"If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town."(Matthew 10:14)
I'm going to be moving in about a month. I will be leaving a town I've called home for about 19.5 years. The one thing I won't be doing is shaking the dust off my feet. The reason of course is that I've been welcomed here and people have listened to my words. I'm moving from one good place to another, so there isn't anything to shake off.
But I do understand how that passage can be applied to everyday life. There are situations from which we must move on. Where we do need to shake the dust off our feet. Those kinds of situations that make us feel dirty that something unnecessary is clinging to us. How do you shake it off?
Those times when I've had to move on, when I'm no longer welcome, loved or listened to, I have tried to have some kind of ritual around letting go. I offer up the pain of it to God and leave the dust of the memory of it where it belongs.
That symbolic gesture of shaking the dust off is pretty powerful, you are saying to that situation nothing about it will be a part of me anymore.
Blessings,
Ed
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