Limps are interesting things. They can arise from all sorts of situations, some good and some bad. Regardless, they show you have been somewhere. You did not escape unchanged, unscathed. You will bear the mark for as long as you live.
Take Jacob. He encountered the holy during his journey back to Canaan and was never the same. He not only walked with a limp but also received a new name. He came into contact with the other and was transformed, maybe not perfectly, but transformed nevertheless. He would never forget that wrestling match, his hip dislocated, the sharp pain of it, the refusal to let the other man go, seeing the face of God and living.
A good limp, then. One filled with remembrance and hope, a sort of living memorial stone. It was a mark filled with God, with his guiding purpose and promise in the past, present, and future. Jacob could look back on the event, recall it in the present, and allow it to shape his steps into the future. He could walk differently. He did.
You have these limps, too, though they may not always arise from a God-encounter of the Jacob variety. You come into contact with people who change you, for better or worse. You live through a circumstance that forever alters how you view life. You see beauty, and it awakens a sense of the holy, the mysterious, something completely separate and other from you.
You’re changed in that moment. Your hip socket has been touched by flesh-and-blood or eternity, maybe both at the same time. You now walk with a limp. You point to it and say, “This happened.” It becomes part of your story, but it’s no passive entry in a journal. It is an overwhelming force for it has transformed you, and it demands a response, perhaps a change in direction or a commitment to continue in it because, sometimes, a limp is the whisper saying, “This is the way; walk in it,” and other times, it’s the branch on the sidewalk that you stumble over as you head toward home.
Image: vavva_92 (Creative Commons)