In Isaiah 52 we read about Jesus being marred beyond human semblance. He didn’t even look human by the time they were done with Him in their torturous abuse of our Lord.

We also read about beautiful feet, those that take the good news and share it.

There’s a story about marred beautiful feet in the autobiography of Darlene Deibler. I’ve mentioned her to you before. She’s the American missionary who was in a Japanese prison camp. Before she got there, she was a missionary in New Guinea, along with her husband, Russell, who was the first missionary into a new region where a tribe was spotted by plane. He was gone for a month as he traversed the rugged terrain to reach them with their first contact for Jesus Christ.

When he gets back from his trip, his feet are diseased. The rocks cut right through his boots and right into his feet. Darlene is given the task of peeling away layers of skin daily until his feet are healed. It was a repulsive task, but they were beautiful feet.

When her mission leader walked in on the procedure, he turned around and walked right out. Then he wrote this.

This morning I looked at the bleeding feet of a missionary, saw his wife tending them, saw the blood and pus running from them and thought to myself, “What a nauseating sight that is!” But, as I walked from the room, The Lord kept saying to me, “Oh, but to Me they are beautiful feet!”

He and Darlene do go and live among them for a time before the war disrupts everything and takes away Russell’s life. He died in his prison camp because of his weak heart, a heart weakened because of that month-long ordeal opening the way for the gospel to reach a people made in the image of God who had never heard the good news.

A marred life, a sacrificial life, is the most beautiful of all.