+ With today’s emphasis on feet and on walking, and what you say and do and wear and not wear, it reminds one of the saying, “Step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back. Step on a line, you’ll break your father’s spine.”
It was the way that children walking on treacherously uneven streets or paths would take special care to watch where they were walking and take care not to trip and fall.
This section from Proverbs dishes out proverbial saying after saying, dishing out advice about every word spoken, not lying, and eating only what is necessary. Then followed with a psalm response, repeated seven times —
“Your word, O Lord, is a lamp for my feet.”
Then the Gospelcontinues with specific walking directions and specific details as to what one should take with them as they walk from town to town. But then a final instruction, should they happen upon a place and people who don’t receive them well —
“And as for those who do not welcome you, when you leave that town, shake the dust from your feet in testimony against them.”
Thank God. As explicit as these instructions are today, they did not include the unsavory expression, “Oops! Don’t step in the doo-doo!”
But really, the point is that this word of God is telling us, under all of this advice and instruction, that it does matter what we say and do, and how we live our lives. Even sometimes little details in our behaviors matter; we should take care how we live and what we do, and even what we say or don’t say.
So please, today, avoid stepping on those cracks, and take care to avoid the lines, too! And don’t even think of stepping in or on the doo-doo!
Forgive me! I don’t know what got into me today. It must have been something I ate last night!
