Yesterday night, while gathering up multiple Bibles off of a bookshelf to look up something in I Samuel to compare a textual issue in various English translations, the hard-cover TNIV decided to leap out of my hands and plunge corner downwards into the top of my sock-covered left foot, near my toes, on the left side of the big metatarsel leading to my big toe - yes, in the soft spot.

Talk about a double-edged sword! My foot hurt all evening afterwards, and while, unbelievably, as far as a visible injury goes there is just a small red dot, compared to my right foot there’s definitely a larger radius of a swollen lump under the skin than that small red dot would indicate.

It’s also painful to press on not only that spot, but all along the full length of the joints to my toes. How that happened I’m not sure, because the corner of the Bible hit a good inch from the joint of any toe. Fortunately, it doesn’t really hurt to move my toes normally, so I can walk fine, but forcing my toes to bend back further than walking would require hurts.

Whatever is going on underneath my skin obviously extends beyond a simple bruise. Two lessons to be learned from this:

1) A reminder of how even the foot is highly complex and works together in ways you don’t think about until you injure some small, behind the scenes part of it. Suddenly what seemed insignificant and ignored becomes very important when it is out of harmony with the rest of the foot.

2) Use Libronix when doing translation comparisons to avoid falling Bibles out to pierce your feet.