| Sunny Side Up March 29, 2006 �2006, Kathleen Gibson The Easter choice is yours The Preacher hates cold feet. Mine, mostly. So I've taken to wearing socks to bed. He's much happier now. Not just any old pair of socks crawls under the sheets with me, though. I have three requirements for candidates. They can't be too thick. They must come off easily. They have to be soft. There's one more qualification, though I forgo it for any pair that meets the above three: I prefer my bedtime socks pretty. Three pairs of socks currently suit me. My friend Signe was in her late nineties when she gave me the first pair. She's with Jesus now, but her gift reminds me of her. They're knit like the sweaters she loved, and they look Norwegian - cream colored, with an exquisite embroidery design, and perky tassels on the back of the ankles. Fuzzy, cushy soft, and just the right thickness, my second pair slips off easily when my feet reach the right temperature. They get no beauty points, though. They're black like the night, only without stars. I wear my third pair most. I like everything about them. They're soft anklets, the perfect weight, and they slide off my feet like butter off a hot knife - but only on command. Plus, they meet that elusive fourth standard: They're very pretty. Picture them: purple toes, then wide bands of pink, cream, and green across the foot, (like Neapolitan ice cream, except with mint replacing the chocolate). The heel is soft pink, and a variegated aqua and cream band edges just the top, which ends exactly where my ankle begins. My friend Judy knit me those socks. They replaced an earlier pair she'd knit me, also perfect in every way (though colored like my morning oatmeal.) I left those, much to my annoyance, under the sheets of a hotel room two provinces over. Forgot to fish them from the sheets before we left. Last weekend, I did it again. Left those multi-colored socks in another hotel room. Back home, thoroughly disgusted with my carelessness, I called the hotel. Yes, housekeeping said, we have your socks. We'll send them C.O.D. "Great," I said. "Stick them in an envelope." They arrived a few days later - in a box as light as air; big enough for dozens of sock pairs. Sixteen dollars and seventeen cents, I paid to redeem them from sock purgatory. Several times what they were worth. Easter is coming - the season that reminds us that the owner and creator of the universe also had to buy back something already rightfully his. Mankind. You. Me. Lost, not through carelessness, but through something Adam and Eve started: perennial, inbred rebellion. But God paid infinitely more than sixteen dollars and seventeen cents for his wandering, multi-colored favorites. He paid with a criminal's sentence: his Son Jesus' death on a cross. The price fully paid, he presents us each with a choice we must eventually make: accept and follow, or reject and wander. Both answers bring profound, eternal, opposing consequences. Consider your choice carefully. Respond Home |
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