The Same Boot for Twenty Years
The word for Tuesday, August 11, 2026 is The Same Boot for Twenty Years.
The anchor verses are John 6:12 and Leviticus 19:2.
There is a family boot shop in Spokane Valley, Washington, on East Sprague Avenue. For twenty years they have made wildland fire boots by hand, for the people who walk toward fires on purpose.
Four words are stamped under the company logo. Made by hand, tested by fire.
On the first of August, fires started outside Spokane. Ten thousand acres. Around nine hundred buildings gone. Tens of thousands of people out of their homes with whatever they could carry.
The fight came to their own street.
One of the owners is a man named Tim Khadzhi, and what he said about it is worth having exactly as he said it. Suiting up and grabbing a hose was not an option for him. So he did the next thing.
They opened the building. Seven in the morning until nine at night. Hot food, hot coffee, water, a place to wash your face and sit down out of the smoke.
They committed fifty pairs of boots, free, to anybody working a fire crew. That is twenty five thousand dollars of leather at retail. When crews could not get to the shop, they drove boots out to base camp and fitted them there. On the fifth of August they gave away every dollar of profit from every sale in every store to the wildfire relief fund.
They passed fifty pairs within days. Khadzhi said they were going to keep going and he did not know when it would stop.
Now the picture from that command post.
At the incident command post set up at a high school north of the city, firefighters come in at the end of a shift wearing boots held together with duct tape. They sit down. They pull them off. They throw them on a pile and lace up new ones.
A photographer from the Spokesman-Review took a picture of that pile. It grows all day.
Open the sixth chapter of John, where five thousand people get fed on five barley loaves and two fish that a boy had brought with him.
Everybody eats. Everybody has enough. And then comes the sentence almost nobody quotes.
Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.
Christ had just made more than enough out of almost nothing. And the very next instruction was to go out into the grass and pick up the scraps.
Twelve baskets of them. Which means people walked that hillside bending down over and over, collecting broken pieces of bread off the ground, because HE told them the leftovers mattered.
Nothing thrown out. Not even the parts nobody wanted.
That is a strange thing to care about for someone who had just fed a crowd out of almost nothing. HE was not short on bread. HE could have made more of it standing right there. HE sent them out after the broken pieces anyway, because HE does not treat what HE has touched as disposable.
Open Leviticus and there is a sentence people quote all the time. Ye shall be holy: for I the LORD your God am holy.
That verse gets treated as though it were about becoming a certain kind of person. GOD keeps talking after that verse, and the rest of the chapter is where the sentence gets its meaning.
Leave the edges of your field. Do not go back over the ground twice. Do not keep a working man's pay overnight. Do not curse a deaf person, since they cannot hear you do it. Do not put something in the path of a blind person to make him fall. Stand up when an old man walks into the room.
Holiness turns out to be about how you pay people and what you leave behind you and whether you get out of your chair.
None of it requires becoming somebody else.
Tim Khadzhi did not invent a new skill in August. He did not learn firefighting in a week. He had a bench, and leather, and twenty years of knowing exactly how to build one specific thing, and he built more of them and handed them out.
Nobody asked him to become a different man.
The letter to the Hebrews says that faith is the substance of things hoped for. Substance. Faith is not presented there as empty sentiment. It has a kind of reality beneath it, something that holds.
A boot has weight. So does a bowl of hot food at nine at night. So does a basket of broken bread that somebody bent down to gather.
The fires are still burning. Nobody knows yet how any of this ends. The pile of taped boots at that high school is still getting taller.
And a man who cannot put out a fire is at a bench in Spokane Valley, making the same boot he made last year.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
- 🙏 To the one who cannot fix the thing and has been told that means there is nothing to do.
- 🙏 To the one who has done the same work for twenty years and wonders whether it counted.
- 🙏 To the one walking in tonight with everything held together by tape.
- 🙏 To the one gathering up fragments nobody else thinks are worth bending down for.
Grace and Peace.