Suffering Vanity
Monday, March 8, 2010 Vanity is a common theme running through my head today. Perhaps it has something to do with shopping for shoes. I don’t need any more shoes and I didn’t buy any more shoes, but I wanted some. I tried on several pair waiting for Sharon as she shopped. She did need a pair and found some.
On the way home we stopped at Krogers for a few groceries. She went in. I parked and sat in the Audi, slightly slouched in my leather seat, thinking more about my vanity and comfortable life. As I thought I watched. Men and women moved across the parking lot. A tall grey man in maroon and kaki, long-legged, short-waisted, heavy through the bottom like a pear, limped slowly across the drive, stumbling and stopping and starting again just before the doors. Was it age or illness that made him limp?
A mature woman with long, brown, stringy hair, her right hand clinched palm up, awkwardly, unnaturally like a claw, walked next to a shorter, older woman, someone I imagined as her mother. I couldn’t remember ever seeing legs so thin. They were tightly wrapped in black jeans. How did she get them on? One leg seem thinner than the other. Unable to fully lift her right foot, she pulled it behind her, catching the edge of her white shoe where the asphalt met the sidewalk. She wore a flowing black cloak festooned with brightly colored musical notes and a keyboard, perhaps in memory of a time when she could extend her long fingers toward the piano. A young, bulging woman laughed behind her, at her I think; her husband looked down at his feet as he shushed her.
I thought of Christ in his suffering, of the call to share his sufferings. I thought more about my vanity.
