“Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.” (Psalm 119:105)

Years ago when I was working in a secular role, one of my work colleagues was an older guy who had a natural gift for humor.  Ray was a natural storyteller and had a joke for just about any occasion.  One of the things he was fond of saying is that we only have a predetermined number of steps allotted to each of us and, therefore, we needed to be careful to not waste steps because once we reached the full allotment, game over.  He said it so often, it became a running joke in my mind, “Don’t waste your steps!” 

To this day whenever I find myself being inefficient in going from one room to another to retrieve something, forgetting why I had come in the first place, leaving and then remembering after I had left what I had come to get, and then having to retrace a portion of my steps, I’ll say to my wife or mutter to myself, “I’m wasting steps.”  It’s not that I believe in the determinism Ray joked about; I just don’t like walking around in circles unsure as to where I’m going or why I started walking to begin with.

The wasting of resources and the challenges to avoid waste has always been a human conundrum.  The examples of how we have done this and continue to do this are too numerous to count, whether they be human resources or the natural, non-human variety.  The idiom, “one person’s trash is another person’s treasure” suggests that things thrown away are discovered by someone else who values them so that, ultimately, they are not wasted.  That’s a nice thought, but I’m not sure it always works that way.  So when it comes to my spiritual steps (which ultimately influence every other kind I might take), wasting any is a frightful thought to me.

I’m deeply grateful that I don’t have to create my own light by which to walk (Isaiah 50:10-11); my GOD has supplied me with all the light I need to keep me from wasting steps.  Over the course of years, I have traversed His Word time and time again.  It has given me warmth during the cold seasons of life and has been a refreshing breeze against the heat of difficult days.  I have sought it for counsel in the darkness of early morning hours and meditated on it during the quiet times in which there was no urgency of need.  I have studied it, taught it, preached from it, and claimed it as my own treasure.

Wasting steps is not in my game plan.  I have a light for my feet, a light that has no beginning nor end.  I have a lamp for my pathway, a lamp that can never be extinguished for lack or oil.  And to think, it is a treasure just waiting to be valued.

© Byron L. Hannon, 2020.  All rights reserved to text content.