Introduction

Life is often thought of in terms of a journey or a road that must be travelled. When we talk about our lives we sometimes say, without thinking, that we ‘encountered obstacles’, ‘arrived at a crossroads’ or ‘faced an uphill struggle’. We talk about issues in our lives in terms of ‘finding our way’.

Yet how to walk the way of life presents dilemmas. For most of us it is more of an obstacle course than a straight path. When faced with the demands of life, many of us suffer from the Christopher Columbus syndrome. Columbus set off and didn’t know where he was going. When he got there he didn’t know where he was. When he got back he didn’t know where he had been. The only real novelty about Columbus is that he stumbled across the New World and became famous and influential – most people are not so fortunate!

The idea of ‘walking with God’ is a universal image that goes back thousands of years. In fact, it is found in the oldest parts of the Bible. So, for instance, when Jews talk about what Christians call the Old Testament, they use the word Torah, a word that is best translated as ‘direction’, bringing with it the sense of the right guidance for walking the way of life. This idea of walking life God’s way occurs in one of the great question-and-answer passages in the Bible. Around 2,750 years ago, a prophet called Micah addressed a question to a society that had lost its way. ‘What does God want of us?’ he asked and gave the answer: ‘To act justly and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God.’ This passage from Micah 6:8 raises the most important question: ‘What does God want of us?’ It follows it with an appropriately big answer. At first glance the three parts of this answer seem to be three commands: act justly (do right actions), love kindness (have right attitudes) and finally, walk humbly with your God. In fact, the best way of understanding this is to see the first two statements as commands that set out the nature of the right way. The last statement, ‘walk humbly with your God’, is, however, something else: it is the great summary of how we can walk the right way. The first two statements set out the requirements (do right actions and have right attitudes) and the final statement sets out the answer.

Micah’s question-and-answer thread runs through this reading plan, which is about finding the way and working out what it means to carry out right actions and have right attitudes. It looks at having God as guide along the way and the practical issues of continuing the walk along the way with God.