So one time I got stung by a scorpion on a trail run wearing sandals. It reached over the edge as I got my revenge.  Or maybe it was the other way around, as I did interrupt his morning constitutional with sudden death from above.

“I will put enmity between you and the woman,and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.” (Genesis 3:15 NRSV) This is what God told the serpent, but it ran through my head as I stared down at the flattened brown corpse of my enemy and wondered if it were the kind that I should be worried about.

And then I thought about the sass I would get about running in the desert in sandals. If it was good enough for Jesus, then it is good enough for me. I always think that to myself, and I then I left again, eager to get back into the flow of the run, even with the throb of my right foot just beginning to crawl up my leg.

People feel it necessary to tell me how stupid it is to run in sandals or barefoot because we can safely assume enmity between us and nature. We know that the world is out to get us and that Satan and his minions go around flinging hypodermic needles and broken glass everywhere we might step. Hypodermic needles, glass, and scorpions.

What happened between God telling whoever was listening that the creation was good (and with us it was very good) and our putting on shoes in the morning? Did the world fall when humanity took its first bite of forbidden fruit?

There are solid, smart Christian thinkers who think so. We live in a fallen world in which God has walked but is not yet restored. There are those who see creation or nature as innocent and humanity as the evil force. It’s been hard to argue with that idea since Silent Spring.

I waver between the two, but I run in sandals. Except when I run in overbuilt trail shoes. I would run barefoot, but the world is not yet there.

The creation is good, but it is also marred by generations of fallen humility. Plato complained that the trees of Athens were all cut down, and the prophets are full of images of nature and its wreckage before the sins of humanity. We long for a day in the mountains or at the shore, but then we have to be careful to survive either one.

We assume a lot in our language about nature, and it shows in our decisions about shoes.

The Biblical narrative begins with humanity separated from intimacy with God and also cut off from the Garden of Eden. The ease of the relationship is replaced with toil and resistance, subjugation and rebellion. The Tree of Life is removed from our reach, but we get to keep the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

We now put on shoes to protect ourselves from the renegade land and conquer what we were made to care for and love. We cannot live forever, we know how to spot evil, but no longer walk easily with God.

In Christ, we are supposed to be restored as human beings as intended by God. Men and women who can walk with their Abba in the cool of the evening among the trees of paradise, but we live in this not yet place.

We can know God, but most of us spend our time confessing and begging because we know how far short we are of his dream for us and how far short the world is from paradise. We are given intimacy but long for restoration of something none of us has ever really known: peace.

I don’t know what you dream about when you dream about peace, but I imagine that we can go barefoot. I won’t even need my sandals when all things are made new.

It makes you wonder that Moses and Joshua were both told to take off their shoes on holy ground. Somehow in those close moments of call they were back on original, unstained ground and did not need to protect their soles.

In many cultures we take off our shoes as we enter a home or house of worship. In these domesticated places where we have imposed some order in the chaos of the world you can be as you were intended: unguarded, safe.

You can really only run barefoot in a few places safely, but more places than you would imagine. I happen to live where it would be unpleasant at best.  And I don’t blame Satan for the needles and the scorpions.

The needles are ours, another sign of our lost humanity and numbing attempts to deal with the distance between peace and our lives. The scorpions, I imagine, are evolved for a world that has been estranged from peace for millennia or longer. We have been enemies for a long time.

The crazy thing about being a follower of Christ is that we are called to live in the world as if we were already in the Reign of God again, back in fellowship, taking walks in the evening, and part of a restored humanity that deserves unguarded love, forgiveness, and dignity.  That world is true in Christ, but it is also not yet here.

We live in hope for things unseen. We love knowing that it will cost us something and may cost us everything. We run barefoot in the desert.  Maybe not physically, but someday.

Imagine a world without needles and scorpions, a world without the fear of death, without good and evil, but only the knowledge of God because he walks among us again like the Garden.  Imagine a world without shoes. I think this is what we see promised in the last chapters of Revelation.

I am not anti-shoe, but they are a measure of how we have to get by in the world. They represent our need to protect ourselves in a thousand ways in this world that is not yet safe. So I wear shoes and take them off when I can.

It is heroic then to walk in the world open-hearted and unshod. We buried a firefighter recently who was also an active soldier. He was heroic, but not for these things, as worthy as they were. For me his heroism was his sitting to eat his leftovers with homeless people and going back to help people off the clock and out of sight. He lived without fear of other people. He was spiritually barefoot, and sometimes he turned the ground under his feet into holy ground.

I have a really great pair of trail shoes that I run in with strong puncture proof sides and toes. They make me feel safe. But my favorite shoes are sandals because they get me a little closer to that someday, even if occasionally I get stung.