Bible and our church does take that literally. However, I think it can also be taken as symbolic and modified in ways to serve others in humility.
Symbolism in Action That being said, two weekends ago a friend of mine (that recently began attending our church) and his two roommates were moving and had to be out by midnight on Saturday, May 5, 2007. Let me preface this by saying that they had known for two weeks that they had to be out by that Saturday. In hopes that they had the situation under control I offered to bring sandwiches that afternoon for lunch. The one roommate had conveniently scheduled a trip out of town that weekend and my friend and the other guy (we’ll call my friend “John” and the other guy “Paul”) seemed to be making decent progress, so I left them and returned to my brother, Arlen, and Chauntay to people-watch at the mall. (I should mention that John has only been attending our church within the last year and Paul is devout Church of Christ.)
A few hours later John texts a thank you for the sandwiches and I responded via text message asking if they were done with the move. This leads to a call from him that, no, they were not done. After feeling somewhat guilty, I coerced Arlen and Chauntay into assisting me as good Samaritans to go over and help them finish up. On the way over we all agreed we were starving, so I promised that we would do one load, packing and unpacking, and that we would go to dinner, we hoped this would take around an hour or so.
Worse Than Footwashing When we arrived the situation was out of control. First of all, they weren’t even there, so we did a neighborhood tour, came back to the house and they showed up a few minutes later. While walking up the sidewalk and peering through the windows we realized that we had gotten ourselves into a heap of trouble. Once inside we knew for sure we were in trouble. Did I mention there is a six foot gong on the front porch (aka doorbell)?
Once inside we did a quick survey to assess the damage. There were not enough boxes and the duct tape was nowhere to be found, so we couldn’t even put the few boxes we had together.
To their credit they had moved out all of the big stuff, so we were left with the one bathroom, all of the kitchen, and general cleanup of the house. As you can imagine a kitchen for three single men can be less than desirable. Not one iota of the kitchen had been packed. Not one glass. To help paint the picture, John told Chauntay that he had done an experiment with their milk and left it in the refrigerator for five (yes five), years to see what would happen, and believe it or not, it solidified. When he opened the refrigerator door the stench was more than overwhelming.
There was a sea of electrical (computer, sound equipment, cable) cords to be packed up in the corner and a sea of glassware in the kitchen with nothing to pack them in. I sent Arlen to obtain boxes from nearby stores and I found a suitcase randomly “stored” in a kitchen cabinet (with an explanation from John, “Ohh! That’s where it was!”) that we used. Arlen found a load of laundry in the washing machine, to the dismay of John and Paul. So they just dumped that in the dryer and kept going. Some sad little duct tape appeared miraculously and we started working frantically, now having something to work with.
Before we knew it three car loads were ready to go and we made the run to the new house to unload and assess what was left to do. The one bright note of the night was the trip to the new house. Once alone we took the opportunity to vent about the night. We sang and screamed and sang some more. Every word, street sign, every Spanish word we knew was artfully put into song. Not. But we did have fun, and it made the rest of the night bearable.
Once at the new house, Chauntay and I immediately began unloading the kitchen stuff while the guys were unloading. We realized that we all needed to go back one more time to load up and clean the old house.
Clean Up I can’t really describe it, nor say that I have ever personally understood the true meaning of “clean up”. I don’t want to make my friends sound messy, but if the bathtub were in the middle of a third world country, it may have been slightly cleaner than what I found.
So, with John and Paul packing up the trucks for the last haul, Arlen, Chauntay and I were going to start cleaning. Since I had roped Arlen and Chauntay into this mess and they were becoming slightly bitter, I could see what had to happen. I volunteered to clean the bathroom (that we had previously stared at with our mouths agape) and began the search and rescue for some sort of cleaning supplies, as at this point anything would help. I started with a cleaning cocktail of some tub spray and dishwashing liquid that I located. The tub promptly stopped up when I started running hot water. I just started scrubbing like crazy. John appeared with some bleach and I added that to the mix. Then fortunately Chauntay found a bag of their cleaning supplies that had randomly been packed; apparently they didn’t realize the necessity of cleanliness in the house while moving. Surprisingly they had bathroom cleaners and some other tub cleaner so I kept scrubbing.
Let me say here that the rest of the bathroom was not as bad.
On a side note: at this point, I was becoming physically ill. On my fourth time trying to scrub this tub I had an epiphany. I was participating in a modern day foot washing for my friend. This actually helped because I knew I was being a servant and I certainly felt the humility of this act. When I finished I didn’t think the tub looked clean, but from the before and after, my brother was amazed.
How About Dinner and a Witness? About five hours from when we began, we had taken the last load, cleaned the last speck of dust out of the house, and unloaded it all into the new house. We then were offered a reward of Waffle House. After getting inside and getting settled we learned that Paul’s girlfriend was joining us for dinner. We then begin to question where she was throughout this escapade. She saunters through the door, looking all fresh, pretty, and rejuvenated, yawning. She then says, “I’m sorry I just woke up.”
This solidifies what I previously was feeling. This had indeed been my foot washing experience and we had been witnesses and dependable friends to John and Paul. These are very popular boys and their “friends” were nowhere to be found on Cinco de Mayo. It was more important to go out and party than to help a friend in need.
Yet his friends from church came over and got it all done within a small amount of time. Paul kept saying that he couldn’t believe we had come to help and John kept saying that we would never know how much we had done for them. So what started out as an innocent trip to the mall, took us down a path that would change all of us in our own way. Though it didn’t seem like the best way to spend our Saturday night, we knew it was the right thing to do. All three of us agreed on that and felt good about what we had accomplished. And we did have a good time.
I found the relevant updated example of how to serve a friend. He didn’t need me to wash his feet. He truly did need me to clean the bathtub. ninetyandnine.com © 2007, Alicia Becton
--------- Alicia Becton coaches Senior Bible Quizzing in Nashville and works in the insurance industry. Chauntay Freeman is an assistant coach to Alicia and did elaborate to this article with some details that Alicia missed. Chauntay still claims Alicia as her friend and they have since been in other humorous/random situations that may require future articles.
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