Wounded Feet

Are hard to walk on


   My 57 year old body doesn't always do what I want it to. I find walking hundreds of kilometers with a heavy back pack puts strain on your feet that causes them to swell, circulation problems ensue and life gets miserable when feet hurt. I was blessed to be able to stay in an albergue run by religious sisters in Santa Domingo de Calzada for two days which enabled me to go to the Farmacia again. The pharmacists here are medically trained and have seen a lot of sore feet and they have a crema for that. Thank you Jesus again.

   The cleaning lady in the convento took me to a corner room with a closet that opened up to a secret chapel and I was delighted to be able to pray there, below the nailed feet of Jesus on the cross. I imagined having a rail road tie sized nail thrust into my feet and sort of internally heard "tell me about it." I then felt extremely silly about whining over swollen feet. I will not act like an invalid. Onward and upward.

  The church at Santo Domingo de Calzada is unbelievable- it houses an actual hen house with live chickens in the wall. Not kidding. The story is wild-Here is why:

There is a legend in the town that German pilgrims (a father, his wife and their son) were traveling to Santiago de Compostelle and were invited to stay with a farmer's family. This was when there were no or few auberges and families hosted the pilgrims on the route in centuries previous. The farmer's daughter took a liking to the son so she hit on him and tried to seduce him. He rejected her advances so she framed him by stashing some family silver in his belongings. She then alerted the family to the "theft" after she framed him. He was arrested and hung in the town, for all to see. They use to hang people in broad daylight and leave their bodies hanging as a warning in the public square. The parents utterly heart-broken continued their journey, and returned to the town to see if they could retrieve their son's body for burial in Germany. He was miraculously alive. He said that the Saint Domingo held him up the entire time so he would not die from hanging.

   When the parents went to the Magistrate to tell him to release their son as he had miraculously survived, the Magistrate was eating chicken dinner .  He mocked them saying- your son is as dead as this chicken on my plate. Just then the chicken jumped up, sprouted feathers and started jumping up and down in front of the Magistrate. The chickens in the Cathedral are allegedly direct descendants of the Magistrate's dinner.

   The son was released to his parents.

God's Justice rules. I prayed for an end to Capital Punishment in America at the church. Seemed fitting. Please pray with me for an end to capital punishment in America.

Back to feet: You do realize of course that it would have been totally impossible for Jesus to walk on his feet after being punctured with a nail like that unless he was walking in a restored resurrected body post resurrection. You cannot almost die, not really die, with a wound like that and be able to walk- and yet, Jesus was seen walking on the road to Emmaus after his hanging and engaging in normal things like casually cooking fish by a lake. His feet would have been so badly wounded, they would have likely been infected, there would be edema or swelling in the tissues, and his tendons likely would have been severed. You could not walk on such a wound. I don't know how far the road to Emmaus was from Jerusalem but you couldn't walk three steps with that kind of a wound if he wasn't really totally dead and somehow revived three days later. That blows out of the water the theory that he was just sort of not really dead. The Christian belief in the Resurrection of the Dead comes from the fact that Jesus died, was buried, and three days later rose FROM THE DEAD with a restored resurrected body.