Barefoot shoes

Who invented shoes?  I'd sure like to know!  I have never liked shoes.  I remember being told as a child that good shoes were important, that you had to have a good arch in them or your feet would develop incorrectly.  Really?  Is that true?  Are our feet so fragile that we don't naturally grow good ones?  What about those fast olympic runners who don't wear shoes at all?  Did God create defective body parts?  Can we really improve on His design?


I remember when my daughter-in-law came over with the first pair of five-finger shoes I had ever seen.

I thought they looked pretty ridiculous but my daughter-in-law raved about how comfortable they were.  At the time I blew them off as some kind of crazy fad

Then I acquired plantar fasciitis, which is a very painful foot injury.  My mobility slowed to only what was most necessary.  Mobility, you never really realize how precious it is until it is taken away.  I tried everything, special shoes, expensive inserts, physical therapy exercises and slowly the pain went from excruciating to tolerable. But, I am not satisfied with tolerable.  I felt like my wings were clipped.  I felt, I felt... old.  I wonder if age is an actual affliction, or simply a state of mind?  In either case, I'm not ready to sit on a front porch swing and watch the world go by.

I did some research on what caused plantar fasciitis.  Why does it affect so many people?  Where does it come from and why did the exercises I was doing help?  There are many theories out there, and I am speaking against some foot doctor's conclusions but at the end of my research I landed on a simple cause... shoes.  Thats right!  The very thing we tell our children they must wear in order to have healthy feet.  Specifically shoes that have any kind of heel or uplift in the back.  I used to think that tennis shoes were flat, but most are not.  They are thicker at the heel than in the front where the toes are.

Here we are again forgetting that God might know better than we do.  Here is a place both creationists and evolutionists ought to come together and agree on.  Wouldn't our feet evolve into the right proportions? When did we need shoes?  I used to say to people who teased me about wanting to go barefoot all the time that if God wanted us to wear shoes we would have been born with them.  Don't believe me?  I challenge you to go into a nursing home and look at the crumpled, deformed and crooked feet of the elderly.  Is this normal foot aging? or is this caused by something?

In my research I also found a thing called "Barefoot shoes"  These are shoes with "Zero Drop" which means they have no uplift at the heal.  I bought a pair of five-finger barefoot shoes like my daughter-in-law's.  Oh man, was she right!  They were so comfortable and within 3 months of wearing them exclusively I was pain free.  But more than that, my feet look like feet, I have better balance and no more painful foot corns.

I'm not really talking about shoes here.  I'm wondering what else we do thinking our ways are better than God's ways.  I'm thinking of the many ways we pursue gain monetarily instead of humanitarily (is that a word?) We chose to use pesticides on crops because the yields will improve. Is that the best way to improve crop yields?  Is that best for everyone and everything involved?  Or is it another time when the end result is something crooked and deformed?  Perhaps, it's time to ask more questions?