A Confession and a Discovery: (Follow Up to Yesterday’s article)
By Michael A. Graham
I have a PhD. I wrote Jack Miller’s biography. I have been a pastor for twenty-five years. I have preached Isaiah and Romans more times than I can count. And until this week, I had missed something that was right in front of me the entire time.
It was a letter that showed me what I had not seen.
A Letter from Uganda
While working through my Jack Miller research library, I came across a handwritten letter dated December 22, 1984, addressed to “Dr. Miller” from a Ugandan brother. The letter refers to Jack’s trips to Uganda and specifically to the incident at Buvuma Island—a remote, tsetse-infested chain of islands in Lake Victoria where Jack had taken a pioneering team to bring the gospel to what he called “forgotten people.”
I tell the full story of that trip in my dissertation on Jack’s life and ministry. Ugandan leaders were most impressed that Jack would take a team to Buvuma Island when no one else was willing to go. Steve DeMoss described the life-threatening trip as one more example of Jack’s saying “Why not?” when others said no. Jack indicated it was worth the risk of infection with sleeping sickness for the joy of bringing the gospel to forgotten people.
The successful visit to the remote island turned into a nightmare on the return trip. The ferry, already packed with too many passengers, was caught in a terrible three-day storm that nearly capsized the boat. Jack described those ominous days on Lake Victoria in a sermon:
“As we went deeper into the darkness and the storm, those poor people were trying to hide in the bottom. They were vomiting, and we were getting everything from every possible direction. And the rain, there must have been about 30 gallons of water in the boat… Finally, the pilot even turned off the motor in the darkness. That had been my own last hope. You know, we Americans, we always have a Plan ‘B’ if Plan ‘A’ doesn’t work… Now there was nothing left to do except say God you are sovereign.”
Edward Kasaija began singing and praying in the storm. Jack had encouraged him to make it loud—partly to keep the non-Christians on the boat from panicking, since they had already crowded to one side of the small vessel, nearly tipping it over. Eventually it was too wet to sing. So Kasaija kept praying: “God, this is a revelation of your power. God, this is a revelation of your glory and your majesty.” Jack recalled praying to himself: “Yeah, and why don’t You quit. I have seen enough.”
The frightened yet grateful team made landfall in Jinja three days later than expected. Kasaija still refuses to travel by boat because of that return trip from Buvuma Island.
That is the incident the letter writer had heard about when he wrote to Jack. He begins: “Every time you come to Uganda I admire your determination and courage. When they told me of the incident of Buvuma Island my heart sunk.”
But then he writes something that really struck me:
“But then I realize when God made man He had to make His hands dirty by touching the dust. Indeed we cannot do evangelism unless we are prepared to make our feet dirty. However Isaiah says how beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news.”
What the Ugandan Brother Saw
The letter writer drew a line from creation to incarnation to mission in a single breath. He had just heard about Jack nearly drowning on Lake Victoria. He knew about the tsetse flies and the sleeping sickness. He knew that Buvuma Island was a place no one wanted to go. And his response was theology.
First, he said that when God made man, He had to make His hands dirty by touching the dust. This is Genesis 2:7—God forming Adam from the ground. God did not create man at a distance. He got His hands in the dirt. Creation itself was an act of condescension, a willingness to touch what was beneath Him in order to bring forth life.
Second, he said that we cannot do evangelism unless we are prepared to make our feet dirty. The gospel does not travel by theory. It travels by feet—by people who go to places that are difficult, dangerous, and uncomfortable. Jack Miller went to Buvuma Island. He nearly died on the return trip. His whole body was soaked in lake water and vomit and rain. And that, the letter writer says, is exactly what Isaiah was talking about.
Third, he connects it all to Isaiah 52:7: how beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news. The logic is complete. God dirtied His hands to make us. Christ dirtied Himself with our sin to save us. And we must dirty our feet to carry that news to others. The filth is not incidental to the mission. It is intrinsic to it.
A Confession
I have read Isaiah 52:7 hundreds of times. Paul cites it in Romans 10:15. I knew the verse. But I had always read it as a statement about the message—the good news is beautiful, the proclamation is honored. All of that is true. But I had concentrated so heavily on the content of the news that I had overlooked the vehicle Isaiah chose to celebrate. He does not say how beautiful is the message. He says how beautiful are the feet.
