On Knees and Knowing
May 22, 2022
After not that many years of abuse, my knees finally started giving out. I could feel it with every step I took. Something was seriously wrong, and walking only made it worse. I was walking wrong, I was sitting wrong, I was standing wrong. What I needed was to relearn how to walk, because clearly that was the problem.
So I called up my sister. She’s a physical therapist; she’ll know what to do!
She had me pick up my toes while standing. Squat and put my heel on the ground. Walk back and forth in front of the camera. It was a remarkably quick assessment—just stretch your calves. No ice, no medication, no rehab. Just run of the mill, boring stretching. Calves, hamstrings, quads. Do that and I’ll be right as rain.
But that’s not what the sensation was in my knees! Something was wrong, seriously wrong! “Maybe you just don’t know what tight knees feel like,” she said.
That’s wild to me. How can I not know what the sensations in my knees mean? If I know anything, shouldn’t it be my own body? If I understand anything, shouldn’t it be my own body?
To make matters worse, I don’t even know if she’s right. They didn’t magically, immediately feel better. They do now, but does that mean it was the stretching that helped? How do I live with this inability to know for sure?
It’s relatively simple, actually. Faith. I trust she knows what she’s talking about, at least enough to accept her diagnosis and prescription. I get off the couch, stretch, and walk. The only way to learn whether she’s right or not is to put it to the test of time.
This story did happen, but I suspect it’s not really about my knees. It’s really about how we walk with God. We go through life and receive feedback—we feel our knees hurt—and we have to figure out what to do about it. We always have ideas about what to do—buy new shoes, relearn how to walk, work on posture—but we don’t always know what is actually needed. We can keep bumbling about on our own, and perhaps we will eventually stumble upon the right fix, but there’s a simpler way.
Go to Scripture and listen to God. It can’t possibly be that simple! But we don’t really know that for a fact, do we? If we take it by faith, accepting the diagnosis and prescription, going out and actually putting it to the test of time, we may just be surprised by the results.
—John Coffey
