Powerless at foot drop
There is a point where you can experience the terrifying vulnerability of having your body fail you for no damn good reason. This powerlessness is awful. I wasn't even doing anything remotely dangerous or exotic or life-threatening (and I regularly do all three of those). No this came from sitting on a hard chair, for 3.5 hours, with my legs crossed. Yeah you can reread that sentence and wonder if I made a mistake or did not proof read my blog, but no, you would be mistaken. According to my nurse/neurologist, I effectively did nerve damage to my peroneal nerve by sitting on a rock hard chair for 3.5 hours with my legs crossed. This nerve damage results in a condition known as Foot Drop. Yes I damaged myself by being in a meeting!
Powerless. Because I sit on hard chairs all the time. I have almost no control over the chairs in my life when I am on the road traveling 100 days per year. I have been crossing my legs Euro-style for decades. Ok ok this was a pretty long meeting, but it wasn't THAT long! And I get up out of that chair and find out immediately that my left ankle and foot will not work properly. It's like they have gone to sleep without the whole tinglely thing. They will not articulate properly, they won't climb stairs properly, I am dragging my left foot like a cripple. Powerless.
Three weeks have passed since this first happened, and I am making tiny incremental progress each day toward normal functional foot and ankle. But I don't even have control over that process. There is no pill to take, there is no exercise to do, there is no decision that can be made to make things better. I am a terrible patient.
There is a special kind of trusting Jesus that is required when faced with powerlessness. And then over this three week period I realized that there is no special kind of trusting Jesus at all. We trust Jesus period, when we realize our powerlessness in any area of life. And frankly I am far more powerless in far more areas of my life, than I had ever considered before. It's ok to trust Jesus. It's foolish to trust your own abilities, because they can just stop working at any time with no notice. Jesus doesn't operate that way.