And the feet are filthy.
In the ancient Near East, feet were the lowest, most degraded part of the body. A messenger who ran across mountains would arrive with feet that were cracked, calloused, bleeding, and caked with dirt. Foot-washing was not a quaint gesture of hospitality. It was a basic necessity. Feet were genuinely foul. So when Isaiah declares these feet “beautiful,” the statement is deliberately paradoxical. The most degraded part of the body becomes the most lovely—not because the feet have been cleaned up, but because of what they carry. The beauty is entirely in the message, and it transforms the messenger.
I missed this because I live in a world of comfort. I have shoes. I have a car. I have paved roads. I have never arrived anywhere with bleeding feet. Even my time in India and Sri Lanka, where I saw people walking dusty roads barefoot, did not shake this verse loose for me. It took a handwritten letter from Uganda, forty years old, written by a brother whose name I am still working to determine, to show me what was right in front of me the whole time.
Perhaps this is its own kind of moralism—the scholar’s moralism, the tendency to read a text for its theological content while missing its physical, embodied, human reality. Isaiah was not writing an abstraction. He was describing a man running across mountains with torn-up feet, arriving at a city under siege, and shouting: Your God reigns! And the people who saw those wrecked, beautiful feet knew that the news was real because the messenger had paid the price to bring it.
The Connection to Romans
Paul’s quotation of Isaiah 52:7 in Romans 10:15 comes at a critical moment in his argument. He has been building a chain of logic: everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved (v. 13). But how can they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how can they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching? And how can they preach unless they are sent?
The entire chain depends on the feet. Without the sent messenger—without someone willing to go, to arrive storm-battered and road-worn at the place where the news has not yet been heard—the chain breaks. Faith comes by hearing, hearing by the word of Christ, and the word of Christ comes by the dirty feet of those who carry it. Paul is celebrating not just proclamation but the physical, bodily, costly act of getting there.
Jack understood this. When others said no to Buvuma Island, he said “Why not?” And what he discovered on that storm-tossed boat was not just the sovereignty of God in the abstract. It was the sovereignty of God over the feet of His messengers. “If He simply touches this boat with His finger it goes to the bottom. And yet if He touches those waves with His finger we go right on into Tommy Bay, and all is well.”
The Exchange at the Feet
As I sat with this letter, I realized that the dirty feet of the messenger are yet another expression of the exchange principle that Jack Miller wrote about in his journal meditation on justification. The messenger’s feet are filthy—but they are called beautiful. The sinner is ungodly—but he is called justified. Christ was sinless—but He was made sin. In each case, the gospel operates by transforming what is low, degraded, and shameful into something glorious—not by cleaning it up first, but by the sheer power of what God has done.
The Ugandan letter writer understood this instinctively. He connected God’s hands in the dust of creation, Jack’s near-death on Lake Victoria, and Isaiah’s declaration of beauty—all in one paragraph. He did not need a PhD to see it. He needed only to live in a world where feet get dirty and messengers actually have to walk somewhere.
How Beautiful
The letter writer closed with words that carry the weight of everything he had said:
“My dear brother, I am committed to you in the deepest of my life and that bond is cemented firmly in the blood of the covenant.”
He sent greetings to Harvie Conn and Edmund Clowney, Ron Lutz and others—the names of men who also had dirty feet, who also went where they were sent. And he asked God to lead Jack safely to and from the USA.
The bond he described was cemented in the blood of the covenant—the same covenant whose good news is carried by dirty feet across mountains and oceans and islands in Lake Victoria. The beauty of the feet is the beauty of the gospel itself: that God comes to us not in our cleanliness but in our filth, not at a comfortable distance but with His hands in the dust, and that He sends His messengers the same way—not scrubbed and presentable, but storm-soaked, broken, and carrying the most beautiful news the world has ever heard.
How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news.
How beautiful are the dirty feet.
(Credit to Claude and Claude Cowork for helping me with assimilating documents and writing what is on my heart and mind)
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