Shoes Without Shoestrings

Ye asked it like a joke.

But it was never just a joke.

It was about humiliation. Class. Being seen as less than the person you were trying to become. The small public signs that tell the world you have been handled.

I know something about that.

Not because I grew up poor. I didn’t. Not exactly. My father did well enough for us to learn the performance of respectability. Sunday best. Holiday tables. Clean shirts. Good schools. The polished family version of things.

But inside the house, my nervous system was learning another language.

When I was little, I stole cookies at night because sugar helped me sleep. A child does not call that dysregulation. A child does not call it a trauma response. A child just knows the body is loud, the house does not feel safe, and chocolate chips make the noise stop for a while.

Later, the cookies became other things.

Puffers. Pills. Whatever could soften the edges and quiet the mind. Not rebellion. Not glamour. Not some dramatic fall from grace. Just the old childhood instinct wearing adult clothes: make the noise stop.

Then I got caught.

And somewhere in my child-brain, cookie theft became criminality. Shame became identity. The boy who needed comfort became the boy who had done wrong.

That is how it starts.

Long before the shoestrings are taken, something else is taken first.

Ease.

Trust.

The right to be complicated.

Years later, I woke up in a cell.

Metal slab. Bars. Shame thick enough to breathe. I did not yet know the full damage. I did not know how far I had fallen. I only knew I had crossed some line between the man I wanted to be and the man I had become.

And somehow, there too, God was not finished.

Not clean God.

Not respectable God.

The God of the cell.

“You ever had shoes without shoestrings?”

Then you know.

You know what it means to be alive but reduced. Protected and embarrassed. Helped and humiliated.

Maybe grace is not God pretending we never fell.

Maybe grace is God sitting beside us at the bottom of whatever we finally could not manage, saying the same thing over and over until we believe it:

Your story is not done.