The Feed Bucket and the Same Ten Steps

There is a worn place on the concrete floor of the feed store, and it is the shape of a man walking from the door to the bin and back.

You cannot see it in the middle of the day. You see it in the morning when the light comes in low through the door, and there are two lines about four feet apart with the concrete polished slightly smoother than the rest, and they run from the doorway to the second bin and back out.

That is me. That is thirty years of me carrying a bucket ten steps and ten steps back.

I noticed it about four years ago. I had been walking on it for twenty six years without seeing it and then one morning the light was right and there it was, and I stood in the doorway and did not go in for a moment.

The thing I felt was not what I would have predicted. I would have predicted something warm about a life's work. What I actually felt was a kind of vertigo, because a man can carry a bucket ten steps four thousand times a year and produce nothing but two faint lines in a floor, and I stood there with that for about a minute.

Then I went in and filled the bucket, because the cows do not care.

Toby is in that shed most mornings now. He does not know about the lines. I have thought about showing him and have not, and I think the reason is that I do not yet know what I would say about them, and a man ought not to show a boy a thing until he knows what he thinks about it.

Bucky is on those lines about as often as I am, and has worn precisely nothing into any floor anywhere, because a goat's whole method is going somewhere different every single time.

An enormous question and a small answer

Micah stages a scene where a person asks God what could possibly be brought to Him, and the offers escalate.

Thousands of rams. Ten thousand rivers of oil. And then, terribly, the firstborn, which is where the escalation goes when a person is genuinely desperate and does not know what is wanted.

And the answer, when it comes, is three things and none of them is large.

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? (Micah 6:8)

He hath shewed thee. The verse opens by saying this is not new information, which is its own quiet rebuke to a man escalating his offers.

And the three are a manner of dealing, a disposition, and a way of walking. Not one of them is an achievement and not one of them can be finished.

You are being asked for three things that are all done in ordinary units rather than in large ones, and Micah 6:8 answers an escalating question by coming down. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as a relief rather than as an anticlimax.

The third one is the one for a man with a bucket. Walk humbly with thy God. Walking is done in steps, and a step is the smallest unit of travel there is, and the verb is not run and it is not achieve.

You have been given a verb about steps rather than a verb about distance. The written word chooses walking, and His Spirit is what makes that fit a shed floor with two lines worn into it.

What walking with somebody actually is

There is a man near the front of the Bible whose entire biography is one phrase repeated.

And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him. (Genesis 5:24)

That is the whole account. In a chapter that is a list of people who lived and had sons and died, one man gets a different sentence, and the sentence is not about anything he built or said.

He walked with God. For three hundred years, which the chapter says, and which is an enormous number of ordinary days, and none of them is described.

You are able to have an entire life summed up by the way you went along rather than by what you produced. Genesis 5:24 gives one man a different sentence from everybody else in the list and it is about walking, and the Spirit of God is what makes that a real category to be in.

And the word with in that phrase is the whole of it. Not walked toward, not walked for. With, which is a word about company and about pace.

You have been walking with somebody rather than toward something. Genesis 5:24 uses a preposition about company, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from a genealogy into a feed store at first light.