My Son Doesn't Own Shoes - And it's Not Because We Can't Afford Them

Most ladies I know own 10 to 20 pairs of shoes. Even most guys I know own four or five pairs. But my son Mike doesn't own any shoes. Not one single shoe. We're not too poor to afford shoes. We're not neglectful parents that find other things more important than the needs of our kids. He simply doesn't own any shoes. We don't waste money buying them because he won't wear them anyway. He goes barefoot, literally everywhere. Why, and how, does he do this, you ask? And how can a good mother support such a choice?

There are a couple reasons that Mike doesn't wear shoes. The first one is medical. Mike was in a serious accident on the interstate a long time ago. Ever since that accident, wearing shoes for longer than 10 minutes causes back pain. We're not talking about just any back pain, this is excruciating pain, the kind of pain that the strongest narcotic painkillers can barely ease. Mike couldn't even function on the necessary painkillers, couldn't work or attend school successfully. He quickly noticed, though, that on weekends and holidays when he was home and off work, he had no pain. Not less pain, he had zero pain.

Some days, he forgot he had back trouble. After a few weeks, he realized, the pain was the shoes. If he went barefoot, he had zero pain. So, we bought other shoes. And more shoes. And took him to four different doctors. He was prescribed $400 shoe inserts, and warned that they would only ease the pain a little bit. We were warned that the pain signaled that his body was being permanently damaged, and that he would almost certainly require extensive surgery as a young adult. We bought flip-flops, every different variety of flips we could find. We have a lifetime supply of nearly new flip-flops in Mike's shoe size. Finally, in our desperation to find safe footwear that wouldn't leave our son addicted to painkillers, we searched online for any shoe that would ease his pain, and found an answer from an unexpected source: The Society for Barefoot Living.

An entire group of people who go barefoot 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and their research, led us to discover that actually, the safest answer might really be for Mike to go barefoot. We questioned the safety. What about glass, nails, or the scorching pavement during a Phoenix summer? Through the society's articles section, we found answers and scientific research to answer each concern we had. We wondered how our son would be able to attend school, hold a job, or even go to the grocery store. And again, we found answers to all of our questions. http://www.barefooters.org/health-dept/ So, after a good bit of very careful research, we came to the only sane answer for Mike: we told him that if he wanted to throw away his shoes, it was all right with us. Within mere minutes, the kitchen trash bin was overflowing with all the shoes he had ever tried, and before we realized quite what he was doing, he had flushed his now-useless painkillers. He's never asked for the painkillers back.

Mike's health is the predominant reason that he first chose to go barefoot. Without his accident and the resulting back damage, he never would have made such a choice. But, once he began going barefoot, he noticed another reason, something much closer to his heart than his lower back. Something about those bare feet was changing his heart, changing his outlook on life, and his perspective. Mike, a dedicated Christian, found himself even more drawn to his faith, more strongly desiring to live and be more like Christ, and less like some of the Christians he knows. You know the sort, the ones that make you wonder why in the world anybody could perceive Christianity as anything better, or even that different, from any other belief system.

Mike discovered a greater sense of understanding and compassion, a greater tolerance for those who are "different," and a greater sense of needing to be real, and honest, and vulnerable. He turned to his Bible for answers to why this change was taking place. In Exodus 3:5, God says to Moses, "Put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground." (RSV) This didn't happen in a church, or anywhere special. Moses was just walking in the middle of nowhere, tending some livestock. He was standing by a burning bush, and God was there, so it became holy. In Psalm 24:1, King David writes, The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it. And, in 1 Corinthians 10:26, Paul quotes it to the people of Corinth. Bare feet in the Old Testament were routinely associated with having low status, being equal to a servant (Deuteronomy 25:9) , with giving up the world's ways and turning directly to God (2 Samuel 15:30). Jesus calls Christians to be lowly servants (Mark 9:35). In Jewish temples of the time, there was a heavy curtain separating the people from the holy of holies, the part of the temple where God's presence was, a place so sacred that only the priests could enter.

When Jesus died, this curtain tore in two from top to bottom (Matthew 27:51, Mark 15:38, Luke 23:45), signifying that now, because of Jesus' sacrifice to take the place of temporary animal sacrifice, God no longer stayed confined to the holy of holies, and any person could meet God anywhere on the planet, if he or she wanted to. And so, through careful study of the Bible, and bare feet, Mike found his answer. He felt more connected to God, his faith, and other humans of all varieties, because the one simple change to bare his feet left not only his body a little more vulnerable, but his heart as well. And so a medical decision became also an act of worship, of faith, of making himself open and accepting to all around him, even those that most Christians find undesirable and inappropriate to associate with.

