Called to Wash Feet

Recently I became involved in a couple of discussions regarding “foot-washing.”  I had seen a comment that “no one feels called to wash dirty feet.”  My instinctive reaction was that the statement was incorrect.  Now, having considered it for a couple of weeks, I still think it is false, whether taken literally or metaphorically.

As a nurse, and a mother, I have washed a lot of dirty feet.  I have never actually taken part in foot-washing as a form of worship in a church service, but I have been present as an on-looker.  In that context, I understand it to be representative of humility and the act of a servant.  However, I just see it as something that needs to be done or should be done, and so I would cheerfully do it anytime, anywhere, for anyone.  I don’t know if this exposes a flaw in myself or a strength.  Am I refusing to be “humbled” by such an act, or is my call to service so strong that such an act is totally natural?

I think that my eight year-old granddaughter has an innate call to service.  One evening while I was visiting her family, my daughter called me into the bedroom to see an outfit she had recently purchased.  My daughter’s husband was lying on the bed with his feet hanging over the edge, and his sweet little girl was kneeling on the floor rubbing lotion on his feet.  This act seemed to be the most natural thing in the world to her.  During a later visit, when my daughter had just had surgery and wasn’t coming down to the dining room for meals yet, this granddaughter appeared in the kitchen and offered to take her mother’s meal up to her.  There was nothing affected in these actions, no sign that she expected anyone to notice her acts of service.  They came as a natural outgrowth of who she is as a person.  She delighted in playing the servant’s role.

I think many people who are nurses….or at least, who were nurses in my era…delight in the comfort foot-washing brings.  An important part of the bed bath used to be actually putting the person’s feet in a basin of water.  A towel was spread out at the foot of the bed, a basin of warm water was put on the towel, and the person’s lower leg and foot were supported on the nurse’s arm while the foot was carefully lowered into the basin.  Many, many times this would result in the patient saying, “Oh, that feels so good.”  Why would one not feel pleasure in doing something that brought comfort to another?  Why would one not feel that foot-washing was a calling?

Foot-washing is only the beginning of what nurses do on a daily basis.  They hold the basin while someone vomits.  They struggle to undress the drunk who has been in a car accident and needs to be helped into the bed.  They clean up the person who can no longer control his or her bowels.  I have never looked on any of this as demeaning, but rather as what I was called and empowered to do.

I recognize that not all of us are called to wash feet in a literal sense, but some of us are.  I suspect that in a metaphoric sense, we all have such a calling.

Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men….It is the Lord Christ you are serving.  Colossians 3:23-24