"You have been told, O man, what is good, and what the Lord requires of you: Only to do the right and to love goodness, and to walk humbly with your God."
--Micah 6:8So rich an instruction, a line that sums up the entire spiritual life. Like toddlers whose hands are in the hand of the Father, we are to walk humbly with our God. What toddler is proud? What toddler thinks he's better than anyone else? The toddler is unsteady, toddling along. He knows that he must hold the parent's hand or else he'll topple. So he walks, clutching the parent's finger, carefully stepping, keeping pace with those big adult legs and neither lagging behind or darting ahead or dawdling off to what's interesting to the left or the right. Safety lies in holding onto that hand so that one can keep one's balance. We are to walk humbly with our God Who will never walk too fast for us, nor too slow. We are to know that we are not God, but that He is. We are to understand that we do not know the way, but that He does. We are little and weak, but He is powerful and strong. We are ignorant, but He knows it all. We are unsteady, but His strength holds us upright. He is not a god but our God. He belongs to us and we belong to Him, not like a dog belongs to a man but like a child belongs to a parent. We belong to Him because He is God Who created us out of love. We belong to Love that made us to love -- to love goodness, to do the right, and to walk humbly with Him.
When we walk humbly with our God, then we will automatically do the right because God will lead us only to do right. He cannot lead us to do evil or to remain indifferent for God is never indifferent or evil. He may walk us through evil, with foes all around us. Some of them may harm us, but then, they harmed His Son to Whom we are to be conformed. Ultimately the evil will be turned to our good, for God, if He bring us through evil, does so because that is the only way to bring us to the good He has in mind. God may walk us through indifference in which the world seems oblivious to our plight, but God is not oblivious. He knows what we need and, if we walk humbly with Him in trust, He will bring us to the good, which is never fully realized in this world but only in the next. We need to trust Him in Whose hand we are to put our baby fingers. The terrain may be unfamiliar, terrifying, rugged, or harsh to us, but He knows it more intimately than Sacagawea knew the Northwest and He will lead us more securely to glory than she led Lewis and Clark to the Pacific.
If we walk humbly with our God, we will automatically love goodness because God is Good and being with Him means knowing the Good. We must walk humbly with God. He is not going to drag us or pick us up and carry us, kicking and screaming, into the good. To walk humbly with God means to allow Him to lead and we can only do that if we know that He is good. When we know that He is good, we automatically love Him.
Walk humbly with your God. We are walking with Him when we know, each moment, that He is with us, even when we do not see Him. A blind toddler can let the parent lead even if she does not know what the parent looks like. We may be in a spiritually blind time, yet we know that God has led us there and that our hand still is in His as He leads us through the darkness. We try to discern where He is leading by prayer, by good counsel, by the dictates of the Church, and by our circumstances. Sometimes we do not know where He is leading--our goal is to hold fast to Him and wait just as a child must hold the parent's hand on a long walk and only when they stop at Grandma's does the child know the destination.
When we face a decision, and each day we face many, we ask God, "What do You want me to do?" and we listen for the answer and then "do whatever He tells you." (John 2:5) Sometimes He seems to take long in answering, but maybe we do not understand His language, just as a toddler does not understand the parent's words but must mature and grow into the understanding. There is a whole spiritual language that we do not know, that deals with reading the circumstances, feeling the nudgings of the Spirit, and listening to the gentle voice of God when our own is louder and drowning His out. The longer we cling to His hand, the more we will come to understand that spiritual language, the more we will grasp about goodness and the more quickly we will do the right.
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