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# A lamp to my feet
- URL: https://www.rubyskitchentable.com/a-lamp-to-my-feet/
- Published: 2026-08-27T10:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-27T09:59:59.000Z
- Author: Ruby Hayes
- Tags: devotional, #Week 14, #scripture, #medium, #104

*"Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path."* — Psalm 119:105

I have had a Bible on this table every morning for longer than I can remember and the pages fall open to certain places the way a door that has been opened a thousand times swings to a certain angle on its own.

This morning the pages fell open to the Psalms, which is where they usually fall, because the Psalms are where I have been reading longest and the spine knows. I read the hundred and nineteenth Psalm, which is the long one, the one the Sunday school children groan about when I tell them it has a hundred and seventy-six verses. I did not read all of it. I read the part about the lamp and the feet and the path, because that is the part I come back to, the way you come back to a room in a house you know well.

A lamp to my feet. Not a floodlight. Not a searchlight sweeping the whole field. A lamp. The kind that shows you the next step and not the one after that. I have spent a good portion of my life wanting the searchlight. I have wanted to see the whole path, the end of the road, the answer to the question I have been carrying. I have wanted to know how it turns out. The Bible does not offer that. The Bible offers a lamp. Enough light for the next step. That is all. That is the whole promise.

I sat with this for a while. The coffee got cold, which is how I know I was sitting with something real, because I do not let coffee get cold for a small thought. The morning light was on the table and the Bible was open and the lamp in the verse and the light through the window were doing the same work, which is showing me what is in front of me and not what is behind me and not what is around the corner.

I have been reading this verse for fifty years. It has not gotten smaller. Some verses do, the way a song you hear too many times loses its shape. This one gets larger. Every year I am older and the lamp is the same lamp and the path is a different path and the verse holds.

*Lord, I do not need to see the whole road. Show me the next step.*