The Path Her Feet Already Knew

In 1987, Margaret Ellison lost her sight to macular degeneration at sixty-three. Her husband Harold worried she would never walk their half-mile gravel lane to the mailbox again. But Margaret had walked that lane every morning for thirty-one years. She knew where the old oak's roots buckled the path. She knew the slight leftward curve past the Hendersons' fence post. She knew exactly where gravel gave way to packed earth near the county road.

So she kept walking. Not because someone forced her, but because decades of faithful repetition had written the path into her muscles, her bones, her very stride. Love for Harold, who waited for his newspaper. Love for the routine that held their life together. The path was not a burden. It was home.

John writes to a church he loves like family, reminding them that love is not a feeling that drifts wherever it pleases. Love walks. It follows a specific path — the commandments they had heard from the very beginning. This is no grim obedience. This is the deep freedom of someone who has walked with God so long that His ways feel like home beneath their feet.

When we walk in His commandments, we are not prisoners trudging a forced march. We are Margaret on her morning lane — moving by love, held by habit, guided by a path the heart already knows.