Trying to touch my toes!

     There are impossible tasks and this was once an impossible task for me.  I'm not saying I was fat; though I've always been fat or fatish.  Touching your toes with your fingers is one thing.  I can touch them with a cane, stick, and other long instruments.  Disabilities can be invisible.  So, when someone is watching me attempt to touch my toes they see my gut and not my pain.  I have several conditions that were not asked for nor welcomed at different times of my life.  Touching your toes mean using all of your senses.  My balance isn't what it once was.  My eyesight has a difficult time focusing on certain distances (like my toes!).  Just kidding.  I have Undifferentiated Spondyloarthritis.  I know, easy for me to say!  But it's a form of arthritis that attacks where the ligaments attach to my bones and isn't the arthritis that attacks my joints.  The painful attacks float around my body and come upon me suddenly.  Why am I telling you all of this?  Maybe God wants you to not feel alone.  Maybe you need to be humbled from your judgmental ways.  Maybe you don't have empathy for your friend, family, or even your enemy.  Touching one's toes is not what it may seem.
     When I was a young boy my father beat me with his fists, kicked me with his feet and called me many different terrible names.  I learned that if I didn't show pain that he would stop sooner.  So, I don't have a real "pain face" until I reach 9 or 10 on the scale.  It's served it's purpose over the years but never really gone away.  I also learned to lie about my pain.  "No, I'm okay." Maybe you do the same?  I've been through 11 surgeries to fix my broken hands, arms, knee, ankle and a few other places.  Putting the pain behind me was a crucial part of my rehab.  But, I don't have it so bad,  When I feel sorry for myself I take a trip to the waiting area of the local Veterans Hospital.  Reality is flooded upon me and my pity party comes to an end.  Thankful that I'm not as bad off as someone I've just seen leads me to understand anew this isn't about touching my toes.  It's about helping someone else touch their toes.
     I'm totally disabled.  There, I said it.  I have problems.  Once again, I've said it out loud and in print.  I'm NOT dead!  Did you hear me?  Just because I can't touch my toes I'm not without purpose.  God has a plan for me.  He doesn't care if I touch my toes or not.  He doesn't care or even notice if I'm fat or not.  He doesn't care about the pain I don't show even though he is intimately acquainted with my pain...and yours.  Not once in my life has God said, "Well, you are damaged goods.  Go find a corner somewhere out of sight and don't bother anyone."  What God does is he takes Stevie Wonder from blindness to feeling music through his fingers and ears to what the world is still amazed over.  He takes those in Special Olympics and uses them to teach the rest of us what real character is  and should be.  He takes a wounded warrior who has no legs and returns them with prosthetics and lets them go back to war even if you won't go.  What kind of a man or woman are you?  Do you ever take your eyes off yourself to see the world around you?  What about going forth in the world to make disciples, care for the widow and feed the orphan?  Maybe your choice hasn't been about how God wants to use you.  Remember, it's always your choice...always.