Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.
Psalm 119:105 (NIV)
A Lamp and a Light
Out behind a house on the edge of town a work light lies in the grass by the fence, on an orange cord, plugged in since the night the gate was going to get fixed. It’s been on the whole time.
He put the tomato cages up in spring because she always did, and then he let the yard go. By the end of August the hose is where he dropped it and the bed is mostly weeds with four tomatoes in it.
Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path. The psalmist asks for both and says he has both. The lamp is for where his shoes are. The light is for a road he hasn’t walked yet. He also says he gains understanding from God’s precepts and hates every wrong path, so he is seeing some distance up the road.
He used to open a Bible wanting the route with every turn marked and an arrival time at the bottom. He gets a lamp and a light, and God decides how much of the road either one shows on a given night.
He goes past the work light morning and night, out through the gate he hasn’t fixed and back in after dark. It’s part of the yard now, like the hose, and it’s still throwing everything it has at four feet of grass nobody is standing on. Her Bible is on the shelf by the door with her glasses on top of it, and he goes past that too, and he has never once decided against it.
Coming back in on Thursday the man two doors down was at the fence with the same story about the deer and the bird feeder, and they laughed at the end of it the way they did the first time, standing in the light that’s been burning out there since June.
In the morning he’s out at the gate before seven with his shoes untied, and he can’t remember which way the hinge pin drops.
A Prayer to Remember
I’ve opened it and felt nothing enough times that I’ve quit expecting anything, and that’s the part I keep back when anybody asks. Give me one line today, before I leave the house. Light the step I’m actually on. I’d ask you for the whole road, and I’ll take the next piece of ground.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
