One Christmas, many years ago, I was given a pair of slippers. They were black leather with suede soles and they were butter-soft, the most comfortable things I have ever worn.
So I wore them a lot, every day, until they were full of holes and beyond repair. But I couldn’t bear to part with them, so I tucked them away in the wardrobe.
Years later, I had a pair of jeans I loved with almost the same passion. I am wearing them now. As is the way with jeans, they wore out faster than the slippers and a little while ago they needed patching – and they needed patching in the places most regularly in contact with my bicycle saddle.
Now the thing about this was that the repair required something tough enough to survive life on a bike and yet gentle enough to be kind in, well, a sensitive spot. So my thoughts turned to my beautiful slippers. I removed the soles and the lining, cut patches from the soft leather uppers and got to work with the sewing machine. The result has brought both comfort and sturdiness to my daily rides and has enabled both my beloved jeans and my beloved slippers to continue to serve.
Of course, not everything we love is as trivial as jeans or as easily mended. Our hearts are broken by carelessness and folly. Our families are worn and stretched by overuse and overfamiliarity, pressed and burdened by grief.
I’m less good at fixing those. But sometimes I’ve been fixed, and often surprisingly, by a tiny, unexpected kindness, a wise word out of a shared experience.
In the Bible, God ‘heals the broken-hearted, and binds up their wounds’. Speaking through the prophet Ezekiel he says that, ‘I will be the shepherd of my sheep…I will seek the lost, and bring back the strayed, I will bind up the injured and strengthen the weak’.
To be like that, as tender as a healer and as tough and faithful as a shepherd, is hard. But I reckon that when we know hearts that need fixing it’s worth the effort to try, however slight our resources might appear; because love, any love, softened by years of wear, can be as strong and as gentle as a pair of old slippers. And just as unexpectedly useful.
These are the jeans, mended by the slippers. The sewing machine needs to come out again.
This was my Esther’s 21st birthday and my only Pause with Fearne Cotton.
It’s worth recording here that later that day, May 7th 2018, Dulwich Hamlet were promoted to the National League South after defeating Hendon on penalties.