The third reason that Mike chooses to go barefoot is, quite simply, because he can. Contrary to conventional beliefs, it's not illegal to drive barefoot. It's not illegal to go into a store or restaurant barefoot. It's not against any health code. Think about it! If it were, McDonald's would never have been allowed to install indoor playlands, with all those signs requiring children to take off their shoes. If it were, all those beach shops that serve barefooted, swimsuit-wearing customers would be shut down. And, as we discovered by making a few phone calls, we've been unable to find a corporation that requires customers to wear anything particular, on their feet or otherwise. The only requirements any company has for customer dress, aside from fancy restaurants that mandate suit and tie, is that the customer not be in violation of any local public decency laws. We live in a wonderful nation, we pride ourselves on individual freedom to do whatever we want, as long as it doesn't harm others. Mike exercises his freedom as an American citizen every day.

How is that safe? Amazingly, as soon as Mike threw away his shoes, his feet began to develop protections from the threats in our environment. They grew tough and sturdy. When he took some younger family members to the river to play one day, he crushed broken beer bottles with his feet, stepping directly on the sharp edges, for the boys' amusement. He walks on nails and screws, and while he feels them, they don't cause a pain reaction. Without a dark, damp, warm environment of a shoe to grow in, he has no fungal infections, and with the constant exposure to the sun's UV lighting, he has less bacteria on his feet than most people have on their hands. He washes his feet morning and night, keeping them far cleaner than most people's shoes. His feet have roughly 200 times less germs than the bottom of the average week-old athletic shoe. They look dirty at times, but only because feet don't harbor dirt as well as shoes do. He has seen the evidence in his own life that, through God's design or evolution, whichever belief you subscribe to, feet were designed to function without requiring shoes, and his do a great job of providing the protection, health, and mobility that he needs.

But, how does he get through the days? Well, we had to move him to a secular school. For reasons we do not begin to fathom, the Christian school we enrolled him in allowed his bare feet for one school year, and then harshly punished him in the final week of school. No amount of explaining his personal faith or health has resolved the matter, so we have sought refuge in "the world" that Christians speak so harshly against. It saddens us to do this, because a Christian education is important to us, but we also have experienced the kind of rejection and intolerance that many people must be complaining about when the gripe and moan about how Christians are about as far from loving as a person can imagine. His new school accepts him just as he is. Mike works in special shoes that lessen the damage to his back. He has not held a job long enough to bring up his need to not wear anything, not without risking his job. He works limited hours so as to minimize the damage, and when he's been on the job long enough, he will discuss with his boss the options. In his desire to balance his right to his medical and religious choices with his employer's need to present the right outward appearance to customers, he plans to wear black socks with grippy tread on the bottoms.

How does he go out in public? Quite simply, he walks like the rest of us! He's been thrown out of a few places by managers who incorrectly assume that they're enforcing a law that has to exist somewhere. In reality, there is no law against bare feet, nor any corporate policy at any store we've ever been to. We've had to contact the corporate offices of the grocery stores in our area, to have them resolve the problem. Usually it only takes one call to resolve things. The Kroger-owned store nearest our home had a communication problem, and Mike was thrown out three times by the same "greeter" before the problem got resolved. We simply stopped shopping at Walmart, because corporate refused to help us, and one of their managers tried to punch me for asking, when he said that Walmart has a written shoes-required policy, where this policy is. After the first three months, however, we've encountered no problems. Today Mike went to the pet store, the electronics store, and a fairly pricey sit-down restaurant, completely in peace, and pain-free.

And, to answer the final question I originally posed, how can a mother support her son doing such a thing? Mike is free from pain, free from narcotic painkillers, free from the future need for risky surgery. He is growing in his faith, and opening his heart to people that most Christians would walk by, or reject outright due to their lifestyle choices. He chooses to follow his faith rather than the kind of intolerance that other members of his faith demand. He exercises his innate freedom as an American citizen to do what he believes is right for him, so long as it harms no one else. The choice to support his decision, then, is really quite simple. There's no compelling reason that I shouldn't, and there are many reasons that I should.