There is no end to the things that my wife hears from the children that she works with! She told me about a conversation that she had with one of the little girls at daycare. When Anna Beth noticed how rough the bottoms of Gale’s feet are, she questioned her about it. Gale told her that her feet are just old, and then she went on and explained how her feet were affected as she often went without shoes as a child while walking on the pavement.

Children have a way of coming up with some really simple (and often bizarre) solutions to the problems of life—and Anna Beth was not without one for Miss Gale’s rough feet. She told Gale, “Get them to cut your feet off and give you new ones.” In her five-year-old way of thinking, that was a quick and easy fix; in the real world, it is unthinkable. But, without a doubt, the innocence with which children speak is priceless.

We can be grateful for the advances in the medical world that have made it possible for ailing body parts to be repaired and sometimes even replaced to provide a better quality of life. But we also readily realize that even the best medical procedures are limited in the results that they can achieve. But when it comes to our spiritual health, God is able to make us completely new and vibrant. Even though the body will surely wear down through time and disease, we can know the joy of spiritual life forever.

In the Book of Ezekiel, God gave this promise to His people: “I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh” (11:19, NIV). The reference is obviously not regarding the physical heart, but the spiritual inner person. God is able to radically transform the inner person from the cold deadness of sin to the tender life that His Spirit produces.

When we receive the forgiveness of sin and the newness of God through faith in Jesus Christ, we enter into a lifelong journey of cooperating with Him and allowing the Holy Spirit to continually help us to become more like Christ. In his book, Fatal Distractions, Ed Young looks at ways of dealing with such spiritual distractions as pride, anger, lust and greed, which are elements of the old sinful way of living that try to creep back into the lives of Christians. He writes: “To successfully “take off” the old way of life, we must replace bad behavior with good. More importantly, we must replace self-focus with a God-focus and an others-focus.”

The Bible instructs us to “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry” (Colossians 3:5). And in verse 12 we are told to “clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience.”

We cannot turn in our old feet for replacement when they become worn, but we can turn to God and allow Him to give us a pure and clean soul as we follow Him, becoming less like the old sinful person that we were and more like our Lord Jesus Christ.

As for Miss Gale’s feet, I love them like they are. And I am grateful for the many miles and places she has journeyed with me doing the work of our Lord. “Happy __0th birthday, my love!”