Things fall apart.

We have been stripping wallpaper in our house and have discovered that in many places it is all paper and no wall.

Some of the old paper is very pretty, but when the paper is holding up the wall, it’s time to get a new wall.  I cannot plaster a wall, so Richard the Plasterer is coming.

But it’s not just the walls. The shoes I wear every day also recently started to give up the ghost.

They are not old shoes. I am a creature of habit and they are simply the latest in a long line of the same shoes. But their soles have taken leave of their uppers and are loose, flapping with every step as my feet get wetter and colder.

Now, I cannot mend shoes, so I went to the cobbler, Mr Merrifield, and asked for his help.

And he looked me in the eye and said, “No. You should do this yourself.”

And then he gave me instructions which began with the words,

“Take a knife for which you have no respect and heat it until it is red hot.”

After that, there was melting involved, and pressing together, and a word or two about bulldog clips, but really, he had me at ‘A knife for which you have no respect’.

To be given the sense that not only could I do the job, but that I was master of the tools it required sent me home convinced that my shoes could be made whole.

Jesus was often confronted by people who wanted to be made whole.  In one story, his coat is touched by a sick woman, and he turns round and says, very simply, “Take heart – your faith has healed you”. 

Sometimes I reckon it’s easy to believe that we don’t have the capacity to fix the things that fall apart.  And sometimes we don’t. 

But sometimes the help I need is not to have the thing done for me, but to be told that I can do it.

So I found a knife for which I had no respect and I fixed my shoes.

They need fixing again now, but that’s because they are bad shoes, not because I have failed.

So, I will fix them again.

Because now, I believe that I can.

The image at the top is the wallpaper under the wallpaper under the wallpaper we stripped before Richard the Plasterer replastered.