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Level Ground

             Teach me to do your will, for you are my God; may your good Spirit lead me on level ground. (Psalm 143:10)

 

            I like level ground. I can stitch plastic canvas or crochet while I’m walking on level ground, with no potholes in which to twist my ankle. Ask the folks where I live in the winter – lovely roads in my park. It’s when the road isn’t smooth and level that I trip and crack a tooth or deeply bruise a knee. When level paths are mentioned in Scripture, I tend to think of paths that don’t go up or down hills, but Jerusalem is in the mountains. Yes, hills can be hard.

            When I was jogging, I noticed it more. Jogging up a hill was hard work. I usually had to slow to a walk. Jogging down a hill wasn’t hard work, but it was anxious work. I was afraid I’d fall. This idea is why trucks have to stay in the righthand lane going up mountains, and why they have run-away ramps on the downward slope. I remember Dad driving down the Rocky Mountains with a trailer behind a Plymouth Fury III, and basically riding the brakes to keep the trailer from pushing us in a direction we didn’t want to go. I also remember getting stuck in the snow in the mountains of New Mexico when we were riding in a four-wheel-drive Dodge truck. Yes, New Mexico. When we got into Texas, we drove on a sheet of ice for a long time. Level, but it didn’t inspire a sense of safety.

            This is something of the sense I get in this verse. The psalmist asks God to teach him to do God’s will. A firm understanding of God’s will would reduce or remove rocks, and ruts. Now, as someone who can trip on smooth floor, With His good Spirit leading the psalmist, he would not only have a GPS to make sure he was on the right road, but help when tackling the hills, but the hard ones going up, and the scary out-of-control ones going down.

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