Just before his death Moses blessed the twelve tribes of Israel. To Asher he said, ”Thy shoes shall be iron and brass and as thy days, so shall thy strength be” (Deuteronomy 33:25, KJV). How deeply the Lord set that promise into my heart on New Year’s Day, 1973. My husband, Addison Leitch, was to report on January 2 to the radiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. His worst fear had come upon him. His first wife had died of cancer, his father had died of prostate cancer. Add had been diagnosed in October not only with cancer of the prostate but also with an unrelated but virulent cancer of the lip. As we came from the doctor’s office on that day in 1972, he quoted Gray’s Elegy: ”The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.”
New Year’s Day is a good time to fix one’s eyes on the only One who knows what the year is to hold. What is going to happen? What shall we do? Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ has a lovely story about a monk who was anxious about his salvation. Christ spoke to him from the Cross: “If you knew that all was well, what would you today do, or stop doing? When you have found the answer, do it, or stop doing it.” One must always get back to the practical and definite.
There is something marvelously sustaining about the knowledge that Thomas a Kempis and Samuel Rutherford and Amy Carmichael and Moses and the people of Israel and Mary and Joseph and countless hosts of others have suffered and feared and trusted and been carried through in the same Everlasting Arms that hold us. And so, on that New Year’s Day as I was imagining what that year might hold, I took that promise of “shoes of iron.”
We shall be given shoes of iron. We shall find the unendurable endurable, the impossible possible. The natural processes of change and decay may be unexpectedly retarded to enable us to travel where no roads are visible, no replenishing available. The Lord is the one who travels every mile of the wilderness way as our leader, cheering us, supporting and supplying and fortifying us. Not all God’s children, I suppose, have iron shoes—only the ones who need them! Lord, Thou knowest what we need.
I prayed then for four things: healing for Add, peace of heart for both of us, grace to help in time of need, and a fixed trust in God. The answer to the first was No. To the second it was, far more than I had had faith to expect, Yes. Grace and trust were always given according to my willingness to receive. There were many times when my heart was grieved,” as the psalmist wrote (Psalm 73). ”I was senseless and ignorant I was a brute beast before you. Yet I am always with you. You hold me by my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will take me into glory. Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”
**Excerpt originally published in the Jan/Feb 1997 Elisabeth Elliot Newsletter.