My Foot Is Killing Me

Last week I was increasing my walking getting prepared to hopefully start jogging again. (OK, when you stop laughing you can continue to read this post!)

Later in the afternoon one day, after I had walked over an hour that morning, my right heel starting hurting. I played it off; "It’s just pain." But by the next morning I could hardly walk across the bedroom floor. It took several hours for my heel muscles to "loosen up". It actually felt like a pulled muscle in my heel...(Oh, stop laughing. I mean it, that sucker hurt.) After several days of 'self diagnosis' I realized that I actually had the continuing heel pain due to my tennis shoes being 'worn out'. The additional walking just made it worse.

Since finances are tight, I have to wear other shoes, so in the mean time I am just minimizing my walking until my heel completely heals. (Heel heals.. get it?!?)

So why am I blogging about this? Well, it's like this. As I continued to walk on my bad heel, I notices that I would turn my foot inward slightly to take some of the pressure off my heel. This helped me minimize the pain to my heel, but later I began to feel some pain in my leg.

It seems that in my efforts to avoid the pain in my heel, the adjustments I made in my walking stride and foot position were actually causing me more pain. It became a domino effect. Next I made adjustments for the pain in my leg, and then my back began to hurt.

SO... I just stopped walking as much as possible to let all the parts of me heal up. I got off my feet. I gave up the “1st pain” (by sitting more) which also helped stop the additional pain from the adjustments I was making in my walking strides and how my injured heel impacted the pavement.

As I reflected on these things, I began to wonder, how many times do we make adjustments in our lives because of a little pain, only to cost us or our loved ones more pain. For example, we avoid the "pain" of apologizing, only to have our pain compounded by the pain caused by a damaged relationship... all because we can't just say, "I'm Sorry."

Or, maybe we have some pains in our lives that we just don't take to God and we hold on to them & try to "walk them off" alone, only to find out later that by carrying those pains around, we end up with more pain in other areas of our lives too.

Can you think of some other examples in your life?

I think this has taught me that I need to take my pains and hurts to God at the beginning and not allow them to build up to the point that they cause me to adjust my life, or my morals, leading to more pain, struggling, and bigger adjustments down the road.