“How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth!” (Isaiah 52:7). It is naive to assume that it is possible to walk the covenant path of the gospel without ever falling. After all, what is walking but a kind of falling? When you think about it, when we walk, we are constantly pushing our center of mass forward until we are off balance and start to fall and then catching ourselves with our outstretched foot. Falling is not an unfortunate aberration for those who are too weak or foolish to walk properly. Falling is an integral and indispensable part of walking. In fact, walking converts falling into forward momentum so well that it uses sixty-five percent less energy. To walk the Covenant Path is to reach out in faith, one foot at a time, knowing that although we will try our best, we will sin and fall short of the glory of God. We don’t get to opt out of falling, but we can choose how we fall. We can fall on our feet or we can fall on our face. Truly embracing the gospel and striving to keep the commandments and honor our covenants and to repent immediately and constantly is to fall with our feet under us. We fall in a controlled manner. We are not ashamed of our humble feet, our constant, consistent efforts to do our Father’s will to the best of our ability. And when we are truly on the Covenant path, then we are not merely walking, but hiking up the Mountain of the Lord. In this way, we are not merely falling in a controlled manner, but actually falling upward. Our errors and lapses and the gaps in our knowledge and strength and experience push us onward and upward. How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of those who catch themselves the moment that they start falling, and are not afraid to take another step, to fall again and to repent and catch themselves again. Most of us get so comfortable with walking that we don’t even think about it anymore. We naturally fall and catch ourselves over and over, sometimes tens of thousands of times a day. The more fully we commit to walking the Covenant path of the gospel, the more comfortable and natural and unthinkingly effortless will be our obedience and our faithfulness to the Lord’s commandments and the promptings of the Spirit. I hope that we can all see the beauty in putting one foot in front of the other as we scale the mountain of the Lord.
